Alex Newman
The New American
September 213, 2012
The New York Times has essentially become a “propaganda
megaphone” to peddle the establishment’s narrative — especially when it
comes to war — charged foreign correspondent Daniel Simpson, who
resigned from the paper in disgust. According to Simpson, the paper,
which is often lambasted and ridiculed by conservatives and libertarians
for its blatant “liberal” bias, is actually just a propaganda tool for
the ruling establishment.
In an explosive interview with the Kremlin-funded RT media broadcaster, the former Times
correspondent, who was based in the Balkans during his stint at the
newspaper, offered an inside look at how it all works. What appears to
have bothered him more than anything was how the supposed paper “of
record” was so determined to sell the Iraq war to the American people,
even if it meant basically lying or repeating government lies to do so.
"It
seemed pretty glaringly obvious to me that the 'news fit to print' was
pretty much the news that's fit to serve the powerful," Simpson
explained, citing the warmongering over Iraq as a prime example. "The
way that the paper's senior staff think is exactly like those in power —
in fact, it's their job to become their friends."
An
ambitious reporter, Simpson joined the paper a decade ago when he was
just 27 years old. He had been hired to report on the Balkans, where the
U.S. government and other Western powers had intervened in an internal
conflict. However, within a few months, disillusioned by the Times' war-mongering, he resigned.
"I
was young and naive and idealistic, I suppose. I thought I was going to
be holding people in power to account," said Simpson, who wrote a
recently published book about his experiences entitled A Rough Guide to the Dark Side. "It turned out instead that when I joined in 2002, the New York Times
was very much engaged in doing exactly what those in power wanted them
to do, and printing fake intelligence information to start the war in
Iraq."
As the establishment’s propaganda about "Weapons of Mass
Destruction" in Iraq was getting in full swing, Simpson said he was
asked to report bogus information about Serbians selling WMD delivery
parts to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The Serbs, however, were
actually just selling spare airplane parts, not WMD delivery systems, he
explained.
Read More
