The LA Times Under Attack (With Good Reasons)

"Damn! Cubs lose again."

My friend and colleague David Stein of Counter Contempt up in LA has written a piece on the LA Times, one of the most over-rated fishwraps in America. Of course, the Times has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the big 3 or 4 newspapers in America, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. Personally, I don't think much of any of them.

The LA Times is one of the most biased newspapers in America, with a liberal staff of editorial writers that rank right down there with the talking heads of MSNBC. (Well, that might be a slight exaggeration.)

Here is David's article with a link back to a previous article on the Times.


The Los Angeles Times and the Jews - A Few Choice Examples.
By David Stein

My article (http://www.countercontempt.com/archives/1710) about Friday’s frustrating encounter with a cowardly reporter and a condescending corporate flack at the L.A. Times got me reminiscing about years past, when I used to pay a lot of attention to incompetent and biased reporting at my city’s “paper of record.” These days, I only occasionally write about what goes on at the rapidly-shrinking L.A. Times, because as the paper’s readers have been evaporating, so has its relevance.

One aspect of Times coverage that always got under my skin was its intensely biased coverage of Jewish issues. Of course, it’s expected that most “mainstream” (i.e., left-leaning) newspapers are, to one degree or another, hostile to Israel. But the Times has gone several steps further, often being openly hostile to Jews as a people.

One of my just-for-fun side projects is working with a libertarian-conservative organization called the Republican Party Animals (RPA). The RPA is a 4,000 person-strong national social club for young, right-leaning urbanites who enjoy mixing their politics with a healthy dose of nightlife fun. Last year, I designed an online video game for the group, “Obama vs. the Corpse-Men,” a riff on the president’s unintentionally hilarious mispronunciation of the term “corpsman” during a press conference last February. The gist of the game is that players must try to save Obama from a horde of hungry zombies (“corpse-men”) by answering trivia questions about the left.

One of the questions reads:

The Los Angeles Times has seen its circulation plummet from 1.1 million to about 600,000. Wonder why? Which of these statements about the L.A. Times is true?

A) The Times colluded with Holocaust deniers to run an anti-Semitic ad during Hanukkah.

B) The Times routinely runs op-eds by the terrorist organization Hamas.

C) The Times ran an anti-Semitic cartoon showing evil Jews slitting the throats of Arabs and drinking their blood.

D) In an article about a Muslim kidnapping ring targeting Jews, The Times hid the Muslim identity of the gang.

E) All of the above.

The answer, of course, is “E.” If players choose correctly, they are redirected to a page that provides background information for each assertion. Being in the mood to kick the Times around a little, I thought I’d cut-and-paste that info here. Enjoy (or, perhaps more appropriately, don’t enjoy. Instead, get angry enough to cancel your subscription, if you have one).



(You can also click here to play the game in full)

http://republicanpartyanimals.org/

The Times colluded with Holocaust deniers to run an anti-Semitic ad during Hanukkah

• In December 2004, the Times’ advertising department was approached by the largest Holocaust denial organization in North America, the Institute for Historical Review (located in Newport Beach, CA), with a plan: The Institute wanted to run a Holocaust denial ad in the Book Review section of the Sunday Times (the Times’ most-read edition), on the last weekend of Hanukkah. The advertising director loved the idea, and the ad was set to run. Someone at the Times who still possessed a living brain cell killed the plan at the last minute, so infuriating the ad director that he promised the deniers that the ad would run in the next week’s edition FOR FREE, to make up for the fact that the poor deniers missed their Hanukkah target. Unfortunately for the Hitler fanboys, their plan was thwarted when the ad was once again killed right before the paper went to press (the preceding information was confirmed through a series of private emails between me and two staffers at the Times. I undertook the investigation after seeing the deniers bragging about the affair on one of their message boards).

The Times routinely runs op-eds by the terrorist organization Hamas

• The Times routinely runs op-eds by the terrorist organization Hamas…you know, that’s the organization that murders Jews on a regular basis. But the Times has NEVER run op-eds by Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, or Thomas Sowell. The Times considers them “too extreme.” I suppose the Hamas Jew-killers are, by the Times’ standards, “moderates.”

The Times ran an anti-Semitic cartoon showing evil Jews slitting the throats of Arabs and drinking their blood

• The L.A. Times refused to run any of the Danish “Mohammed cartoons,” even the really tame ones (only a fraction of the cartoons portrayed Mohammed disrespectfully. Some portrayed him as a dignified, wizened old man, and one cartoon lampooned the editor of the Danish newspaper as a moronic dunce). In place of the Mohammed cartoons, the Times ran a cartoon from the Arab press, showing bloodthirsty, evil Jews slitting the throats of Muslims to drink their blood.



As an illustration of just how blind, deaf, and dumb the Times is to its own hypocrisy, Times columnist Tim Rutten criticized CNN for not showing the Mohammed cartoons, and replacing them instead with anti-Semitic cartoons from the Arab press. Wrote Rutten (“Lets Be Honest About Cartoons,” February 11, 2006), “Nothing, however, quite tops the absurdity of (a piece) done this week by CNN…Thursday, CNN broadcast a story on how common anti-Semitic caricatures are in the Arab press and illustrated it with – you guessed it – one virulently anti-Semitic cartoon after another. As the segment concluded, Wolf Blitzer looked into the camera and piously explained that while CNN had decided as a matter of policy not to broadcast any image of Muhammad, telling the story of anti-Semitism in the Arab press required showing those caricatures. He didn’t even blush.”

And Timmy Rutten didn’t blush either when his newspaper did the exact same thing (for the record, Timmy was critical of his editors’ decision not to run the Mohammed cartoons, but he was mum on their hypocrisy in publishing an Arab anti-Semitic cartoon instead, just as CNN had done).

Oh, and it should be added that running anti-Semitic cartoons is a regular feature in the Times. In the past, the Times has run cartoons which depicted:

L.A.’s Jews crucifying then-Mayor Tom Bradley like Jesus;

A murderous Jew with an uzi standing on top of a pile of dead Palestinians, declaring that there’s no need to negotiate with the Palestinians because there aren’t any left;

Uncle Sam in chains, his arms crushed in a Star of David-shaped manacle;

A Jewish Nazi goose-stepping with a sword, holding a snarling Star of David on a leash, its fanged, drooling mouth attempting to devour a young Muslim mother and her child (understatement is a Times specialty)

All in a days work at the “L.A. Sturmer.”

In an article about a Muslim kidnapping ring targeting Jews, The Times hid the Muslim identity of the gang

• And here’s the corker: In 2006, the Times ran an article about a shameful instance of French injustice. In Paris, a gang of Muslims (primarily immigrants from Africa) was kidnapping Jews. The kidnappers would call the victims’ families. They would force the families to hear the agonizing screams of their loved ones as they were tortured…and the kidnappers would yell Koranic verses into the phone to let the families know that they were doing this in the name of the “religion of peace.” The Parisian police attempted to cover up the existence of this crime ring, fearing that any attempt to stop it would “offend” France’s Muslim community (and possibly lead to more riots in Muslim slums, as had happened in 2005), but after one of the Jewish kidnap victims was murdered, the story finally broke (23-year-old French/Moroccan Jew Ilan Halimi was tortured, stabbed, stripped naked, and burned alive with acid after 24 harrowing days in the gang’s captivity).

In the Times article about this story, the Times refused to use the term “Muslim” to refer to the murderous gang. Instead, they merely referred to the killers as a “multiethnic gang.”

Multiethnic? So, was there an Eskimo involved? An Uzbek? A Creole? Perhaps a Peruvian tree-dwelling Indian? Only at the L.A. Times could the irony be so completely lost: They reported on the cover-up of the existence of a Muslim anti-Semitic kidnapping ring by covering up the existence of a Muslim anti-Semitic kidnapping ring.

And the Times is still at it! Check out this example of pure, excremental pseudo-journalism.HERE’S a story about the 2009 trial of the Muslim kidnap/murderers from the Daily Telegraph.

And HERE’S the L.A. Times.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/30/world/fg-briefs30.S3

No mention of the “M word!” To lift a line from the incomparable Dennis Miller, calling the folks who run the L.A. Times “scum buckets” is an insult to buckets filled with scum.

• Oooh, but there’s more! On July 4th, 2002, a Muslim terrorist, Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, opened fire at the El Al counter at LAX, killing two (25-year-old Victoria Hen and 46-year-old Yakov Aminov), and wounding four, before being fatally shot by an El Al security guard.

The death of young Victoria Hen was made even more tragic by the fact that on July 5th, her boyfriend and family had planned a surprise party at which the boyfriend was to ask for her hand in marriage.

The day after the shootings, the Hen family issued a brief public statement: “We believe that this was an act carried out by a terrorist against Israelis and Americans on American soil. We wish the American government will once and for all take a clear stand on this issue of terror and will act on it.”

That statement was carried by most mainstream newspapers, including the New York Times. And, indeed, Times reporters Anna Gorman and Karima Haynes dutifully included it in their article profiling the LAX victims. But, just hours before the edition went to press, someone in authority at the Times issued an order that the family’s statement must immediately be pulled from the article. After all, a grieving Jewish family should have NO RIGHT to call their daughter’s murderer a terrorist. I mean, how DARE they!

Not only was the Hen family’s statement cut from the article, neither her mother nor her father or brother were quoted – AT ALL – in the article.

The title of the article from which the family’s statement was erased, and for which no family members were quoted? “Families, Friends Remember Loved Ones Killed in Shooting.” You might want to pause for a moment to appreciate the irony.

When quizzed by David Stein (the Republican Party Animals Southern California Chairman), reporters Gorman and Haynes were baffled as to who removed the family’s statement. After being bounced from editor to editor, none of whom would take credit for censoring the statement, Stein landed at the desk of L.A. Times Assistant Managing Editor David Lauter. When asked for an explanation as to why the Hen family statement was removed, Lauter had this to say:

“I’m sorry you have been bounced around among editors. I can’t give a definitive answer to your question – the editor who handled the story that day is on vacation, and I don’t work on Saturdays – but Ill tell you what I can. Generally when things are trimmed out of a story, the reason is simply inches….Perhaps the story could have been edited differently – there are almost always several different ways a story can be cast….The story was too long. They had to cut something and the statement was among the things that were cut. There was no political motivation or intention involved nor was the Hen family singled out for unfair treatment.”

Ah, of course. It all makes sense now. The family’s reaction to their daughter’s murder wasn’t germane to an article about the family’s reaction to their daughter’s murder. That’s not just torturing logic…that’s waterboarding it while shoving bamboo under its fingernails.

Oh, but check THIS out! About a week later, the Times ran a glowing profile of Hadayat, the LAX murderer, filled with loving tributes from his wife, his cousin, and his co-workers (“Those Who Knew LAX Killer Say Personal Agenda Died With Him,” July 14th, 2002). According to his wife Hala, “He was correct, a perfectly decent Egyptian person. He loves his children and his neighbors and his family and his friends. He is a normal person who goes from work to home and that’s it. A normal person. There is nothing to suggest he was a bad person or that he belonged to any groups.” According to his cousin Emad, “Since he was 13 or 14 he wanted to go to America. He used to say, ‘It’s a beautiful country.’ He was like any young man, dreaming of a good life in the States.” His co-worker Abdallatef was quoted as saying, “He had nothing against Americans….He’s not hateful for the American people on the street….He loved this country. He loved freedom of speech. He told me, ‘I’d like to be a U.S. citizen. I like to pay my taxes. I want to raise my children here.”’ The Times even sought a praiseworthy quote from the killer’s INSURANCE BROKER (no, I swear I’m not joking…I wish to God I were). “‘He seemed to be very ambitious, conscientious,’ said Hadayat’s insurance broker John Henningsen. ‘He had big plans for his limousine company. He wanted to go places with it.’”

The Times didn’t include a single negative comment about the murderer in their profile of him. In total (including comments I didn’t quote above), the Times ran a whopping six-hundred and sixty-six words of praise for the killer from his family, friends, and co-workers. Yet the newspaper couldn’t make room for the victim’s family’s forty-three word statement in the article about the victims.

David Stein sought comment from the writers of the tribute to Hadayat (sparing no expense, the Times had assigned three reporters to write the glowing piece – Robyn Dixon, Jack Leonard, and Rich Connell). Stein wanted to know – why were the comments from Victoria Hen’s family removed from the article about the victims, but loving comments from the murderer’s friends and family were included in the article about the murderer? Replied staff writer Dixon, “The aim of the story was to create a balanced portrait of the killer and his background. Inclusion of the widows comments seems not only valid but important in this case.”

Okay, so let’s recap: Victoria Hen’s family’s comments were not important enough to be included in the article about Hadayat’s victims…but Hadayat’s widow’s loving comments were “valid” and “important” in the article about him…which was a “balanced portrait” of Hadayat…even though no negative comments, only positive ones, were included in it, which makes it balanced rather than one-sided because, uh, umm, because…uh…

I seriously think my head’s about to explode from the lack of logic and decency. So I’ll sign off with a question: Considering that all L.A. Times content is available online for free, why would anyone – especially anyone who’s Jewish – spend money to subscribe to that rag?
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David,

To answer that last question; there is a good reason to buy the LA Times-to wrap your fish. You can't do that online.


(Toledo Talker)



Great articles.