one of the things i can't really get over is talking to someone who works at the new york times (in a very local capacity and has never dealt with their overseas reporting) and realizing they genuinely, earnestly don't think there is a systemic bias in their reporting. they actually couldn't see it. this is someone who is very sharp and religiously fair in their own reporting. but it simply never occurred to them, even through the war in iraq, through the caliphate mess, through the thomas friedman op-eds, and through 75 years of reporting on palestine, that there may be a systemic problem in the new york times and that it is deliberate. at worst, they would say, it is an error on the part of these individual reporters. they were careless. they were sloppy. but they can't possibly mean it.
but you know, if you can't see the bias, you don't see the mistake until it's a scandal. and you think it's made once. but in fact the scandal is that this mistake was made a thousand times. when you make a mistake a thousand times, it's not a mistake, it's policy. it's an editorial decision. i think i was just really sad to see someone defend it not on the basis of malice, but rather on the basis of an earnest and thoroughly casual dehumanization. what's the problem if a headline is incorrect? what's the problem if a humanitarian organization is inferred to be a terrorist organization? what's the problem if an entire people are characterized as rapists? what's the problem if a cause and effect are incoherent? what's the problem with a few missing historical facts? these were all just earnest mistakes. people might be terrorists and rapists and things are complicated and history is disputed. i can repeat that endlessly even over the corpses of 13000 children. what's the problem with that? i don't see a connection between our reporting and the dead children. we report on the dead children too. i think our reporting is very fair. we talk about the dead children maybe a third as often as we talk about why they should be killed. that seems fine to me. yes the president of this nation quoted us, and the president of that nation quoted us, but this is surely correlation and not causation.
it's the kind of casual racism that makes you walk and talk like a fool. the editorial board knows what it's doing. but the casual racists, the ones who don't even want to be racist but have simply never lived a life that confronted their racism—they're being taken along for the ride. footsoldiers in a march for genocide who think they're on a scenic hike.
