The NY Times isn’t convincingly pretending that it’s in any business but that of disseminating propaganda:
The NYT refused to issue any corrections [to its pieces from the 1619 Project, its campaign to make it seem as though slavery was the true founding principle of the American enterprise], it announced Thursday, despite a letter written by five historians concerned about the project’s “misleading” and “factual errors.” Some of the historians that signed onto the original letter expressed frustration and concern to the Daily Caller at the NYT’s unwillingness to issue corrections…
“The Times has not addressed our many citations of factual errors,” Oakes said in an email to the Daily Caller Sunday. “I am particularly distressed by Matt Desmond’s essay. It is based on a body of scholarship that has been subjected to severe criticism by experts in the field, experts who San [sic] the spectrum from mainstream economists to Marxist sociologists.”
“As a result Desmond repeats claims that cannot be substantiated by the evidence.”
I applaud the letter-writers, and yet if they thought the Times had a particle of interest in what historians say (rather than what Marxist historians say) on the subject, they are demonstrating remarkable naivete. The Times can find people who say exactly what the Times wants the public to hear, and is completely uninterested in airing anything that counters that message:
The NYT declined to issue any correction, writing that they “welcome criticism” but “don’t believe that the request for corrections … is warranted.”
In the letter to the editor, the historians cited specific examples of what they believe are factual errors and misleading commentary currently published in the project. One notable issue is the project’s depiction of the American Revolution.
“On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue,’” the historians’ letter to the editor reads. “This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”
The historians also took issue with how the “1619 Project” portrayed “Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality.” The project “ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality,” according to the letter published in the NYT.
The NYT defended its decision not to issue any corrections, writing that “numerous scholars of African-American history and related fields” were consulted prior to the project launching.
The Times has always had its problems with truth (Duranty, for example). But for years now, it has been lowering itself further to engage nearly constantly in the enterprise Iowahawk (David Burge) has described on Twitter as one of the main tools of the left:
In this case, the Times is doing this to US history, as well as to the Times itself. And make no mistake about it, the Times’ project is not limited to publishing a few articles. The paper has an agenda involving education in the school system and elsewhere:
The project has gone on to include a five-episode podcast, a kids’ section of the print newspaper, and a broadsheet for the print newpaper that includes an article on how slavery is taught in U.S. schools as well as a history of slavery in 15 objects that was curated by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Pulitzer Center supported the project as an education partner, providing free reading guides, extension activities, lesson plans and physical copies of the magazine to educators across the country.
Teachers across all 50 states have accessed the Pulitzer Center educational resources since the project’s launch, and many have shared their students’ work by posting to Twitter and emailing student work to education@pulitzercenter.org. Educators from hundreds of schools and administrators from six school districts have also reached out to the Center for class sets of the magazine. Teachers are using the magazine in their classes to teach subjects ranging from English to History and Social Studies, and their engagement with the project has guided students in creating essays, poetry, visual art, performances, and live events that demonstrate their learning…
These events, which will continue into 2020, have been lively opportunities for both teachers and students to engage in the material and showcase their work. At Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, students interviewed Hannah-Jones, asking her about every aspect of her process from how she brought the idea to her editors to how she conceived of the audience for this project.
At one point, the conversation turned to Hannah-Jones’s own education and how she had come to the idea to commemorate the year 1619. A student asked: “At school, was this [year] really a topic, or were they trying to cover it up? Like, did you have to go and find it out for yourself?”
In response, Hannah-Jones described the one Black Studies class she had taken as a high schooler, and the book she read which described the significance of this year, called Before The Mayflower.
“I really started thinking about the year 1619 in high school,” Hannah-Jones said. But a lot of her knowledge since then, she said, came from her own research.
The theme recurred at the Smithsonian event, when Nikita Stewart asked a panel of educators to describe a lie about slavery that they learned as students, and how they unlearned it. As the panelists discussed the issue, several of them encouraged the students in the crowd to do their own learning.
Much much more at the link.
