# The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

By Simon Hørup Eskildsen · 2021-10-11 · Book by Ashley Rindsberg, rated 4/5 · https://sirupsen.com/books/gray-lady-winked

Imagine reading NYTimes's coverage of past historical events and discovering to
your dismay how strange and straight-up misleading the reporting was at the
time. Then digging further and uncovering perverse incentives for authors and
cover-ups. That's what this book is.

Although it's difficult to determine whether the author worked backward from
"NYTimes is an extremely biased for-profit family business" or forward from "I
wonder what the coverage was for historical events." I choose to read it as the
latter, but I sense that Rindsberg took the former approach. Either way,
you will probably unsubscribe from NYT after reading this book for the
former reason. Presumably, other newspapers aren't much better, as their
incentive structure isn't fundamentally different, perhaps except National Media
(which the US doesn't have).

That way of reading it alone is illuminating. As the saying goes, today's
newspapers are tomorrow's birdcage liners. News expires rapidly, and
historically even the largest media companies have gotten the narrative
hopelessly wrong.

NYT's coverage of Nazi Germany in the 1930s was covered by a pro-nazi
journalist. So pro-nazi in fact that he was often quoted on Nazi broadcasts, and
when all other journalists were put in jail when the war started, he was left
alone "because of his proved friendliness to Germany." In fact, because New York
Times is owned by a Jewish family, NYT didn't cover anti-semitism. They didn't
want to be labeled as a Jewish newspaper and appear biased. During the war,
Holocaust-related stories were only on the front-page 6 times. I can't help but
wonder if we'll look at the Uyghur genocide similarly.

This is the starkest example, but each chapter tells another story: Covering up
the Ukrainian famine, long-term effects of nuclear weapons through radioactive
poisoning, and so much more.

Overall, it's not exactly a page-turner, but the first-hand narrative of the
incentives and biases of for-profit media corporations (beyond the cheap
clickbait arguments) will stay with me.