When I was starting out as a Chicago City Hall reporter for that big metropolitan paper—when we could smoke in newsrooms on deadline, curse, tell jokes, laugh and wore jackets and ties to work—I had one rule.
I’d often discuss this rule with my political sources, elected officials, cops, city workers and others:
Lie to me just once, just once, and I’ll burn you to the ground.
It wasn’t an empty threat. Chicago politics wasn’t a cloistered convent. It was and remains a place of thieves protected by the laws and regulations that they themselves controlled. It is a Democrat Barter Town and like all such towns it is hell bent on strangling itself. And there was one top aide to the mayor who thought himself a master manipulator. Frank lied to me and I burned him.
I burned him repeatedly, mercilessly, using a line often attributed to the poet Richard Brautigan: “He’d sell a rat’s asshole to a blind man for a wedding ring.”
Political Chicago understood. He lied. But I would never use “asshole” in the paper. We had editors. So I adapted it to say Frank was the kind of weasel who’d sell dead rats on coat hangers to a blind man for earmuffs. His boss, the mayor, once asked me about the feud with Frank. He lied to me, I said. The mayor shrugged, said nothing more because he knew Frank.
I never spoke to Frank again, never trusted his word, even his allies were dead to me. He eventually left town. I think he’s a goatherd now.
It was necessary because an honest reporter can’t let such things go. And, because Chicago City Hall was and is the legendary epicenter of political lies and political corruption in Chicago. Even our reformers were crooked. One reform alderman who railed against the evils of prostitution was found by cops in the back of his car with a teen-aged girl, without his pants. Another reformer, a favorite of lakefront leftists who dubbed him the “conscience of the council” and “Mr. Clean” was sent to prison for tax fraud. The Chicago Police Department’s chief of detectives, lionized as a heroic cop by the papers, was in reality the mob’s paid man, the Chicago Outfit’s director of a nation-wide jewelry theft ring.
At least 30 Chicago aldermen have been convicted of corruption since 1973, most with high profile court cases. The most powerful crooks—like Ald. Ed Burke–controlled the agenda for decades and had bad judges in their pockets as hammers to enforce their will.
Investigative reporters–many of them liberals in the Democrat run cities–made handsome careers of Chicago corruption and learned these lessons well. One such reporter was Dean Baquet, who secured a Pulitzer Prize from an investigation of Chicago City Hall corruption and used that as a springboard to become editor of the New York Times.
Baquet was a good reporter and he loved fine suits and fancy silk neckties, but he had a habit of telling me about the novels of Marcel Proust. I should read Proust, he said to me as we were sitting near the City Desk. I stuck with Elmore Leonard.
But in the 21st Century an amazing thing happened to the media. Even as they mouthed their cliches about “speaking truth to power,” America’s corporate media began to openly revel at their participation in the power structure alongside their classmates and elites in the increasingly dominant managerial class. They became the willful tip of the spear for Deep State censorship and misinformation operations against populist challenges.
The Chicago political world was all about accountability not to the people, but to their fellow warlords. But the New York Times was accountable to no one.
Because of its dominant position in corporate journalism, the New York Times has never been held accountable. It leverages corporate media but has never taken responsibility for misinformation and malfeasance. The newspaper’s lies have been rewarded with dominant market position and those Pulitzer Prizes based on lies were wrapped adulation based on fear.
Far from its carefully nurtured Hollywood image as the fearless speaker of “truth to power,” the old gray lady is the newspaper of the Deep State and the American Kemalists who control and feed the Deep State.
But now, following abuses of journalism that have finally reached critical mass in the public consciousness, the New York Times has yet again become the object of ridicule by recently publishing a pathetic defense of its COVID coverage, misleading readers even as it bleats “We Were Badly Misled.”
You were misled? Really?
What’s left of real journalism couldn’t help but “pounce.”
No Amount Of Crocodile Tears Can Erase Corporate Media’s Complicity In Covid Scandal was a good take by The Federalist writer Jordan Boyd.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman asked How Often Has the New York Times Been Misled?
The NYT hand-wringing was good entertainment, since the old gray lady participated in a series of Deep State coverups and the comeuppance is a feature of melodrama. The New York Post naturally took a chomp out of it.
The national economy was crippled, America’s public schoolchildren were closed out of school by leftist educators and other COVID hysterics, drained of opportunity so that cities will never recover, the Deep State actors led by the New York Times elevated Covidians like Fauci, fed into the cancel culture and silenced all those questioning the “established views” in direct contravention of established scientific practice.
The Times served as the secular prayer book for hysterical leftists in local and state governments who used the New York Times as leverage to shut businesses and close schools, and now and you’re misled?And what of the great journalism prizes where the Times pats itself on the back and puffs out its chest? There was the Walter Duranty Pulitzer that praised Stalin and covered up the famine that Stalin caused to murder tens of millions in Ukraine, to the recent New York Times Pulitzer damning President Donald Trump as an agent of Putin’s Russia in the “Russia Russia Collusion” stories based on a phony dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton.
And all were based on lies.
But will they ever return their phony Pulitzers? It doesn’t appear so.
The Times Pulitzer scandal continued as noted by Krystina Skurk in the Federalist” “New York Times Wins Another Pulitzer For Falsifying History.” And Mark Hemingway also of The Federalist offers this: “For Five Straight Years, The Pulitzer Prizes Have Rewarded Misinformation.”
The New York Times set a tone, from elevating President Obama to godlike status, to the scolding of anyone who would dare suggest that Joe Biden was non compos mentis though the world could see that the corrupt old man was descending into senility. Biden was propped up by the left and used as a figurehead, what historian Victor Davis Hanson refers to as a “waxen effigy.”
The New York Times was “misled” about COVID? Where are its insincere apologies for supporting the disastrous Iraq War? Years ago, I supported the Iraq War. I believed Iraq was a threat, as portrayed by the neo-conservatives who demanded an invasion. I was wrong. I repeatedly and publicly apologized for supporting the needless invasion that broke the Middle East.
Did the New York Times apologize? It waffled but did not apologize.
The litany stretches to hell. And that Hunter Biden laptop and the famed 51 American intelligence officials insisted bore “all the hallmarks” of Russian disinformation when it wasn’t Russian, but Hunter’s and on and on.
The New York Times brags that it contains “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
But was the Deep State plot to change America’s foundational date to 1619 fit to print and distribute to America’s schoolchildren? No. It set America’s foundation in slavery rather than the liberty expressed by our Declaration of Independence of 1776. It fed into the canonization of the street thug George Floyd, and that led to violent Black Lives Matter riots in cities during the infamous “Summer of Love.”
The left is all about force and violence. Did the New York Times say it was misled about Hunter’s laptop and the “1619 Project” and on and on?
.
I’ve gone on for quite a bit here, but only to argue that the left, holding the New York Times as their secular bible has told lies for partisan advantage that have been deeply corrosive, killing American institutions that our nation needs to function. All the lies have now metastasized. The cancer from the leftist agenda attacks the bones of the nation, our spiritual and civic infrastructure. The left’s extreme excesses during COVID are causing Americans to not trust public health officials during the next pandemic, with deadly results. Apply the same citizen suspicion to the criminal justice system and the law, trace the curve and understand it leads to civic death. “Ozymandias” is not just a sonnet written long ago to be marveled at by schoolboys. It is a warning.
Think of it this way. With its 1619 Project, its stilted reporting on Donald Trump and a myriad of other ways, the New York Times took the lead in gain-of-function manipulations of America’s civic DNA to produce the intended and easily predictable damage to the health of the American way of life.
The New York Times owes a loud apology to America or it will forever be likened to some babbling old man at the end of the bar as the rest of the nation moves on and ignores him.
We are now in the season of those grand Washington journalism dinners, journalism with a Capital J, of brunch at the Hay-Adams Hotel, and dinners at ballrooms where the correspondents wear white tie and tails, or sashes to distinguish themselves. I’ve been to these corporate legacy media dinners of self-congratulation, the journos and the politicians performing skits and musical ditties, entertaining themselves like monkeys dressed up in velvet suits.
But we’re Americans.
We are not the masses to be manipulated and herded down the chutes like cattle at the slaughterhouse stockyards. Real America is not a land of cunning eunuchs and courtiers spinning lies to destroy enemies with the knives to be held by other witless tools.
We’re Americans. The cowboy is our icon, the pioneer, the frontiersman, the visionary entrepreneur and the self-made man whose lingering existence is an affront, and a mortal threat to the dominance of the Deep State cowards.
The stables must be mucked out. Now. And no amount of moaning about the mucking process should obscure the fact that the health of the state itself requires it. Urgently.
The New York Times is as lost in its Acela Corridor provincialism as any isolated shepherd boy in the most remote valley of Kurdistan. It hates the America that most of us love and so many died for. In its offices and newsroom, The New York Times whispers into its sleeve like the politicos of old Chicago and Tammany.
It is the one-eyed jack of our broken politics. And we’ve seen the other side of its face.
(Copyright 2025 John Kass)
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 