London: *"Well, I don?t believe ?paper ownership is the sole reason but, being pretty cynical, I do think it ?has to do with?. As I?ve said; I believe people don?t own ?papers in order to not exert influence and power. Here?s my reasoning;
The US public is, relatively speaking, uninformed, on that we agree. They do not always fully understand what is done in their name. And I have to believe ? until otherwise persuaded ? that the reason for that is, in large measure, because of the quality of information they receive."*
No, people don’t own papers in order to not exert influence and power–but that is a far cry from showing either that 1) Jewish or Jewish-descended people who inherited papers from their families own them in order to flack for the current government of Israel (whomever that country happens to choose to elect) or that 2) newspapers such as the NYT exert sufficient influence over US politics and the US public to effectively control them in any meaningful fashion.
As to point 2: if the NYT editorial page had its way, Gore would be president now, Bush would be a multilateralist, the inspectors would probably still be in Iraq looking for WMDs according to a UN compromise of some sort, and the taxcut that the US senate is likely to pass would flop. Not only has none of these things come to pass, but there have many times (esp. the 2000 election) when Times reporting was not at all favorable to achieving the goal of the Times’s own editorial position.
There have been many books on the subject of why the US media is the way it is. One of the very best (IMO) and most recent is by Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (2000). It goes all the way back to a discussion of the 1920s introduction of radio. The New York Times Corp. is among those major conglomerates discussed. As I said earlier, if memory serves, it is now a pubicly traded corporation. What that means among other things is that like many such corporations it is seriously devoted to its own bottom line. On top of which US opinion has, for decades now, and especially since the 1980s, been much more influenced by television journalism than by any print media.
I suspect there are books written by reputable scholars about how the US media has specifically treated coverage of Israel though I do not know of one off hand. You might want to take a look though at Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky as this is a classic work in media studies. Since Chomsky is very involved in criticizing US foreign policy from a leftist point of view I’d not be surprised if he’s written something on the subject of Israel specifically. (You might even want to search Znet, which Chomsky is involved in publishing, and see what they’re saying about Israel in the media.) Beyond that I’m not sure but if you’re interested I can ask friends of mine who know much more about this topic than I do.
It seems to me that until you read stuff like McChesney and Chomsky–for starters at any rate–that you’d be best just leaving a big question mark over the subject of what precise material conditions makes the US media what it is. Especially if the only immediate alternative is, as it appears, having to google your way into fascist websites geared towards supporting anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
If the research done in this thread is at all correct then it looks as though Sulzberger was born half Jewish but considers himself an Anglican, while Graham may be 1/4 Jewish but doesn’t consider herself Jewish at all. One thing I do know though, if the Jewish descent was there, Hitler, were he in power in the US of today, would have killed them both. He would have also killed Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, along with Jeff Cohen and Chomsky and, on the other side of the political spectrum, Wolfowitz, Podhoretz, and Perle. He made no political distinctions because, as you well know, Jewish racial identity was the sole criterion on which he based his justification for genocide. Among the less illustrious, he’d have gone for Izzy, december, CK Dexter Haven and me. He probably would have spared my British husband but not my son, or the child whose birth I’m expecting in the next few weeks.
While Nazi genocide does not give Jews or anyone else moral immunity to ignore other people’s suffering–and while the Palestinian situation is, as both the cited Rabbis in this thread have said, a threat to Judaism itself–it is something that Jews live with and are aware of. I don’t think it’s all that surprising that it makes them edgy when people start to construct flimsy cause-and-effect arguments based on scant information about who owns what. Some will act reflexively, emotionally and assume the worst.
While I did not and do not believe, London that you are an anti-semite, I do believe that you have got hold of a thesis–that the US position on Israel is either primarily or at least substantively influenced by Jewish-owned/mangaged media–for which you have so far found only superficial evidence, and of a very poor quality. As the same time, 1) there are superior resources out there that you have yet to consult, 2) and people here at the SDMB with varying points of view, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who have tried to persuade you (by means fair and foul) that your hypothetical assumptions are not only intellectually implausible but also, by their very nature, reprehensible in themselves. (The second point is, perhaps, debatable, but the it’s something to take into account as you try to establish a dialogue here.)
Since you now know these things, I think it behooves you to reorient your “cynicism”–which is not necessarily a bad thing from a research point of view–and direct it towards the thin foundations of your own assumptions. I say this to you, as I think you must realize, with all my heart: I hope you believe me when I say that I speak mainly as a virtual friend who respects you, and as a historian and professor who knows a bit about research, rather than as a person whom you have offended on religious or ethnic grounds.
), he does not violate the rules of the forum.
) – I wish you the very, very best over the next few weeks, btw.