Thursday, June 11, 2020

"Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!), an—Oblivious—Founder of the (Error-Ridden) 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed: "We as a News Organization Should Not Be…Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked"


Isn't there someone that Nikole Hannah-Jones reminds you of? Think about it: the attitude, the self-righteousness, the wild hair, the (seeming) constant urge to giggle.

Give up?

Michelle Wolf.

And Nikole is just as fair and pertinent and objective and neutral as the comedienne is with her comments.

(I am not even sure that you can say that NHJ looks like MW, but she does remind one of her… In any case, should anyone ever need to portray Hannah-Jones in a film, we know who to go to…)

Regarding the 1619 Project, David Rutz writes over at the Washington Free Beacon that the Founder of Error-Ridden ‘1619 Project’ Slams Lack of Fact Checking in Cotton Op-Ed:
Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her initiative examining the legacy of slavery in American history, but the "1619 Project" has come under fire for multiple inaccuracies.

Despite the objections of historians, Hannah-Jones has stood by her assertion that American revolutionaries were motivated primarily by a desire to defend the institution of slavery, a claim that was ultimately subject to a lengthy clarification. One historian who helped fact-check the "1619 Project" said the Times ignored her objections about it.

In the seven months between the article’s publication and the Times’s clarification, five prominent historians demanded that the paper retract "all the errors and distortions" it contained, a move the Times has resisted.

Hannah-Jones was one of dozens of Times staffers who expressed fury last week over the publication of Cotton's essay, writing in a tweet that she was "deeply ashamed" of her employer.
And now, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend Stephen Green your ears, and listen to what the Instapundit blogger has to say with regards to the 1619 "Agitprop" Project's instigator — hilariously — stating that Nobody Should "Have the Right to Run [Their] Opinions in the New York Times Unedited and Unchecked" And that "We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked" ("we" meaning that Nikole Hannah-Jones is, or at least, feels part of the New York Times family)…
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the deeply flawed 1619 Project for the New York Times, went on CNN’s Reliable Sources this weekend to accuse Senator Tom Cotton of spreading “misinformation.”

The word you’re looking for is “chutzpah.”

Before we get to that, let’s back up a moment.

On Sunday, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet was forced out of his job following a snowflake-induced uproar over an op-ed he published on Friday by Sen. Cotton.

In a piece headlined “Send In the Troops,” Cotton argued that “these rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives.” Since local authorities in many cities have proven unable — or more likely, unwilling — to quell the violence, Cotton wrote that “it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority.”

 … This was too much for the SJW crowd, who immediately accused Cotton of calling for the military to slaughter innocent civilians, and demanded the Times fire pretty much everybody who had ever even hear[d] of Tom Cotton.

Instead, Bennet was offered up as the sacrificial lamb to appease the progressive gods, who are as insatiable as they are jealous.

Enter Nikole Hannah-Jones and her dubious-at-best 1619 Project for the NYT. The premise of 1619 was to claim that the United States was “born” the day the first black slaves arrived on our shores in 1619. As PJMedia’s own Rick Moran wrote about it last August:
A project that seeks to condemn capitalism and view the remarkable achievements of an entire nation through the prism of slavery and race is ignorant. These views represent a complete (deliberate?) misunderstanding of 400 years of American history.
Other reviewers were even less kind.

National Review’s Dan McLaughlin called 1619 outright “agitprop,” and bemoaned the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Times for publishing it:
Journalism and academia are supposed to honor, as their highest value, the fearless pursuit of truth. If you tried to parody the sad decline of prestige awards in those fields into an ideologically blinkered self-congratulatory echo chamber for progressive agitprop, it would be difficult to find a more on-the-nose example than the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times for commentary.
Marc A. Scaringi noted for American Thinker that “the major premise of the Project is based upon a lie.” Several lies, actually, as Hannah-Jones conflated, obscured, or just “somehow” got wrong nearly everything about the history of slavery in North America and in Africa.

Scaringi notes that pushing a radical racialist and anti-capitalist agenda has proven quite lucrative for Hannah-Jones, who “holds a 2017 fellowship with the MacArthur Foundation, which was founded and endowed by a white man, in which she received a $625,000 no-strings-attached grant.”

If you didn’t read Scaringi’s entire piece when he published it back in August, I highly recommend it.

But it wasn’t just right-leaning columnists who found fault with Hannah-Jones’ effort. Rich Lowry noted in January that historians “roasted” the 1619 Project:
It is “a very unbalanced, one-sided account.” It is “wrong in so many ways.” It is “not only ahistorical,” but “actually anti-historical.” It is “a tendentious and partial reading of American history.”
More:
Given that the Times can’t necessarily be trusted to give a straight account in its news pages of Mitch McConnell’s latest tactical maneuver, it wouldn’t seem a natural source for objective truth on sensitive historical matters, and sure enough, the 1619 Project is shot through with an ideological radicalism that leads to rank distortions and laughable overreach.
When as a reviewer you’re forced to tell readers that something is bad even for the New York Times, that says all too much about the condition of the once-respected Gray Lady, and the writers it chooses to promote.

But how bad was Hannah-Jones’ work, really? Hannah-Jones herself was forced to make “a very significant change” to her “core 1619 claim” after being called to account by the NYT fact-checker.

 … Nevertheless, the NYT has yet to issue a formal correction, much less a retraction of the Project, which is now used to teach our schoolchildren lies instead of history.

Talk about spreading misinformation, right?

CNN’s “media watchdog,” Brian Stelter, invited Hannah-Jones on his comically-named Reliable Sources to spread even more manure.

And here’s the relevant quote from Hannah-Jones, if you can’t bear to sit through the whole thing:
What was the main issue was that you have a U.S. senator in the party of power saying that he wants to use the military to repress dissent, not going into the normal fact-checking process that anyone making such claims should go through and making, you know, assertions that our own reporters had discredited through their reporting. And that was the main concern.
None of that is true. None of it.

Cotton called for the military to assist in cases where state and local authorities are overwhelmed by rioters, not protestors. Unlike Hannah-Jones and her 1619 hit job on American history, Cotton referenced actual events anyone can look up, and that millions of Americans can still remember.

Bennet edited and fact-checked Sen. Cotton’s op-ed before publication, and lost his job for having printed factually correct wrongthink. Meanwhile, historical smear-peddler Hannah-Jones has not had her work denounced by the Times, no one has lost their job over its publication, and she remains a regular guest on a show called Reliable Sources.

But that ain't all: Over at mrcNewsbusters, Nicholas Fondacaro provides its audience with the entire transcript, in addition to having these words to offer:
Journalism is dead. That fact was made abundantly clear by New York Times staff writer and founder of the factually-inaccurate 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones in an appearance on the CNN’s so-called “Reliable Sources” Sunday, where she argued that the media couldn’t legitimately treat the Republican Party fairly because they were a “rogue” organization and being fair would be “picking sides.”

 … National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote an extensive report on how The Times had a big role in helping to shape the scope and edit Cotton’s piece. “There were at least three drafts back and forth. The Times would send along edits for approval, and the Cotton team would sign off, and then there would be another round,” he wrote. “The first two rounds focused on clarity and style, and the last round on factual accuracy.”

Hannah-Jones went on to suggest the Cotton controversy was the latest example of the media getting in trouble because they were trying to be fair to Republicans. “But I think so what happened is a larger symptom that we're seeing in news organizations across the country, which is they are really struggling to cover in a way that appears to be nonpartisan a political landscape where one political party has, in many ways, gone rogue and is not following the rules.” She said.

Adding: “But there’s a sense that if you're cover that straight down the line, you look like you are picking sides. So, this adherence to even-handedness, both side-ism, the view from nowhere doesn't actually work in the political circumstances that we're in.”

In reality, the opposite was true: The New York Times is fine with the lies and revisionist history Hannah-Jones published via the 1619 Project despite the warnings of scholarly fact-checkers, because it fits their narrative.

“On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America,” wrote Northwestern University historian Leslie M. Harris for Politico back in March.

Hannah-Jones also boasted about the internal outrage against Cotton’s op-ed. “So, let me just say that The New York Times journalists who oppose this column love the institution of The New York Times intensely and also care deeply about journalism.”

So, what did it say about Times reporters that they didn’t have the same outcry against a 2014 op-ed that wanted to destigmatize pedophilia?

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise


THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

"Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?" (Compare with, say, China…)

The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

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