Why Won’t the NYT Report on Ray Kelly’s Spooks?

On the NYT’s homepage, the story of the ongoing protests in reaction to the burning of Korans at Parwan prison occupies a fairly prominent position.

What you won’t find anywhere on the NYT homepage, though, is the story of how the NYPD monitored local response to Dutch cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, culled from informants at mosques across the metro area and summarized in a report for Ray Kelly. It’s a similar story–the Muslim reaction to perceived blasphemy–but it’s local. The NYT’s own city. Yet the NYT doesn’t consider it news.

Nor will you find a report on the NYPD’s press conference yesterday, an effort to insist all this surveillance of First Amendment speech is perfectly legal. Both the NYPost and the NYDN reported on that. (Admittedly, the WSJ is silent on the story today, though they have reported on it before.)

The New Jersey press was reporting on the NYPD’s spying in their own neighborhoods, both Newark–in the AP’s latest installment, Paterson.

Has the NYT moved to FL for the winter? Because every newspaper in the NY area seems to think this is news.

I’ve noted before the contortions the NYT went through to downplay (or even dismiss) this spy program in a profile of Ray Kelly. That almost felt like petulance over being beat–except for a few stories from Michael Powell–on a big story in its own backyard.

But the NYT’s silence on the story is beginning to get creepy.

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8 replies
  1. joanneleon says:

    Their coverage of Occupy Wall Street was pretty creepy too. It went from sneering and mocking to ignoring to reporting it on a back page blog. News organizations like the Guardian and Al Jazeera across the Atlantic were doing a hundred times better reporting than the big newspaper of record who had OWS in its backyard.

  2. PeasantParty says:

    I’d blame it on B. Keller and the Truth Vigilantes.

    The news media and organizations in America are now in the zone of Criminality in informing the public on what they need to know and have the right to know. Even when they do a story they spin it so far that you can’t get the facts and are left wondering why they wasted the time and print. You know you are going to see and hear a different version from other sources and I am not talking about when the story evolves. Some things do evolve where more information is available. The problem is they start out wrong with the slant and missing pieces!

  3. Scott Lazarowitz says:

    The Roto-Writers of the New York Times have been propagandizing for wars, spying and other government crimes against the civilians, whether directly or through omission of truth. That is why, unlike during the years of Daniel Ellsberg and Edward R. Murrow, now more than ever we have to rely on alternative news media and Internet sources to know what’s really going on.

  4. MadDog says:

    It just seems that the NYT doesn’t want Bloomie’s bloomers to get in a bunch and not continue to invite them to lunch.

    So the AP has to carry the load, and does so:

    “NY mayor defends intelligence-gathering on Muslim

    …In perhaps his most vigorous defense yet of some of the NYPD’s anti-terrorism efforts, Bloomberg said it is “legal,” “appropriate” and “constitutional” for police to keep a close eye on Muslim communities that terrorists might use as a base to strike the city. And he said investigators must pursue “leads and threats wherever they come from,” even across state lines.

    “It would just be naive to think we should stop following threats when they get to the border,” Bloomberg said…

    [snip]

    …Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, questioned why the NYPD was assembling volumes of information on people who weren’t suspected of breaking any laws.

    “It’s bad policing. It’s profiling, fishing expeditions. They’re looking around saying, `Surely in this community there must be bad people. If we look long enough, we’ll find them,'” Holt said…”

  5. P J Evans says:

    Not exactly OT:
    The LA Times is going to the 15-articles-per-month limitation for people who aren’t ‘members’ (which means paying a monthly subscription price for unlimited access to their mostly-fluff website). I think it’s going to help them like it did the NYT.

  6. Acharn says:

    Can’t think where I saw this, and it reminded me I already know this stuff:

    “The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread.” — John Swinton

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