11 ms·

Chomsky has written quite a bit about how this is the norm, and about how the media (including the New York Times) is usually complicit. I recommend his book Ma

Chomsky has written quite a bit about how this is the norm, and about how the media (including the New York Times) is usually complicit. I recommend his book Manufacturing Consent. It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies (e.g. Communists). And they do this knowingly, too, by ignoring or outright silencing dissenting voices (like Chomsky's). Really opened my eyes to how propaganda actually works. It's not the overt stuff you see from the early 20th century. Instead it's subtle but pervasive omission and exaggeration of facts. * They do the same for advertisers, too, not just the government. Which is why people like Harvey Weinstein can call up the NYT and get a disparaging story erased.

hawkice 9y ago
To be fair, the exceptions are growing as media is less and less beholden to e.g. government sources for major stories. I can't recall seeing even a single tweet in favor of America's involvement in Yemen, journalists or no. It's not the world, but it's something.
- ejlangev 9y ago
  There's still a lie by omission with the Yemen story though. You don't hear news outlets saying the truth which is that the Saudis are bombing Yemen with U.S weapons that we sold them knowing full well what they would be used to do.
  - hawkice 9y ago
    Are you kidding me? They might not report on it a lot, but that's almost _all_ I hear about it. I'd like to know more, because I'm aware it has to do with the Arab Spring but I'm not clear on who is involved (aside from the US and the Saudi governments) or what the ideas behind the political factions are. [Edit: It's worth noting that those used to be only details we'd hear: who's a communist, who's a radical and who's a moderate, which individual people are monsters or the best hope for the country. To say the Chomsky critiques apply here is... a stretch. We got one story either essentially right or are making new mistakes.]
  - m777z 9y ago
    It took me less than a minute to find this: http://time.com/4787797/donald-trump-yemen-saudi-arabia-arms-deal/ http://time.com/4787797/donald-trump-yemen-saudi-arabia-arms... "When President Donald Trump closed a nearly $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia on Saturday, his deputies’ spirits soared...The weapons sale was one of the largest in history, totaling close to $110 billion worth of tanks, artillery, radar systems, armored personnel carriers, and Blackhawk helicopters. The package also included ships, patrol boats, Patriot missiles, and THAAD missile defense systems. Much of that military hardware will likely be pressed into service in the Saudi fight against its neighbor Yemen, where more than 10,000 people have been killed over more than two years of heavy airstrikes and fighting."
    - koheripbal 9y ago
      ...but the only they ran this story was to target Trump. ...and even still, what's happening in Yemen is barely mentioned. Obama was just as complicit with what was happening and no one published anything about it.
- r00fus 9y ago
  s/government/major wealthy-corporate interest/ It's for sale, but increasingly the buyers are not the USG anymore. So do we fear the devil we know or the one we don't see yet?
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Why stop there? There's tons of progressive bias as well. I don't know if it's a matter of progressive influence from the inside or fear of becoming the newest target of a progressive revolt that causes the major media outlets to toe the progressive line, but progressive bias seems at least as strong as pro-USG or pro-corporate bias. Maybe my vantage point is distorted/limited?
    - r00fus 9y ago
      What do you mean by progressive bias? corporate vs. normal people is orthogonal the progressive vs. conservative. Think of it as a separate axis.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > corporate vs. normal people is orthogonal the progressive vs. conservative. No, it's not. Both are about flattening of power distribution vs. concentration of power distribution.
        nate_meurer 9y ago
        Progressive and conservative are an odd nomenclature nowadays. Both "sides" have large populist elements that share a hatred (and conspiratorial paranoia) of globalism and "the elites". In this respect, ANTIFA and alt-right white-nationalists have a lot more in common than they'll admit.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        That white nationalists (at the grassroots, even before considering what ends they might be being manipulated to serve) are about concentrating power in a specific subgroup rather than distributing it in an egalitarian manner is, well, painfully obvious from their overt label. It's true that just as both those seeking a broader distribution of power and those seeking to move it from the aristocracy to the mercantile class shared a small degree of common interest in the downfall of feudalism, the anarchocommunists and other leftists at the heart of Antifa and the White Nationalists in Trump's base might have something of a common opponent in at least some segment of the current cosmopolitan corporate elite, but that is a weak and transitory common interest, and their general interests are fundamentally in near-polar opposition.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  I think you're seeing competition in action. Before the Internet, there were 3 major broadcasting companies (4 after FOX gathered steam in the 80s) and one major newspaper per metro area. Ensuring the media's silence was as simple as making sure that all of the heads of these organizations knew that if they published, they would be the one organization that was shut out of all future news from the government. Now, if the major news organizations don't publish something newsworthy but inconvenient for powerful people, they can be sure that it's going to show up on Twitter, or Facebook, or Wikileaks, or Reddit, or Breitbart, or HuffPo, or Gawker, or Hacker News, or somewhere. And if it's outrageous enough, it'll spread virally and the consequence will be that the media companies that missed it will look stupid, not that the information won't get out there.
DINKDINK 9y ago
>the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying the minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies I agree with your general thesis governments downplay their own murder but Communist regimes have killed millions of people[1]. Those are not "minor crimes". Both Capitalist (e.g. Native American population), Communist (Mao's purge), Socialism (Nazis' genocide) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
- CalChris 9y ago
  NAZIs were not socialists. They just co-opted the word. http://www.snopes.com/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/ http://www.snopes.com/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/
  - baldfat 9y ago
    NAZI = Nationalist Kind of why McCain used the word in a negative manner this week.
  - DINKDINK 9y ago
    Really depends on what one's definition of Socialism. >Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good" and accept political interests as the main priority of economic organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism Take a look at Sweden when their policies were more Socialist skewed, the government in order to manage the P/L sheet for social welfare programs compelled political out groups to be sterilized[1]. Roma people were considered a "drain" on Swedish society and attempts to exterminate them were done much more quietly. If any government starts to make value judgements about who is more valuable than whom, they will repeat these same errors. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sw...
    - 9y ago
danso 9y ago
> Which is why people like Harvey Weinstein can call up the NYT and get a disparaging story erased. I thought the NYT was the outlet that broke the Weinstein scandal? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/insider/sexual-harassment-weinstein-oreilly.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/insider/sexual-harassment...
- csallen 9y ago
  After it became absolutely impossible to ignore, and therefore no longer profitable to support him. But what about when it was brought to their attention before?[1] The story I reported never ran. After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted. I was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall. But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right? Wrong. The story was stripped of any reference to sexual favors or coercion and buried on the inside of the Culture section, an obscure story about Miramax firing an Italian executive. Who cared? [1] https://www.thewrap.com/media-enablers-harvey-weinstein-new-york-times https://www.thewrap.com/media-enablers-harvey-weinstein-new-...
  - danso 9y ago
    It's only fair to point out the Waxman's former editor's response: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/harvey-weinstein-sharon-waxman-new-york-times-243600 http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/harvey-weinstein-sh... To summarize: He doesn't remember the conversation in which he allegedly argued that Weinstein wasn't a worthy public topic. And he never met with Weinstein at the Times, as Waxman claims. So it's her word against his. But we can as outsiders consider these assertions: > Landman also questioned why “if the Times had been intent on protecting Weinstein, wouldn’t it be odd to send a reporter to pursue this story on two continents, at considerable time and expense?’ From the NYT's response (from the current exec editor, who wasn't at the NYT in 2004): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/reader-center/dean-baquet-sharon-waxman.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/reader-center/dean-baquet... > I’m sure Ms. Waxman believes she had a story. But if you read her own description, she did not have anything near what was revealed in our story. Mainly, she had an off-the-record account from one woman. That's not to say that Waxman isn't right on a certain principle: stories don't need to face direct opposition to be "killed". If the NYT had been more open to the idea of Weinstein being a serial abuser, they would have given her more time and resources to pursue evidence that would eventually lead to on-the-record testimony and other hard evidence. But that's not what you said. You simplified all of the NYT's (and others') inaction to an evil villain picking up a phone and making a threat. What do you mean that the current story came about because "it became absolutely impossible to ignore"? Do you think that it all started with tweetstorms from recent victims? The first story in NYT's investigation involved incidents that were decades old. Meaning that nothing became "impossible to ignore" -- ignoring was the status quo for decades. It's very difficult to square your assertion with the fact that the NYT would've needed to throw considerable money at this investigation to even get it off the grounds. Sorry to be an apologist for the NYT, but your simplification does a bit of injustice to what the victims faced in the Weinstein scandal, as if they had been complaining on-the-record and openly for decades and they were ignored because of an elite conspiracy. It appears that what they faced was even worse, threats from their own industry and massive personal shame to the point that it was just easier to keep quiet and sign non-disclosure agreements than to speak out about injustice. And Waxman herself would probably agree to this, as she left the NYT to found her own media outlet, which until the NYT's investigation, seems to have completely ignored Weinstein's scandalous history. In the case of the Indonesia massacre, it's very possible/likely that it was a story that news organizations didn't push hard enough to investigate. That's not at all inconceivable, especially as we see media organizations outright shutting down because of lack of money. But giving your argument the benefit of the doubt, that the media is "consistently doing the government's bidding", then why was it the media that rooted out the Pentagon Papers and the My Lai massacre (the NYT and Sy Hersh specifically for the latter) and published photos that contributed heavily to the public's disillusionment with the war? But to the greater point: it seems ironic to simplify things into a media conspiracy because of something you read from a Chomsky book, in a thread about an article that hints (based on a recently declassified document) at how perversely/tragically complicated world politics is, even in the face of a massacre. To the smaller issue of media complicity, I'd completely agree that that media organizations have the capacity to act maliciously, or at least be too slow/unprepared to respond to injustice. But that's a result of media organizations -- similar to governments -- being complicated. To reduce the factors of a worldwide tragedy to the consequences of a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. caricature pulling all the strings, ultimately does not help in helping people remember history in order to avoid repeating it. edit: I gave Waxman more benefit of the doubt before she recently came to the defense of Matt Damon, who was getting criticized as being complicit to the alleged killing of Waxman's story: https://twitter.com/sharonwaxman/status/917821882556022786 https://twitter.com/sharonwaxman/status/917821882556022786 And yet Waxman, an experienced reporter who was writing for her website (i.e. no constraints from ink/paper limits, or overreaching editors), wrote this about Damon: > The story I reported never ran. > After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted. There is no way you intentionally write that about Damon and Crowe, without adding a caveat (e.g. "to vouch for Lambardo as a colleague, though I never asked them about the sexual abuse allegations"), unless you intend to amplify the drama of your own story, i.e. Hollywood's pressure on Waxman. That she only absolves Damon after he gives his side of the story makes me think that she might exaggerate the amount of real evidence she had on Weinstein in 2004 (evidence, again, that she sat on for 12+ years, as someone whose entire livelihood is reporting on Hollywood). But I do agree that the NYT columnist she wrote in response to is "sanctimonious" [0]. Even if that columnist, and his editors, were unaware of Waxman's 2004efforts, they do have current colleagues who cover Hollywood and who most definitely had heard the open secret. I don't agree with you that if the NYT suppressed news about Weinstein out of profit-motive, but I can believe that the NYT could have done more earlier to question someone who happens to be cozy with New York media and media reporters. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/business/media/harvey-weinsteins-media-enablers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/business/media/harvey-wei...
anthonyarroyo 9y ago
Do you actually consider the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Castro and Mugabe to be minor?
- csallen 9y ago
  Absolutely not. But those are not the examples I would point to to show that the media exaggerates our enemy's crimes.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    BUT those are what you just did. You are just as guilty of what you were excusing of others. You just made MAJOR hundreds of millions of people's deaths and called all of these little.
    - ashark 9y ago
      You might want to re-read the post you're criticizing.
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    Don't delude yourself about Chomsky's objectivity. As late as 1969 in debate with William F. Buckley he refused to believe that the Chinese Communists were killing people with failed economic policies and authoritarian crackdowns.[0] [0] https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793 https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793
    - icebraining 9y ago
      That doesn't make him wrong about the criticisms he does make.
      - lr4444lr 9y ago
        Right. It calls into question his intellectual honesty and the morality of his intellectual preoccupations. Not to mention the pension he pulls from the MIT endowment which is heavily invested in the military industrial complex he supposedly despises, but not to my knowledge has ever used his clout among the MIT faculty to protest in formal petition. Must be a nice life.
freeflight 9y ago
I'd also recommend Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War by Arthur Ponsonby. Some really interesting reports in there, it's also quite scary to see how certain themes persist to this day and even seem to have influenced large parts of how WWII ended up being perceived. Already during WWI the Germans had been depicted as "industrialized savages" who supposedly processed dead soldiers bodies in "corpse factories", of course only if they had not been too busy nailing nuns to churches after maiming them. It's pretty easy to draw a clear line from that depiction to the narrative of a whole nation of atheist perfectionists trying to industrialize genocide in the most efficient way possible. I guess our feeble human minds need those simple narratives which pit the perfect "good side" against the inexcusable "evil side", to rationalize our own shortcomings.
- flexie 9y ago
  Are you suggesting most Germans didn't know about holocaust or that it didn't happen?
  - Retric 9y ago
    I really don't see how you can get that idea from the GP post. Hypothetically, if 95% of a country was 'evil', does that excuse killing the nice 5%? Further, as an American I recognize America historically committed genocide, that does not mean everyone in that time period was evil.
    - flexie 9y ago
      He's referring to Germany after WWI, not generalizing or referring to America as you do. What other way is there to read his comment?
      - Retric 9y ago
        A reference to the power of labels. America rarely gets a bad rap for genocide in such discussions, but it's defiantly a major part of our history.
deleted 9y ago
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lr4444lr 9y ago
When was Chomsky ever silenced?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- detcader 9y ago
  I don't know about any actual silencing myself (I'm not well-read), but the efforts to impeach Chomsky's mental stability and character [1] unquestionably have that as the goal [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-chomsky-guardian-personality https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-c...
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Unquestionably? Really? Look, I agree with a great deal of Chomsky's claims but doesn't prevent me from thinking that he's got faults of his own. Given his enormous stature as a linguistic scholar, those are more than mere shortcomings. He wouldn't accept his own style of political argument from one of his students.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Unlike the current TV pundits, which are all Socrates reborn. The question is not whether he has faults (of course he does), but whether there is a double standard.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        I'll take your word for it as I watch little or no television. I think you know perfectly well what I'm saying.
        icebraining 9y ago
        I know what you're saying. I disagree that it is relevant.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>subtle but pervasive omission and exaggeration of facts Deciding what to omit/include and what to emphasize/downplay is a very subjective task.
- csallen 9y ago
  Right, so I can forgive the occasional mistake or slight bent. But the point Chomsky makes in his book is that the omissions and exaggerations are consistently in line with the desires of the government and with advertisers, much more so than can be explained by random chance.
ctdonath 9y ago
Killing a cumulative 100,000,000 hardly constitutes "minor crimes".
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  Leaving aside uncharitable readings of the parent comment, I don't think that killing 100,000,000 is included in the minor crimes that he claims are emphasized. Or to put it another way, he's claiming that minor crimes are emphasized for enemies, which doesn't preclude major crimes being committed as well.
r00fus 9y ago
> It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies Not to normalize the atrocities but I think you can generalize and say that we should expect any government to be doing the same. The issue with the US is purely the hypocrisy.
- Udik 9y ago
  No, the issue with the US (and other western countries) is not an absolute one (the level of hypocrisy). It's a more personal one: we are the targets of their propaganda, and we believe at least some of it. Looking at a distant country denying its crimes when they're denounced daily from the pages of our newspapers might be unnerving, but doesn't affect us. Knowing that part of what we actually believe, or our own news sources tell us, is propaganda, is much more enraging.
merpnderp 9y ago
Yes, I'm sure Chomsky would say Pol Pot's genocide was overblown and Pinochet's was undercounted, because he's no better than those he rails against.
- vkou 9y ago
  We don't need to speculate, let's see what Chomsky himself has to say on the subject of communist regimes. > "Would you describe the authoritarian result of the Bolshevik's actions as an honest mistake, a "historical accident" maybe-or was it just the natural outgrowth of the Leninist Worldview: the idea that only a few people are smart and knowledgeable enough to be the leaders, and they should run the show?" > Chomsky: Yeah, in my opinion the heart of the problem is Marxism-Leninism itself-the very idea that a "vanguard party" can, or has any right to, or has any capacity to lead the stupid masses towards some future they're too dumb to understand for themselves. I think what it's going to lead them towards is "I rule you with a whip." Institutions of domination have a nice way of reproducing themselves-I think that's kind of like an obvious sociological truism. [1] Yep, we definitely found the holodomor apologist, there. Edit: It's entirely possible that he spent plenty of time and words on whitewashing crimes against humanity. His views have changed since then. [1] Undestanding power, p226.
  - Sangermaine 9y ago
    >Yep, we definitely found the holodomor apologist, there. You're dodging the question: no one mentioned the Holodomor. The parent mentioned Pol Pot for a reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
    - nate_meurer 9y ago
      But... from the article you just cited: > In 1993, Chomsky acknowledged the massive scale of the Cambodian genocide in the documentary film Manufacturing Consent. He said, "I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975 through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury."
devinhelton 9y ago
It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies (e.g. Communists).* We don't have one media. It's more accurate to say that we have leftist media (Jacobin, Chomsky), establishment liberal media (NY Times), generic for profit media (NBC nightly news, etc ), conservative populist media (Fox, Breitbert), conservative high-brow media )(City Journal, Commentary) and that all of them will at times exaggerate the crimes of their enemies and whitewash the crimes of their allies or ideological compatriots. Chomsky for example was himself guilty of whitewashing the Khemer Rouge back in the mid-1970s when he should have known better (see http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm ) Or read this New York Times obituary about Mao which totally whitewashes him -- http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.html http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.... The NY Times is hardly amplifying the crimes of communism! Or going back further consider how the liberal mainstream press whitewashed the horrors of communist Russia (see this review of Malcolm Muggeridge's memoirs for example -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... ) At this point I have come to the belief that it is very hard to trust any media source unless you personally know something about the subject and can figure out which sources are credible about that topic.
baursak 9y ago
> I recommend his book Manufacturing Consent. This Wikipedia article is a good quick overview and introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
kchoudhu 9y ago
I would be careful about calling the crimes committed by Communists and their fellow travelers "minor".
- icebraining 9y ago
  I think what csminor is saying that they amplified even the minor ones, not that they were all minor.
zeveb 9y ago
> It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies (e.g. Communists). Of course, in the real world the media played down the major crimes of Communists (cf. Walter Duranty, whose Pulitzer Prize has never been revoked), while massively amplifying the minor crimes of anti-Communists (e.g. South Vietnam, a nasty little republic significantly less nasty than the victorious North Vietnam). Yes, the anti-Communists have their hundreds of thousands, but the Communists have their hundreds of millions. The death tolls aren't even comparable. > And they do this knowingly, too, by ignoring or outright silencing dissenting voices (like Chomsky's). There are many adjectives one can apply to Noam Chomsky, but 'silenced' is not among them.
- the_af 9y ago
  > South Vietnam, a nasty little republic significantly less nasty than the victorious North Vietnam That's... debatable, to say the least. > Yes, the anti-Communists have their hundreds of thousands, but the Communists have their hundreds of millions. The death tolls aren't even comparable. If you were a demonstrator abducted and killed by a CIA-backed & trained task force in Latin America in the 70s, these silly "death toll" comparisons would hardly matter. Evil is not necessarily measured in numbers. Had the Nazis "only" killed "hundreds of thousands" of Jews instead of millions, the crime would have been just as horrible.
thrden 9y ago
The New York Times actually covered up the holodomor, and were incredibly supportive of Stalin in the 1930's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty] Further, The NYT had favorably reviewed books that denied the Khmer Rouge, and as late as 1990 published editorials denying that governments human rights abuses as being statistically insignificant[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial]. I think that this has less to do with manufacturing consent and instead realizing that the New York times isn't a bastion of truth but rather a flawed human organization that often makes terrible mistakes.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Not a great example: "American-made imports reached a high point in 1930, when approximately 25 percent of Soviet imported goods came from the United States. (..) By 1931, there were 134 signed technical aid agreements, the vast majority of them with American companies, servicing virtually every branch of the economy (...) General Electric had been eager to reenter the Russian market as early as 1922 to prevent German competitors from preempting it. Their granting of credits for up to five years, credits which were not guaranteed by the United States government, caused a sensation in the United States and signaled greater willingness by capitalist firms to take risks in the Soviet market (...) In 1913, there had been only some 600 tractors in all of Russia, mostly of German make; by 1930, there were 60,000, three quarters of them manufactured in the United States." https://sci-hub.cc/https://www.jstor.org/stable/178483 https://sci-hub.cc/https://www.jstor.org/stable/178483 And of course, 1933 was when Roosevelt officially recognized the USSR.
  - thrden 9y ago
    In 1933 The United States recognized the Soviet Union, however Walter Duranty wrote his work defending Stalin in 1931. Further, it has been argued that his work and the New York Time's work played an important part in the United State's formal recognition of the Soviet Union [1] Additionally, the United States had joined a military Intervention in the Russian Revolution against the Bolsheviks (we sent almost 11,000 troops). As such relations between the two countries could not reasonably be considered friendly before recognition. [2] Finally, The United States had gone through the First red scare just 10 years prior to the articles being written. As such it's unlikely that the U.S. Populace had an overwhelmingly positive view of the country. [3] Whereas the two had a strong trade relation as you pointed out, the countries were very adversarial and as such I believe it is incorrect to imagine that the NYT's strings were pulled to show the USSR in a positive light. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Reporting_the_1932.E2.80.931933_famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Reporting_the_1... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Rus... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare

hawkice 9y ago

To be fair, the exceptions are growing as media is less and less beholden to e.g. government sources for major stories. I can't recall seeing even a single tweet in favor of America's involvement in Yemen, journalists or no. It's not the world, but it's something.

ejlangev 9y ago
There's still a lie by omission with the Yemen story though. You don't hear news outlets saying the truth which is that the Saudis are bombing Yemen with U.S weapons that we sold them knowing full well what they would be used to do.
- hawkice 9y ago
  Are you kidding me? They might not report on it a lot, but that's almost _all_ I hear about it. I'd like to know more, because I'm aware it has to do with the Arab Spring but I'm not clear on who is involved (aside from the US and the Saudi governments) or what the ideas behind the political factions are. [Edit: It's worth noting that those used to be only details we'd hear: who's a communist, who's a radical and who's a moderate, which individual people are monsters or the best hope for the country. To say the Chomsky critiques apply here is... a stretch. We got one story either essentially right or are making new mistakes.]
- m777z 9y ago
  It took me less than a minute to find this: http://time.com/4787797/donald-trump-yemen-saudi-arabia-arms-deal/ http://time.com/4787797/donald-trump-yemen-saudi-arabia-arms... "When President Donald Trump closed a nearly $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia on Saturday, his deputies’ spirits soared...The weapons sale was one of the largest in history, totaling close to $110 billion worth of tanks, artillery, radar systems, armored personnel carriers, and Blackhawk helicopters. The package also included ships, patrol boats, Patriot missiles, and THAAD missile defense systems. Much of that military hardware will likely be pressed into service in the Saudi fight against its neighbor Yemen, where more than 10,000 people have been killed over more than two years of heavy airstrikes and fighting."
  - koheripbal 9y ago
    ...but the only they ran this story was to target Trump. ...and even still, what's happening in Yemen is barely mentioned. Obama was just as complicit with what was happening and no one published anything about it.
r00fus 9y ago
s/government/major wealthy-corporate interest/ It's for sale, but increasingly the buyers are not the USG anymore. So do we fear the devil we know or the one we don't see yet?
- weberc2 9y ago
  Why stop there? There's tons of progressive bias as well. I don't know if it's a matter of progressive influence from the inside or fear of becoming the newest target of a progressive revolt that causes the major media outlets to toe the progressive line, but progressive bias seems at least as strong as pro-USG or pro-corporate bias. Maybe my vantage point is distorted/limited?
  - r00fus 9y ago
    What do you mean by progressive bias? corporate vs. normal people is orthogonal the progressive vs. conservative. Think of it as a separate axis.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > corporate vs. normal people is orthogonal the progressive vs. conservative. No, it's not. Both are about flattening of power distribution vs. concentration of power distribution.
      - nate_meurer 9y ago
        Progressive and conservative are an odd nomenclature nowadays. Both "sides" have large populist elements that share a hatred (and conspiratorial paranoia) of globalism and "the elites". In this respect, ANTIFA and alt-right white-nationalists have a lot more in common than they'll admit.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        That white nationalists (at the grassroots, even before considering what ends they might be being manipulated to serve) are about concentrating power in a specific subgroup rather than distributing it in an egalitarian manner is, well, painfully obvious from their overt label. It's true that just as both those seeking a broader distribution of power and those seeking to move it from the aristocracy to the mercantile class shared a small degree of common interest in the downfall of feudalism, the anarchocommunists and other leftists at the heart of Antifa and the White Nationalists in Trump's base might have something of a common opponent in at least some segment of the current cosmopolitan corporate elite, but that is a weak and transitory common interest, and their general interests are fundamentally in near-polar opposition.
nostrademons 9y ago
I think you're seeing competition in action. Before the Internet, there were 3 major broadcasting companies (4 after FOX gathered steam in the 80s) and one major newspaper per metro area. Ensuring the media's silence was as simple as making sure that all of the heads of these organizations knew that if they published, they would be the one organization that was shut out of all future news from the government. Now, if the major news organizations don't publish something newsworthy but inconvenient for powerful people, they can be sure that it's going to show up on Twitter, or Facebook, or Wikileaks, or Reddit, or Breitbart, or HuffPo, or Gawker, or Hacker News, or somewhere. And if it's outrageous enough, it'll spread virally and the consequence will be that the media companies that missed it will look stupid, not that the information won't get out there.

DINKDINK 9y ago

>the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying the minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies I agree with your general thesis governments downplay their own murder but Communist regimes have killed millions of people[1]. Those are not "minor crimes". Both Capitalist (e.g. Native American population), Communist (Mao's purge), Socialism (Nazis' genocide) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...

CalChris 9y ago
NAZIs were not socialists. They just co-opted the word. http://www.snopes.com/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/ http://www.snopes.com/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/
- baldfat 9y ago
  NAZI = Nationalist Kind of why McCain used the word in a negative manner this week.
- DINKDINK 9y ago
  Really depends on what one's definition of Socialism. >Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good" and accept political interests as the main priority of economic organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism Take a look at Sweden when their policies were more Socialist skewed, the government in order to manage the P/L sheet for social welfare programs compelled political out groups to be sterilized[1]. Roma people were considered a "drain" on Swedish society and attempts to exterminate them were done much more quietly. If any government starts to make value judgements about who is more valuable than whom, they will repeat these same errors. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sw...
  - 9y ago

danso 9y ago

> Which is why people like Harvey Weinstein can call up the NYT and get a disparaging story erased. I thought the NYT was the outlet that broke the Weinstein scandal? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/insider/sexual-harassment-weinstein-oreilly.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/insider/sexual-harassment...

csallen 9y ago
After it became absolutely impossible to ignore, and therefore no longer profitable to support him. But what about when it was brought to their attention before?[1] The story I reported never ran. After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted. I was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall. But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right? Wrong. The story was stripped of any reference to sexual favors or coercion and buried on the inside of the Culture section, an obscure story about Miramax firing an Italian executive. Who cared? [1] https://www.thewrap.com/media-enablers-harvey-weinstein-new-york-times https://www.thewrap.com/media-enablers-harvey-weinstein-new-...
- danso 9y ago
  It's only fair to point out the Waxman's former editor's response: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/harvey-weinstein-sharon-waxman-new-york-times-243600 http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/harvey-weinstein-sh... To summarize: He doesn't remember the conversation in which he allegedly argued that Weinstein wasn't a worthy public topic. And he never met with Weinstein at the Times, as Waxman claims. So it's her word against his. But we can as outsiders consider these assertions: > Landman also questioned why “if the Times had been intent on protecting Weinstein, wouldn’t it be odd to send a reporter to pursue this story on two continents, at considerable time and expense?’ From the NYT's response (from the current exec editor, who wasn't at the NYT in 2004): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/reader-center/dean-baquet-sharon-waxman.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/reader-center/dean-baquet... > I’m sure Ms. Waxman believes she had a story. But if you read her own description, she did not have anything near what was revealed in our story. Mainly, she had an off-the-record account from one woman. That's not to say that Waxman isn't right on a certain principle: stories don't need to face direct opposition to be "killed". If the NYT had been more open to the idea of Weinstein being a serial abuser, they would have given her more time and resources to pursue evidence that would eventually lead to on-the-record testimony and other hard evidence. But that's not what you said. You simplified all of the NYT's (and others') inaction to an evil villain picking up a phone and making a threat. What do you mean that the current story came about because "it became absolutely impossible to ignore"? Do you think that it all started with tweetstorms from recent victims? The first story in NYT's investigation involved incidents that were decades old. Meaning that nothing became "impossible to ignore" -- ignoring was the status quo for decades. It's very difficult to square your assertion with the fact that the NYT would've needed to throw considerable money at this investigation to even get it off the grounds. Sorry to be an apologist for the NYT, but your simplification does a bit of injustice to what the victims faced in the Weinstein scandal, as if they had been complaining on-the-record and openly for decades and they were ignored because of an elite conspiracy. It appears that what they faced was even worse, threats from their own industry and massive personal shame to the point that it was just easier to keep quiet and sign non-disclosure agreements than to speak out about injustice. And Waxman herself would probably agree to this, as she left the NYT to found her own media outlet, which until the NYT's investigation, seems to have completely ignored Weinstein's scandalous history. In the case of the Indonesia massacre, it's very possible/likely that it was a story that news organizations didn't push hard enough to investigate. That's not at all inconceivable, especially as we see media organizations outright shutting down because of lack of money. But giving your argument the benefit of the doubt, that the media is "consistently doing the government's bidding", then why was it the media that rooted out the Pentagon Papers and the My Lai massacre (the NYT and Sy Hersh specifically for the latter) and published photos that contributed heavily to the public's disillusionment with the war? But to the greater point: it seems ironic to simplify things into a media conspiracy because of something you read from a Chomsky book, in a thread about an article that hints (based on a recently declassified document) at how perversely/tragically complicated world politics is, even in the face of a massacre. To the smaller issue of media complicity, I'd completely agree that that media organizations have the capacity to act maliciously, or at least be too slow/unprepared to respond to injustice. But that's a result of media organizations -- similar to governments -- being complicated. To reduce the factors of a worldwide tragedy to the consequences of a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. caricature pulling all the strings, ultimately does not help in helping people remember history in order to avoid repeating it. edit: I gave Waxman more benefit of the doubt before she recently came to the defense of Matt Damon, who was getting criticized as being complicit to the alleged killing of Waxman's story: https://twitter.com/sharonwaxman/status/917821882556022786 https://twitter.com/sharonwaxman/status/917821882556022786 And yet Waxman, an experienced reporter who was writing for her website (i.e. no constraints from ink/paper limits, or overreaching editors), wrote this about Damon: > The story I reported never ran. > After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted. There is no way you intentionally write that about Damon and Crowe, without adding a caveat (e.g. "to vouch for Lambardo as a colleague, though I never asked them about the sexual abuse allegations"), unless you intend to amplify the drama of your own story, i.e. Hollywood's pressure on Waxman. That she only absolves Damon after he gives his side of the story makes me think that she might exaggerate the amount of real evidence she had on Weinstein in 2004 (evidence, again, that she sat on for 12+ years, as someone whose entire livelihood is reporting on Hollywood). But I do agree that the NYT columnist she wrote in response to is "sanctimonious" [0]. Even if that columnist, and his editors, were unaware of Waxman's 2004efforts, they do have current colleagues who cover Hollywood and who most definitely had heard the open secret. I don't agree with you that if the NYT suppressed news about Weinstein out of profit-motive, but I can believe that the NYT could have done more earlier to question someone who happens to be cozy with New York media and media reporters. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/business/media/harvey-weinsteins-media-enablers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/business/media/harvey-wei...

anthonyarroyo 9y ago

Do you actually consider the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Castro and Mugabe to be minor?

csallen 9y ago
Absolutely not. But those are not the examples I would point to to show that the media exaggerates our enemy's crimes.
- baldfat 9y ago
  BUT those are what you just did. You are just as guilty of what you were excusing of others. You just made MAJOR hundreds of millions of people's deaths and called all of these little.
  - ashark 9y ago
    You might want to re-read the post you're criticizing.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  Don't delude yourself about Chomsky's objectivity. As late as 1969 in debate with William F. Buckley he refused to believe that the Chinese Communists were killing people with failed economic policies and authoritarian crackdowns.[0] [0] https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793 https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793
  - icebraining 9y ago
    That doesn't make him wrong about the criticisms he does make.
    - lr4444lr 9y ago
      Right. It calls into question his intellectual honesty and the morality of his intellectual preoccupations. Not to mention the pension he pulls from the MIT endowment which is heavily invested in the military industrial complex he supposedly despises, but not to my knowledge has ever used his clout among the MIT faculty to protest in formal petition. Must be a nice life.

freeflight 9y ago

I'd also recommend Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War by Arthur Ponsonby. Some really interesting reports in there, it's also quite scary to see how certain themes persist to this day and even seem to have influenced large parts of how WWII ended up being perceived. Already during WWI the Germans had been depicted as "industrialized savages" who supposedly processed dead soldiers bodies in "corpse factories", of course only if they had not been too busy nailing nuns to churches after maiming them. It's pretty easy to draw a clear line from that depiction to the narrative of a whole nation of atheist perfectionists trying to industrialize genocide in the most efficient way possible. I guess our feeble human minds need those simple narratives which pit the perfect "good side" against the inexcusable "evil side", to rationalize our own shortcomings.

flexie 9y ago
Are you suggesting most Germans didn't know about holocaust or that it didn't happen?
- Retric 9y ago
  I really don't see how you can get that idea from the GP post. Hypothetically, if 95% of a country was 'evil', does that excuse killing the nice 5%? Further, as an American I recognize America historically committed genocide, that does not mean everyone in that time period was evil.
  - flexie 9y ago
    He's referring to Germany after WWI, not generalizing or referring to America as you do. What other way is there to read his comment?
    - Retric 9y ago
      A reference to the power of labels. America rarely gets a bad rap for genocide in such discussions, but it's defiantly a major part of our history.

deleted 9y ago

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lr4444lr 9y ago

When was Chomsky ever silenced?

deleted 9y ago
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detcader 9y ago
I don't know about any actual silencing myself (I'm not well-read), but the efforts to impeach Chomsky's mental stability and character [1] unquestionably have that as the goal [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-chomsky-guardian-personality https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-c...
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Unquestionably? Really? Look, I agree with a great deal of Chomsky's claims but doesn't prevent me from thinking that he's got faults of his own. Given his enormous stature as a linguistic scholar, those are more than mere shortcomings. He wouldn't accept his own style of political argument from one of his students.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Unlike the current TV pundits, which are all Socrates reborn. The question is not whether he has faults (of course he does), but whether there is a double standard.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      I'll take your word for it as I watch little or no television. I think you know perfectly well what I'm saying.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        I know what you're saying. I disagree that it is relevant.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

>subtle but pervasive omission and exaggeration of facts Deciding what to omit/include and what to emphasize/downplay is a very subjective task.

csallen 9y ago
Right, so I can forgive the occasional mistake or slight bent. But the point Chomsky makes in his book is that the omissions and exaggerations are consistently in line with the desires of the government and with advertisers, much more so than can be explained by random chance.

ctdonath 9y ago

Killing a cumulative 100,000,000 hardly constitutes "minor crimes".

wutbrodo 9y ago
Leaving aside uncharitable readings of the parent comment, I don't think that killing 100,000,000 is included in the minor crimes that he claims are emphasized. Or to put it another way, he's claiming that minor crimes are emphasized for enemies, which doesn't preclude major crimes being committed as well.

r00fus 9y ago

> It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies Not to normalize the atrocities but I think you can generalize and say that we should expect any government to be doing the same. The issue with the US is purely the hypocrisy.

Udik 9y ago
No, the issue with the US (and other western countries) is not an absolute one (the level of hypocrisy). It's a more personal one: we are the targets of their propaganda, and we believe at least some of it. Looking at a distant country denying its crimes when they're denounced daily from the pages of our newspapers might be unnerving, but doesn't affect us. Knowing that part of what we actually believe, or our own news sources tell us, is propaganda, is much more enraging.

merpnderp 9y ago

Yes, I'm sure Chomsky would say Pol Pot's genocide was overblown and Pinochet's was undercounted, because he's no better than those he rails against.

vkou 9y ago
We don't need to speculate, let's see what Chomsky himself has to say on the subject of communist regimes. > "Would you describe the authoritarian result of the Bolshevik's actions as an honest mistake, a "historical accident" maybe-or was it just the natural outgrowth of the Leninist Worldview: the idea that only a few people are smart and knowledgeable enough to be the leaders, and they should run the show?" > Chomsky: Yeah, in my opinion the heart of the problem is Marxism-Leninism itself-the very idea that a "vanguard party" can, or has any right to, or has any capacity to lead the stupid masses towards some future they're too dumb to understand for themselves. I think what it's going to lead them towards is "I rule you with a whip." Institutions of domination have a nice way of reproducing themselves-I think that's kind of like an obvious sociological truism. [1] Yep, we definitely found the holodomor apologist, there. Edit: It's entirely possible that he spent plenty of time and words on whitewashing crimes against humanity. His views have changed since then. [1] Undestanding power, p226.
- Sangermaine 9y ago
  >Yep, we definitely found the holodomor apologist, there. You're dodging the question: no one mentioned the Holodomor. The parent mentioned Pol Pot for a reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
  - nate_meurer 9y ago
    But... from the article you just cited: > In 1993, Chomsky acknowledged the massive scale of the Cambodian genocide in the documentary film Manufacturing Consent. He said, "I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975 through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury."

devinhelton 9y ago

It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies (e.g. Communists).* We don't have one media. It's more accurate to say that we have leftist media (Jacobin, Chomsky), establishment liberal media (NY Times), generic for profit media (NBC nightly news, etc ), conservative populist media (Fox, Breitbert), conservative high-brow media )(City Journal, Commentary) and that all of them will at times exaggerate the crimes of their enemies and whitewash the crimes of their allies or ideological compatriots. Chomsky for example was himself guilty of whitewashing the Khemer Rouge back in the mid-1970s when he should have known better (see http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm ) Or read this New York Times obituary about Mao which totally whitewashes him -- http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.html http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.... The NY Times is hardly amplifying the crimes of communism! Or going back further consider how the liberal mainstream press whitewashed the horrors of communist Russia (see this review of Malcolm Muggeridge's memoirs for example -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... ) At this point I have come to the belief that it is very hard to trust any media source unless you personally know something about the subject and can figure out which sources are credible about that topic.

baursak 9y ago

> I recommend his book Manufacturing Consent. This Wikipedia article is a good quick overview and introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

kchoudhu 9y ago

I would be careful about calling the crimes committed by Communists and their fellow travelers "minor".

icebraining 9y ago
I think what csminor is saying that they amplified even the minor ones, not that they were all minor.

zeveb 9y ago

> It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies (e.g. Communists). Of course, in the real world the media played down the major crimes of Communists (cf. Walter Duranty, whose Pulitzer Prize has never been revoked), while massively amplifying the minor crimes of anti-Communists (e.g. South Vietnam, a nasty little republic significantly less nasty than the victorious North Vietnam). Yes, the anti-Communists have their hundreds of thousands, but the Communists have their hundreds of millions. The death tolls aren't even comparable. > And they do this knowingly, too, by ignoring or outright silencing dissenting voices (like Chomsky's). There are many adjectives one can apply to Noam Chomsky, but 'silenced' is not among them.

the_af 9y ago
> South Vietnam, a nasty little republic significantly less nasty than the victorious North Vietnam That's... debatable, to say the least. > Yes, the anti-Communists have their hundreds of thousands, but the Communists have their hundreds of millions. The death tolls aren't even comparable. If you were a demonstrator abducted and killed by a CIA-backed & trained task force in Latin America in the 70s, these silly "death toll" comparisons would hardly matter. Evil is not necessarily measured in numbers. Had the Nazis "only" killed "hundreds of thousands" of Jews instead of millions, the crime would have been just as horrible.

thrden 9y ago

The New York Times actually covered up the holodomor, and were incredibly supportive of Stalin in the 1930's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty] Further, The NYT had favorably reviewed books that denied the Khmer Rouge, and as late as 1990 published editorials denying that governments human rights abuses as being statistically insignificant[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial]. I think that this has less to do with manufacturing consent and instead realizing that the New York times isn't a bastion of truth but rather a flawed human organization that often makes terrible mistakes.

icebraining 9y ago
Not a great example: "American-made imports reached a high point in 1930, when approximately 25 percent of Soviet imported goods came from the United States. (..) By 1931, there were 134 signed technical aid agreements, the vast majority of them with American companies, servicing virtually every branch of the economy (...) General Electric had been eager to reenter the Russian market as early as 1922 to prevent German competitors from preempting it. Their granting of credits for up to five years, credits which were not guaranteed by the United States government, caused a sensation in the United States and signaled greater willingness by capitalist firms to take risks in the Soviet market (...) In 1913, there had been only some 600 tractors in all of Russia, mostly of German make; by 1930, there were 60,000, three quarters of them manufactured in the United States." https://sci-hub.cc/https://www.jstor.org/stable/178483 https://sci-hub.cc/https://www.jstor.org/stable/178483 And of course, 1933 was when Roosevelt officially recognized the USSR.
- thrden 9y ago
  In 1933 The United States recognized the Soviet Union, however Walter Duranty wrote his work defending Stalin in 1931. Further, it has been argued that his work and the New York Time's work played an important part in the United State's formal recognition of the Soviet Union [1] Additionally, the United States had joined a military Intervention in the Russian Revolution against the Bolsheviks (we sent almost 11,000 troops). As such relations between the two countries could not reasonably be considered friendly before recognition. [2] Finally, The United States had gone through the First red scare just 10 years prior to the articles being written. As such it's unlikely that the U.S. Populace had an overwhelmingly positive view of the country. [3] Whereas the two had a strong trade relation as you pointed out, the countries were very adversarial and as such I believe it is incorrect to imagine that the NYT's strings were pulled to show the USSR in a positive light. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Reporting_the_1932.E2.80.931933_famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Reporting_the_1... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Rus... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare