The New York Times says in an article today that, although the US won’t join the majority of the world by signing the treaty banning cluster bombs, it has “abided by its provisions”.

Glenn Greenwald published an article in response documenting that, in fact, the US “continually violates all” of the provisions of the cluster bomb treaty, “systematically and as a matter of policy doing exactly that which the treaty expressly bans.”

Many journalists, such as Robert Parry, methodically note the propaganda of the self-proclaimed “paper of record”, but some fall into the trap of thinking that NYT has only recently started “becoming” a propaganda rag, or has been “descending” into propaganda for the last ten or twenty years.  As a fewexamples illustrate, this is a misconception.

1872: “A three-month strike of 100,000 workers in New York won the eight-hour day, and at a victory celebration in June 1872, 150,000 workers paraded through the city. The New York Times wondered what proportion of the strikers were ‘thoroughly American.’”

1961: The New York Times “cooperated with the Kennedy administration in deceiving the American public” on the US invasion of Cuba. “James Reston and Turner Catledge of the New York Times, on the government’s request, did not run a story about the imminent invasion. [Historian] Arthur Schlesinger said of the New York Times action: ‘This was another patriotic act…’”

1991: “The two leading news magazines, Time and Newsweek, had special editions hailing the victory in the [Gulf] war… A New York Times editorial (March 30, 1991) said: ‘America’s victory in the Persian Gulf war … provided special vindication for the U.S. Army, which brilliantly exploited its firepower and mobility and in the process erased memories of its grievous difficulties in Vietnam.’”

In its 1991 invasion of the Gulf region, the US killed approximately two hundred thousand people.

The cases are endless, and have led one of the West’s leading media analysts, Chomsky, to conclude and show, time and again, that “[t]he New York Times is pure propaganda.”

Robert Barsocchini focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. @_DirtyTruths