This is not an easy article to write. Back in Brooklyn, in the sixth grade our school had a deal with the Times by which everyone in the class received a copy Monday through Friday, delivered to our desk, for the munificent sum of ten cents each. (To further elaborate on how long ago it was Newsweek and Times had a newsstand price of 25 cents.) Then, in the ninth grade my English teacher assigned the class to read the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday Times and gave us a ten-question quiz on it Monday morning. Furthermore, we scrutinized the cartoon on the first page of Arts and Leisure to count the Nina’s. (For the uninitiated, the artist, Al Hirschfeld, liked to insert his daughter’s name in the cartoon. It could appear as a swirl of a bouffant hairdo or a pleated dress, for example. He signed his name with a subscript giving the number of Ninas).

So, we grew up regarding the Times as the gold standard of journalism. Today, however, we see that the gold is tarnished. Most of us know that the Times is obsessed with slandering the State of Israel. No lie is too big or too small. At the same time, the paper has increasingly adopted the anti-Semitic stance of its fellow Leftist periodicals, by publishing a series of libelous articles about New York’s yeshivas, accusing them of everything from providing an inadequate secular education to fraudulently accepting public money for special education, as well as a drumbeat of lies accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. They notably published without fact-checking a claim by the Gaza Health Ministry after October 7 that Israel had bombed a hospital, killing 471 people, when it subsequently was found that the explosion came from an errant Islamic Jihad rocket that hit the parking lot, causing about fifty casualties.

Since then, the Times has parroted every fable promulgated by Hamas. One of the most egregious was printing the photo of a frail child in his mother’s arms, resembling Madonna and child, depicted as suffering from severe malnutrition to support the allegation that Israel was starving Gazans. (Actually, Hamas is starving Israeli hostages). The original story omitted that the child had cerebral palsy, a detail which was quietly added to later versions of the story without calling attention to it. In addition, the original photo had been cropped to remove the boy’s brother, who was clearly well-nourished, as was his mother.

Playing fast and loose with facts has long been a staple of the Times; at least two of its correspondents have undeservedly won Pulitzer Prizes for fictionalized stories, one for Walter Duranty for concealing Stalin’s intentional creation of a famine in the Ukraine, the Holodomor, to “liquidate” the kulaks, peasants who owned their own plots of land, in order to collectivize agriculture, and the latter for Jayson Blair for inventing the adventures of a juvenile street urchin. Furthermore, Nikole Hannah-Jones  won the Pulitzer for the distorted history of the United States, the 1619 Project, referring to the year that the first slave ship reached our shores, which was condemned across the political spectrum for falsely asserting that all of American history has been based for the past 400 years on racial oppression by whites.

Going back in time, readers who have read history extensively know that the Times suppressed, or buried in its back pages. accounts of the Holocaust so as not to upset their idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was incidentally an open admirer of Benito Mussolini until 1935, when negative public reaction to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia caused FDR’s advisers to recommend that he distance himself from the fascist leader. A subsequent flirtation with totalitarianism was the series of reports from the paper’s correspondent in Cuba, Herbert Matthews, that romanticized and helped popularize what was then Fidel Castro’s floundering revolution against the Batista government. Greater detail about these and other deceptions can be found in investigative reporter Ashley Rindsberg’s book, The Gray Lady Winked, from which I learned that the Times had been unduly sympathetic to Hitler going back as far as 1922, culminating in printing uncritically the Nazi lie that Poland had attacked Germany in 1939, which served as justification for Germany’s invasion of Poland.

One might think that the foregoing would give the full picture of the Times’ past derelictions, but there’s more to the story. I was amazed, even shocked, to read an account of the newspaper’s history of bigotry that appeared in the Prager U video “Why immigrants Should Love Columbus Day.” As narrated by Breitbart News reporter Alana Mastrangelo, the relevant passage reads,

“Following a mass migration from southern Italy beginning in the 1880s, the status of Italian Americans was at an all-time low. How low was clearly illustrated by one of the single worst episodes of racial violence in American history: the mass murder and lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891.

“Hatred against the Italian newcomers had been brewing for years and was openly encouraged by the leading newspapers of the day. For example, in 1882 the New York Times ran an editorial under the headline ‘Our Future Citizens’ in which the Times’ stated, ‘There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants…as the Southern Italians…’

“In 1887, the same New York Times wrote approvingly about the lynching in Mississippi of a man they referred to as ‘Dago Joe,’ ‘dago’ being an ethnic slur for Italians.

“Anti-immigrant sentiment was especially intense in New Orleans where Italians were settling in large numbers. Local papers accused them of working for below-market wages, engaging in all manner of crimes, and being more loyal to the Pope than the President.

“These seething resentments broke to the surface when the city’s police chief, David Hennessey, was assassinated in the fall of 1890.

“As the chief lay dying in the street, a witness claimed to have heard him say that ‘dagoes’ had shot him. In response, authorities rounded up hundreds of Italians, eventually charging nine of them with complicity in Hennessy’s murder.

“When their trial resulted in six not-guilty verdicts and three mistrials, the public was outraged. Further inflamed by the local press, some decided to take ‘justice’ into their own hands.

“According to journalist Erin Blakemore, here’s what happened:

‘[T]housands of angry residents gathered near the jail. Impassioned speakers whipped the mob into a frenzy, painting Italian immigrants as criminals who needed to be driven out of the city…

‘A…group of [vigilantes] stormed the prison, grabbing not just the men who had been acquitted or given a mistrial, but several who had not been tried or even accused in the crimes. Shots rang out… [When the shooting stopped] eleven…bodies were riddled with bullets and torn apart by the crowd.

‘Outside the jail, the…mob cheered as the mutilated bodies were displayed. Some corpses were hung…others were…plundered for souvenirs.’

“‘The next day, the New York Times celebrated the crime with a headline that read, ‘Chief Hennessy Avenged: Eleven of his Italian Assassins Lynched by a Mob.’

“’These…descendants of bandits and assassins…are to us a pest without mitigations,’ the Times editors wrote.

“In protest, the Italian government broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. Tensions receded only after the US government paid an indemnity to the Italians. Despite the New York Times’ incendiary rhetoric, much of the country was outraged by the massacre. In his 1891 State of the Union address, Republican President Benjamin Harrison pledged to protect foreign nationals from mob violence.

“Then, in July 1892, Harrison issued a proclamation celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World. It was a timely pretext to a greater purpose: to raise the status of a badly shaken Italian-American community.’”

So, the next time The New York Times begins pontificating about institutional racism, it needs to be reminded of its own disgraceful history. The moral of this story is an old-fashioned one:

“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

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