Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Self-Victimize to Bar Criticisms of Themselves

The daily newspaper USA Today is the second-most circulated print newspaper in the United States — more than The New York Times and more than double The Washington Post. Only The Wall Street Journal has higher circulation numbers.

On Sunday, the paper published and heavily promoted a repellent article complaining that “defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan. 6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown by tech companies.” It provided a road map for snitching on how these private citizens — who are charged with serious felonies by the U.S. Justice Department but as of yet convicted of nothing — are engaged in “a game of cat-and-mouse as they spring from one fundraising tool to another” in order to avoid bans on their ability to raise desperately needed funds to pay their criminal lawyers to mount a vigorous defense.

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In other words, the only purpose of the article — headlined: “Insurrection fundraiser: Capitol riot extremists, Trump supporters raise money for lawyer bills online” — was to pressure and shame tech companies to do more to block these criminal defendants from being able to raise funds for their legal fees, and to tattle to tech companies by showing them what techniques these indigent defendants are using to raise money online.

Factional warfare erupts in New York Times over the 1619 Project

The immediate trigger for Sulzberger’s memorandum was a Friday column written by Times opinion writer Bret Stephens, “The 1619 Chronicles.” Stephens is one of the Times’ leading columnists. An anti-Trump conservative, he pointed to the absurdity of many of the Project’s historical claims as well as its disregard for basic journalistic principles. Stephens concluded that the 1619 Project was “a thesis in search of evidence.”

Stephens quoted at length from historian James McPherson’s interview with the World Socialist Web Site, to which he provided a link. In early September 2019, the WSWS produced the first major exposure of the racialist falsifications of the 1619 Project, a few weeks after its rollout amidst an unprecedented media blitz. The WSWS followed this with interviews with scholars who dismantled the 1619 Project’s major claims—McPherson, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, Dolores Janiewski, Adolph Reed, Jr., Richard Carwardine, and Clayborne Carson.

The Stephens column brought into the open the bitter conflict raging at the Times over its creation and promotion of the 1619 Project.

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