Five of the MANY 'pandemic'-launch-and-substantiation' stories or features that warrant an apology from The New York Times
The New York Times has issued an abysmal, unapologetic statement and “Editor’s note” regarding the misrepresentation and misuse of a photo of a Gazan child in a front-page story last week.
Amit Segal’s tweet above and further reaction here capture the problems and many of my sentiments. To what he’s said, I would (and did) add that not only has the NYT failed to recognize or “own” the effect of their reporters’ failure, they also had the audacity to reinforce how stunning and brave they are. [Update 31 July 2025: good catch here about what the Ed. note didn’t mention]
It’s all very shameful but not surprising.
The paper’s failures leading up to and during the Holocaust are well-documented (e.g., Leff 2005), as is its willingness to play Chief Propagandists in launching and legitimizing a staged pandemic.
For the latter, I highlight five of the many spring 2020 stories and features that the New York Times should not only correct (if not retract) but also acknowledge with a genuine apology for the part they played in conning the world into believing a deadly pathogen was on the loose and dropped like a bomb on the Big Apple.
1. Iran Object Lesson (3 March 2020)
In March 2020, the paper used Iran as a fear-driven warning to justify U.S. lockdowns—framing its response as reckless and deadly to push the message: take ‘the coronavirus’ seriously, or else.
My credentials don’t include J-school, but I’ve documented enough of the ‘Iran Object Lesson/Cautionary Tale’ for anyone to see the diversionary narrative very clearly in retrospect. With its vast resources, surely the NYT can find out, for example, if the coronavirus killed 17 regime officials and amend its own stories.
The Time a Coronavirus Hit Iran
Iran being in the news yet again makes this a great time to look back at the bizarre role the country/regime played in the staging of a spreading coronavirus from afar.
2. Brace yourselves for the abyss (18 March 2020)
The NYT was also an active participant in the “virus-hit-us hard handoff” from Italian doctors to doctors in the U.K., U.S., and beyond.
OpEds published on the same day — one from an anesthesiologist in Milan, another from respiratory specialist in Britain, and a third by an NYT writer/ER Med prof — convey the same fear-driven message about demand outmatching resources and doctors not knowing how to handle the purportedly-new illness.
Videos like the one above were the equivalent of “dispatches from the frontline” in a simulated war against an invisible enemy. Western doctors and nurses were the targets of psychological warfare — and it’s hard to believe it was accidental that approved voices (and beautiful, cheery faces!) from much-beloved Italy were used to deliver the message to medical personnel and average citizens.
Given that no hospital anywhere was overrun with an unprecedented number of patients — and the suspiciously fast, high-magnitude death curves in northern Italy (Bergamo especially) London, and New York — the NYT needs to revisit these “first-hand accounts” and confess, or at least come to a better understanding of, what they really were.
3. Elmhurst Hospital is under siege (25 March 2020+).
The NYT was the willing producer of the opening scenes in The Elmhurst Hospital Show. Located in the Corona health district of Queens (yes, Corona), a nearly-breathless “ready-for-her-close-up” Colleen Smith allegedly shot video of herself and the hospital, and reached out to the NYT, who then apparently came to the site of the “deadly outbreak” to shoot additional footage and help Colleen tell the world that the facility didn’t have what it needed to deal with car accident victims who showed up with ‘novel coronavirus’.
Smith recalled her heroics two months later during a “storytelling event” with an artificiality that should make any professional journalist wonder what in the world actually happened at Elmhurst. (Transcript here.)
A lot of the legwork the NYT should have done on Elmhurst is on this page:
Elmhurst Hospital
Articles related to the events at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, New York City, during the spring 2020 death event. Displayed in the order they were written.
An AI-generated podcast summary of the myriad problems can be found here:
4. Trenches are needed to bury indigent dead on Hart Island. (10 April 2020)
The NYT wasn’t the only media outlet to elevate drone footage and other images of the dead being buried on Hart Island, the city’s burial ground for unclaimed bodies. However, they did nothing to fact-check what was happening and why — or to ask obvious questions that journalists employed by one of the best-known newspapers in the world should ask. For example: When did those people in the footage actually die? Island burial records show that a good number of the coffins we saw were deaths that occurred before the pandemic declaration.
The total number of New Yorkers buried on Hart Island who died in spring 2020 — roughly 1,500 — was above normal but doesn’t come anywhere close to substantiating the 27,000-death increase in the timeframe. Neither does the number of deaths for which FEMA COVID funeral assistance was received — as shown in this analysis and depicted in the graph below.
Does the NYT know? Who wants to tell them?
perhaps?
5. A coronavirus has created an ‘incalculable’ loss (24 May 2020)
Many, many more examples of the NYT’s misdirectional and very obviously nonsensical spring 2020 stories could be given, but I’ll end with The Crown Jewel of the NYT’s initial propaganda campaign: a multi-page spread and online interactive feature, “An Incalculable Loss.” The sheer number and brazenness of the techniques used to distort and obscure the truth warranted a lengthy article in response — one I wrote to unpack in detail.
The Bottom Line
I wish I could say The New York Times’ Gaza photo ‘incident’ is a ‘fog of war’ mistake. Unfortunately, it’s only the latest in a long pattern of narrative-driven propaganda posing as journalism.
The five COVID-era examples I highlighted above weren’t isolated missteps or misjudgments either. They are examples of coordinated, mutually-beneficial efforts to shape public perception about a ‘pandemic.’
NYT should revisit these and many other stories involving the 'sudden spread’ of a ‘novel coronavirus’, correct the record, and offer real apologies for advancing the biggest deception of my lifetime.
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