Propaganda, New York Times Style

Different kinds of propaganda can be spiced differently.  First, there’s strong, sharp propaganda, the kind the packs a spicy wallop.

You know it’s propaganda. You know that the facts are being distorted to influence your opinion. Still, you keep reading it because you have stopped noticing how spicy it really is.

It’s like eating very, very spicy foods. At first bite your mouth goes numb. After that, you keep eating because you no longer sense how spicy it really is.

Then there’s the more subtle kind of propaganda, the kind that is only mildly spiced, to taste. It has a pleasant taste, does not pack a wallop, but lulls you into complacency and tricks you into thinking that it is really offering facts.

You don’t even know that you are feeding on propaganda. It seems right; it tastes good; you keep eating.

Take a major American propaganda organ, the New York Times.

When it comes to strong propaganda, the kind that you know is propaganda, think about this.

The New York times had a policy of referring to the al Qaeda operatives in Iraq as al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The Times had decided to deny that al Qaeda was in Iraq because it wanted to end the war in Iraq. It imagined that if the American people knew that al Qaeda was committing terrorist acts in Iraq they would believe that the Iraq War was justified.

The Times did not think so. As an organ of anti-administration propaganda it was doing everything in its power to undermine the war effort.

It was so flagrant, so embarrassing, that the Times should have been laughed out of town.

It wasn’t. Times readers, inured or numbed to this kind of distortion, did not rise up and cancel their subscription. They kept on eating.

The mind of the average Times reader has been so completely numbed by the paper’s strong, sharp propaganda that it did not even register the blatant falsification involved in: al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

And then there’s the less pungent, more subtly spiced everyday Times propaganda, the kind that it directs at women.

Yesterday, the Times reported that unemployment rates have been diminishing because more and more women have been dropping out of the workforce.

Were they not dropping out, the unemployment rate would be approaching 11%.

Be that as it may, Catherine Rampell told the story: “Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force.”

Could it be that these young women want to devote more of their time to their homes and their children? In the New York Times they don’t.

Rampell compares them to the soldiers who came back from World War II and earned college degrees under the G.I. Bill.

Rampell writes: “Though young women in their late teens and early 20’s view today’s economic lull as an opportunity to upgrade their skills, their male counterparts are more likely to take whatever job they can find. The longer-term consequences, economists say, are that the next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts, whose career options are already becoming constrained.”

Let’s see: women who are going back to school in order to qualify for jobs in non-profits are being compared with soldiers coming back from a war. In the world of dumb analogies this one rates very high.

The Times tells us that women who are dropping out of the work force and incurring significant debt will eventually have a “significant advantage” over men.

Of course, it recognizes that many of these women have husbands who are supporting them. And many of them have what Rampall calls “family responsibilities” that might be more important to them than doing night shifts or working ten hours a day.

Yet, Rampell sees these women as a warrior class that will naturally come back into the workforce and take over the world.

Of course, this is the way the world looks when you are living in feminist fantasyland.

The Times reports the story without even hinting that these women are like Douglas MacArthur proclaiming: I shall return.

In truth, the women in question do not see themselves as feminist warriors. They are repudiating the feminist life plan.

Feminism has told women that they should put career first and then add a husband and children after they have become professionally established.

I will not outline the price women have paid for following this plan. I have done so in many other posts.

Yet, the New York Times does not want young women to think that dropping out of the workforce is a new rejection of feminism. In truth, feminism tries to tell women that no matter what they do they can still be feminists. They are required, however, to vote Democratic.

Rampell offers the correct feminist interpretation of the current exodus of women from the job market. She says that men are more willing to take lesser jobs because they suffer from what is now being called the masculine mystique.

Despite four decades of feminist propaganda men still believe that they should be breadwinners. And now, God forbid, women are starting to act as though they agree.

In the New York Times a man who feels some responsibility for providing for his family is a relic, an anachronism that needs to be beaten out of the culture. Let's not call this reporting all the news that's fit to print.