Rindsberg argues that Times reporters have followed the same playbook since the 1920s. “Rather, they were the byproduct of a particular kind of system, a truth-producing machine” constructed to twist facts into a pattern of the Times’ own choosing, he says. The “fabrications and distortions” he found in the Times’ coverage of major stories from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to Vietnam and the Iraq War “were never the product of simple error,” Rindsberg contends. “My research churned up not mere errors or inaccuracies but whole-cloth falsehoods,” Rindsberg writes in “ The Gray Lady Winked” (Midnight Oil), out now, which examines how the nation’s premier media outlet manipulates what we think is the news. Both confirmed the assumptions of the nation’s left-leaning media and academic elite, while damaging their political enemies.Īnd both were driven by The New York Times, where malicious misreporting has been the practice for a century, argues journalist and media commentator Ashley Rindsberg. 6 Capitol Hill riot, as reports had claimed, but had died of natural causes.īoth stories were based on anonymous, unidentifiable sources, but had become deeply enmeshed in the public consciousness.

On April 15, the Biden administration acknowledged there was no evidence that Russia ever offered bounties on American troops in Afghanistan, walking back a report that wounded former President Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election.įour days later, the Washington, DC, medical examiner revealed that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick had not been murdered by rampaging Trump supporters during the Jan.

The gray lady winked