Former NY Times editor A.M. Rosenthal died yesterday at the age of 84. Not
surprisingly, the paper's obituary said virtually nothing about his role in
pushing the paper to the right under his tenure as Executive Editor from
1977 to 1988.
During the time I was involved with Central America solidarity in the
1980s, the Times was a key element in Reagan's foreign policy.
In the most pronounced example of Rosenthal collaboration with the White
House, reporter Raymond Bonner was replaced as correspondent in El Salvador
in 1982 after reporting on the El Mozote massacre. Rosenthal was reported
to have said that Bonner "was too willing to accept the Communist side of
the story." According to Mark Danner, an author of a book on El Mozote,
Rosenthal "was very vocal that Bonner was sympathetic to the Communist side
in Central America." Danner also reports on "a scene in a Georgetown
restaurant a few weeks after the El Mozote story ran -- it was the evening
of the annual Gridiron dinner -- in which Rosenthal criticized Bonner and
angrily described the sufferings that Communist regimes inflict on their
people."
Rosenthal replaced Bonner with Shirley Christian, a rightwing ideologue
whose previous job was with the Miami Herald. Many of her articles consist
simply of stenographer-like reports from the contra leaders. For example,
in a September 13, 1985 item, she shamelessly quotes the monstrous contra
military commander Enrique Bermudez: "I won't say that sometimes an
isolated patrol might not commit an abuse. But this has not been a
practice." You might as well have quoted Idi Amin saying that he was
committed to human rights.
As bad as Christian was, nobody could top Claire Sterling for awfulness
except perhaps for Judy Miller. Sterling used the pages of the NY Times to
promote a wacky theory that the USSR was the mastermind of a plot to kill
the pope as a means to countering the growth of Solidarity in Poland. The
conspiracy supposedly involved the KGB, the Bulgarian government acting on
its behest and Mehmet Ali Agca, who was supposedly paid $400,000 to carry
out the hit.
Rosenthal decided to hire Sterling on the basis of her book "The Terror
Network," written in 1980. She got much of her data from Robert Moss, who
co-authored the lurid spy novel "The Spike" with Arnaud de Borchgrave, who
would become the editor of the Moonie Washington Times. Edward Herman noted
that "Sterling's fanaticism can be inferred from her statement (in Human
Events, April 21, 1984), at the height of the Reagan era anti-Soviet
frenzy, that the Reagan administration was 'covering up' Soviet guilt in
the assassination attempt against the Pope in 1981 because of the Reaganite
devotion to détente."
Full:
<http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/AllNewsFit_Herman2.html>http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/AllNewsFit_Herman2.html
To this day, the NY Times never issued one of its famous corrections to the
story about the KGB/Bulgarian plot to kill the pope. Even after a Roman
court cleared 3 Bulgarians who had been arrested for involvement in the
alleged conspiracy to kill the pope, the NY Times failed to accept the
verdict. Herman notes, "When CIA officer Melvin Goodman testified during
the Gates confirmation hearing in 1990 that the CIA professionals knew the
Bulgarian Connection was a fraud because they had penetrated the Bulgarian
secret services, the Times failed to reprint this part of Goodman's testimony."
Eventually, after Rosenthal was retired from his post, the NY Times edged a
bit more toward the center and away from his excesses. Even though the
disease went into temporary remission under a new editorial team, it never
went away as the Judith Miller affair reveals. It can safely be assumed
that as long as the U.S. government needs an "official" voice to explain
the wisdom of its decisions to the public, there will always be a need for
the NY Times as it is currently constituted.
Rosenthal continued to work for the NY Times, turning out the flatulent
op-ed column "On My Mind" until 1999. Then he went to work for the Daily
News, a trashy tabloid published by rightwing billionaire Mort Zuckerman,
where he adopted the persona of the windbag uncle everybody has to put up
with at the Thanksgiving Dinner table. His very last column, written on
February 6th of this year is proof positive of how detached from reality he
was:
>>But the Bush haters should hold their applause. This story is far from
over. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was absolutely right in telling a
Senate committee on Wednesday, "We may eventually find it [the WMD
stockpile] in the months ahead." As the secretary pointed out, those
weapons may be buried in a still unexplored area, they may have been
smuggled into another country [think Syria] or they may have been destroyed
just before the invasion.
CIA Director George Tenet smartly reinforced Rumsfeld's argument yesterday,
stressing in his congressional testimony that the search for WMDs is
"nowhere near 85% finished."<<
May he rot in hell.
--
www.marxmail.org
