The Point


Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

April, 1958

NEWSPAPERS AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

Other Jews And Minister Sulzberger

The homespun humorist who said, “All I know is what I read in the newspapers,” spoke not as a unique American, being funny, but as a typical one, being frank. Nearly 1,800 English-language dailies, having a combined circulation of fifty-seven million copies a day, are currently being published in the United States. And this tidal wave of newsprint, washing into the minds of American readers, has become, for most of them, the sustaining source of entertainment, of information, of opinion, of ideas. What newspapers affirm, readers believe; what newspapers deny, they discredit; what newspapers don’t mention, they ignore.

And this is a national calamity. For America’s daily press is — except for a few oases — an encompassing desert, hostile to the growth of both intelligence and morality. It offers as its chief attraction a day-to-day chronicle of the blunders and stupidities, the crimes and depravities of the human race. And in those columns not immediately concerned with recording the depths to which men have fallen during the previous twenty-four hours, most papers are a welter of misinformation and gross distortion of world events. “The popular Press as we have it today,” Hilaire Belloc once wrote, “thrusts the ‘Modern Mind’ lower than it would otherwise have fallen, swells its imbecility, and confirms it in its incapacity for civilization and therefore for the Faith.”

*   *   *   *   *   
Since American newspapers are a typical product of that unholy ferment which has been agitating the western world since the time of the French Revolution, it is quite easy to isolate one cause of their being the way they are; namely: the influence of the Jews.

Essential to the understanding of our chaotic times is the knowledge that the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-Christian bloc within Christian society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by every means at its disposal. And because the daily press, as we know it, is the child of the Masonic era — the era which thinks it meet and just that the Jews should be allowed to subvert Christianity if they can — newspapers have had no sure ground for combating the Jewish take-over. Difficult Gentile journalists have been brought into line simply by being reminded of the Liberal, Masonically-inspired principles which all newspaperdom takes for granted. For example, the Jews have had no difficulty in getting yards of publicity and loud editorial acclaim for their Interfaith and Brotherhood endeavors. The premise underlying these movements — that to adore Christ as God and to reject Him as an impostor are both commendable, brotherly forms of religious activity — is never questioned. And this lack of protest has plainly unnerved Christian resistance to the encroachments of the Jews.

As for the large, distracting doses of smut and scandal which most papers regularly serve up, Jewish interests have done their best to encourage this poisonous diet in a number of ways — perhaps most effectively by waging incessant war against censorship and anti-obscenity regulations, wherever they may be found.

One further, and most necessary, aspect of the Jews’ press campaign has been to make sure that, as their anti-Christian purposes and activities proceed, nothing gets into the papers that would expose them to public view. To this end, they have found that what they cannot achieve by persuasion they can usually get by intimidation.

Because few newspapermen have the fortitude to stand up against high-pressure tactics, even those editors not intellectually convinced of the supremacy of the Jewish race are inclined to print articles favorable to the Jews, or else to keep quiet about them. So effective have Jewry’s organized intimidations proven that many overly-timid or flaccid-willed editors have decided to play safe by turning over to the Jews as many of their news columns as they might require, to be filled with whatever material the Jews might suggest. Thus, in a confidential report to its members, the American Jewish Committee has revealed that it regularly supplies 1,700 American newspapers with what it calls “canned editorials” — free commentaries on current affairs, prepared to Jewish specifications, all to serve up to local readers.

Again, in its annual budget message, the American Jewish Committee outlines as follows the objectives of its Public Information and Education Department: “To place in the magazines, the wire services and newspaper columns material which will aid in the development of positive intergroup attitudes ... To instill in editors and writers ... an understanding of certain types of material, with a view to keeping the number of objectionable articles to a minimum.”

After several pages of instances, detailing how it has “cooperated” with editors in determining what should and should not go into the papers, the American Jewish Committee concludes the report of its press activities with the straight-faced announcement: “During the year we were active in combating repression and censorship ... ”

*   *   *   *   *   
To give our readers a more particular view of the Jews-and-the-news picture, we determined to focus the rest of this month’s attention on one of those public news enterprises which the Jews operate directly, through immediate ownership and personal administration. We lined up all the possible candidates, with the Pulitzer empire (dilutedly-Jewish) at one end, and the radio-wailings of Walter Winchell at the far other. We chose for our purpose the one newspaper which overshadowed all its neighbors. Its publisher is probably the least rabbinical-looking Hebrew ever to receive a degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. His name is Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his particular Jewish news enterprise is called The New York Times.

Unlike some Jewish papers, The New York Times appears daily and in English. Unlike many Jewish papers, the Times employs quantities of non-Jews in all its departments. And like no other Jewish paper (or magazine, or broadcast or news service), Mr. Sulzberger’s is an eminently assimilated one. It travels agreeably in the most rarefied Gentile company. Partisan newsmen look to it as America’s great neutral daily, the nation’s one “newspaper of record.” Scholars the world over cite it as an accepted, standard reference.

Through all these unlikely achievements, the Times has moved with gravity and balance. Cloaked in a conservatism which might have been tailored by the Brooks Brothers themselves, Mr. Sulzberger’s paper gives witness, in print if not in person, to the venerable virtues of that classic individual: the White, the very White, Jew.

But, as happens to the Whitest of them, every once in a while Mr. Sulzberger’s paper forgets itself. The Jewishness comes through. Often, we must say, it is no more than an airy suggestion — like a gentle breeze out of distant delicatessens.

At other times, however, it is close to overwhelming.

*   *   *   *   *   
There is no news subject which will bring out the Jew in The New York Times more surely than the five-letter word, Spain — unless it be the six-letter word, Franco. Spain, ever since 1492, when it expelled all the Jews within its Catholic borders, has been a favorite target for harangues in the ghettos of every nation. The Times’ Spanish policy is a Manhattan version of the same. And when a Catholic employee of the Times had the integrity to report the truth about Spain during that country’s fight against Communism twenty years ago, he soon found himself out of a job.

The Times’ editorials never tire of warning against the dangers of friendship with Franco. He should not get one cent of our money, the paper said, when the United States Senate voted to give the Generalissimo a loan in 1950. It was around this same time that Franco was charged (by the scholarly, reliable The New York Times) with having provided refueling stations for Nazi submarines. A resentful American naval attache in Spain demanded that the Times prove its charge. An embarrassed Mr. Sulzberger had no proof to offer.

In a statement issued by Sign magazine in May of 1950, the Passionist Fathers made perhaps the most pithy published summary of The New York Times’ attitude toward Franco. “It has a special brand of distilled venom for him,” they said. “This venom spills over into every line of reporting that comes from its Spanish correspondents, reporting which is scandalously colored even by tawny standards.”

*   *   *   *   *   
There is little ground for assuming that because The New York Times has consistently detested Franco, the most successful anti-Communist in Europe, it must therefore be a pro-Communist paper. The Times’ position on Communism is that of so many other wealthy White Jews. Being wealthy and White, they automatically go on record as opposed to Communism. But, being Jewish, they invariably find there are Party members right in their own household. In the case of the Times, it took a full Congressional investigation to turn up the Reds on the payroll. When the Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee was identifying Communists in the newspaper field, 14 out of the 18 subpoenaed to its public session were, or had lately been, employees of The New York Times.

The investigation brought to light the previous existence of a Red monthly called Better Times, published by “Communist Party units of The New York Times.” Testimony did not disclose where the Better Times staff had got their supplies of paper stock, but they might confidently have expected that Mr. Sulzberger himself would have supplied it, had they ever run low. Sulzberger had done as much for that most noted of party publications, the Daily Worker. In an editorial on March 11, 1947, The New York Times boasted that it had delivered 16 tons of its own newsprint to the Daily Worker staff in order to keep those needy Communists in business. The Times justified its action with a hearty rendering of that popular Masonic hymn, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Which any thinking reader must have taken to mean: Mr. Sulzberger would rather be shot down on Forty-second Street than deny the Communists a chance to win over New Yorkers to the Moscow Line.

The Christian line, however, has a way of upsetting The New York Times particularly when there is a movement afoot to protect some Christian value. A campaign to boycott an obscene or blasphemous motion picture, for example, will bring the Times rushing to the defense of the poor, persecuted movie industry. Cardinal Spellman found this out not so long ago when he went to war against that notorious, Jewish-backed film, The Miracle.

Yet, when fellow-Jews are involved, the Times can blithely abandon its crusade for uncensored entertainment. It had not a syllable of criticism for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith when those Jewish terrorists conducted a nation-wide boycott of the film based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist. And it clapped loud approval when the Jews of West Germany picketed a theater which was showing a movie produced by a man with alleged anti-Jewish leanings.

*   *   *   *   *   
Like most Jews, The New York Times has had to defend itself from the apprehensions of those wiser Americans who doubt whether any Jew, White or Red, can ever take a serious interest in our country and in the preservation of its institutions. On several occasions, the Times has protested that it can and does. But in this matter, as in so many others, it sometimes forgets.

An editorial dated April 8, 1953, revealed just how little The New York Times is concerned about America as we have known it, and citizenship as we have enjoyed it under the Constitution. In pointing out what it said were the dangers of the proposed “Bricker Amendment” — a resolution which purports to safeguard our country against foreign control by the United Nations — the Times wrote the following astounding paragraph: “The resolution is dangerous because it forbids any treaty that would allow any foreign power or any international organization (meaning the U. N. or one of its agencies) to control the constitutional rights of American citizens within the United States ‘or any other matter essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States.’ ”

Going back over this statement, the patient reader will confirm that what the Times has so awkwardly said is that (1) it is “dangerous” to keep the U. N. from interfering with our rights as Americans; (2) it is “dangerous” to leave matters of domestic jurisdiction in the hands of our own locally-known and locally-elected representatives.

This casual proposal of revolution certainly puts the Times in the non-nationalist camp; but, here again, an accommodation in policy will be made where the Jews are concerned. Jewish nationalism (the Zionist plan for the rape of the Holy Land) comes off in the Times as a lofty and laudable venture — one which the paper, in its measured fashion, has been only too happy to promote.

Last November 17, the Times carried a typical promotion item. An editorial was devised in which all the Times-reading world was at last supposed to be given the inside story on why the Arab leaders do not like the Israeli Jews. The “real opposition,” said the Times, “is to the democratic and economic features of Israel. These groups simply do not want an efficient western-style economy in Arabia.”

The Times presented this pat little summary as though the Arabs were resentful of some hypothetical Utopia off on the dunes of the Sahara. The “western-style economy” which is currently driving the Arabs mad is, of course, the one which the Jews have already set up — on Arab-owned farms and in Arab-owned towns — and out of which the “efficient” Israelis have already expelled over 900,000 rightful Arab residents.

There remains a further unmentioned reason why Israel through Arab eyes is such a loathsome prospect. Scattered throughout the Middle East, in the Arab countries, in the refugee camps, in the State of Israel itself, there live tens of thousands of that once-proud community, the Catholics of Palestine. With them, the issue is much more resolved than the Times could possibly imagine: Our Lord’s Holy Land has been betrayed into the hands of His crucifiers; there will be divine vengeance for this betrayal; it will not be long in coming.

And, we might add, in the spirit of Catholic Palestine, that when this pending vengeance finally falls, the crash will be a resounding one indeed, in all of Israel — and in Times Square.


Point Magazine Index