A.M. Rosenthal
Posted to www.marxmail.org on May 11, 2006
Former NY Times editor A.M. Rosenthal died yesterday at the age of 84. Not surprisingly, the paper's obituary said virtually nothing about his role in pushing the paper to the right under his tenure as Executive Editor from 1977 to 1988.
During the time I was involved with
In the most pronounced example of Rosenthal collaboration
with the White House, reporter Raymond Bonner was replaced as correspondent in
Rosenthal replaced Bonner with Shirley Christian, a rightwing ideologue whose previous job was with the Miami Herald. Many of her articles consist simply of stenographer-like reports from the contra leaders. For example, in a September 13, 1985 item, she shamelessly quotes the monstrous contra military commander Enrique Bermudez: "I won't say that sometimes an isolated patrol might not commit an abuse. But this has not been a practice." You might as well have quoted Idi Amin saying that he was committed to human rights.
As bad as Christian was, nobody could top Claire Sterling
for awfulness except perhaps for Judy Miller.
Rosenthal decided to hire
Full: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/AllNewsFit_Herman2.html
To this day, the NY Times never issued one of its famous corrections to the story about the KGB/Bulgarian plot to kill the pope. Even after a Roman court cleared 3 Bulgarians who had been arrested for involvement in the alleged conspiracy to kill the pope, the NY Times failed to accept the verdict. Herman notes, "When CIA officer Melvin Goodman testified during the Gates confirmation hearing in 1990 that the CIA professionals knew the Bulgarian Connection was a fraud because they had penetrated the Bulgarian secret services, the Times failed to reprint this part of Goodman's testimony."
Eventually, after Rosenthal was retired from his post, the
NY Times edged a bit more toward the center and away from his excesses. Even
though the disease went into temporary remission under a new editorial team, it
never went away as the Judith Miller affair reveals. It can safely be assumed
that as long as the
Rosenthal continued to work for the NY Times, turning out the flatulent op-ed column "On My Mind" until 1999. Then he went to work for the Daily News, a trashy tabloid published by rightwing billionaire Mort Zuckerman, where he adopted the persona of the windbag uncle everybody has to put up with at the Thanksgiving Dinner table. His very last column, written on February 6th of this year is proof positive of how detached from reality he was:
But the Bush haters
should hold their applause. This story is far from over. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld was absolutely right in telling a
Senate committee on Wednesday, "We may eventually find it [the WMD
stockpile] in the months ahead." As the secretary pointed out, those
weapons may be buried in a still unexplored area, they may have been smuggled
into another country [think
CIA Director George
Tenet smartly reinforced Rumsfeld's argument
yesterday, stressing in his congressional testimony that the search for WMDs is "nowhere near 85% finished."
May he rot in hell.