Devoted New York Times readers are likely unaware that a huge protest was held in the nation’s capital on Saturday, January 13, to protest Israel’s wanton slaughter of tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, and to condemn “Genocide” Joe Biden’s weapon shipments and diplomatic backing for Israel. The Times, despite having a huge bureau in Washington, DC, did not mention the event, even over the course of the following week.
It’s hard to get an independent estimate of the number of people who showed up—Palestinians and Americans of all ages and races, including Jewish Americans, arriving from all parts of the country—because neither the Washington Metro Police nor the National Parks Service provides crowd estimates. What is clear from photo images of Freedom Plaza, a broad 500-foot-long rectangle that can easily accommodate over 100,000, is that there was what Newsweek (1/13/24) called a “massive” demonstration spilling over into adjacent Pershing Park, with still more thousands of protesters continuing to arrive along on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Protester John Reuwer, treasurer and a board member of the organization World Beyond War, is a veteran of many protests, large and small. He attended the January 13 protest, as well as an earlier one on November 4. Reuwer said he attempted to gauge the number of marchers when they began walking out of the plaza towards a planned White House protest. “It took one hour and 40 minutes to clear Freedom Plaza,” he said, guessing that the total protester count was “between 100,000–150,000.” (March organizers claimed to have had 400,000 protesters in DC, though that seems a high estimate to this author, who has attended plenty of protests, dating back to the early Vietnam War actions.)
Newsworthy alliance
By size alone, the rally deserved a story in the Times. But this wasn’t just one isolated US demonstration; it was part of a global call for protest against the ongoing assault on Gaza, which by January 13 had killed nearly 24,000, 70% of the victims being women and children. Times editors were surely aware that large anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian demonstrations were occurring around the US and the world (Al Jazeera, 1/13/24).
Even more newsworthy than the number of demonstrators and simultaneous global actions was the reality that this was the second mass action in DC in two months. In both cases, the lead organizers were Palestinian or US Muslim pro-Palestinian organizations.
Also newsworthy was that those two demonstrations both prominently featured activists from Jewish Voice for Peace (Newsweek, 1/13/24), a leftist anti-Zionist organization that claims to have some 400,000 members. This unique sponsorship marks a huge development after the two decades of widespread US Islamophobia that followed the 9/11 attacks, as well as a rare political alliance between US Muslims and anti-Zionist American Jews.
Surely all this deserved an article in the the nation’s leading newspaper.
True to form
The Times has a long history of ignoring or minimizing the newsworthiness of anti-war protests. As the late John Hess, a career New York Times journalist, wrote of the paper’s coverage of protest against the Vietnam War in his tell-all book about working for the paper, titled My Times: A Memoir of Dissent (Seven Stories Press, 2003):
The Times’ coverage of the Indochina war, as indeed all its news coverage, may be viewed as a battleground. On the one hand (to employ a favorite Times usage), a handful of reporters did noble work; on the other hand, editors reined them in, toned down reporting on the peace movement, passed up chances to break the news of the My Lai massacre, and followed the basic administration line on peace terms to the bitter end.
Journalist Jeff Cohen, a longtime media critic (and founder of FAIR), says:
The Times has a long-standing bias against activists and protests—especially if the protests are against US foreign policy, and especially if the Times is supportive or apologetic about official policy—which is most of the time. Totally ignoring the January 13 protest, to me, is not unusual. Times coverage has a bias that views politics as happening in the suites (or at election time), but certainly not in the streets. Public protests in which the US president is being labeled a genocide-enabler or mass murderer by unofficial actors—i.e., not elite politicians—are rarely going to make it into the news pages of the Times.
A former Times reporter recalls:
The NYT‘s coverage of protests has long been sporadic, hit and miss. Some editors would say, “Just because people are out there protesting doesn’t necessarily warrant a story. If the underlying subject or controversy is important, then we will cover that—that’s more important than covering the protest.”
This former Times reporter adds:
One annual protest that the Times covers almost religiously is the annual anti-abortion protest on each January anniversary of Roe v. Wade. it was never clear why Times pays so much more attention to that than to many other protests.
Indeed, true to form, the Times (1/19/24), after apparently deciding that the huge January 13 pro-Gaza protest didn’t warrant a story, less than a week later devoted 1,500 words to an annual March for Life anti-abortion rally on the National Mall, said to have been attended by “thousands.”
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Ellen Connett
We went to the first NO WAR IN IRAQ protest in DC. Peace activists in our neck of the woods (St. Lawrence County NY) filled the rented bus and it departed around 11pm and arrived in DC the next morning. It was a wonderful huge march of solidarity to beg the president not to go to war. The next day I rushed out to buy the NYT review of the march. The article said that 10,000 people attended! My husband said, “the reporter didn’t attend the march.” It turns out he was right. In a correction buried in the paper that week (I think it was on Thursday) the NYT admitted that the number of protestors was significantly higher than 10,000 and that the reporter didn’t attend the march. Her quotes from protesters were gotten days before the march.
Doug Latimer
Streets sweeping
Dave Lindorff
One Time veteran suggested to me that perhaps the “ever-earlier deadlines” for filing copy for the Times’ Sunday paper might have prevented the story getting reported. I could accept that explanation for why it would have missed the print copy of the Jan. 14 Sunday Times, but why not on line, and why not on Monday? If it was a big story, and I explain above why it was indeed a big story, it should have at least been in the Monday paper. Instead it’s a tree falling in the NYT’s forest of paper pulp trees. That’s not publishing “without fear or favor,” (the Times onetime motto), nor is it “all the news that’s fit to print,” which the Times abandoned long ago. Its stenography — reporting what the government wants reported.
Eric Arthur Blair
I wrote this on 4 January 2024 and texted it to friends.
Here is an (honest) alternative to the Tar Bangled Spanner to post on your website and/or read aloud on a podcast and/or send out to all your contacts. It is called:
VAMPIRE EMPIRE, EMPIRE OF VAMPIRES
Politicians for sale, enshrined in our law,
All queued up for the revolving door,
Scrambling to get their retirement stash,
All that is needed is buckets of cash.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Freedom of speech, well that’s what we say,
But not for Assange, who has hell to pay,
We bring you democracy, the light on the hill,
How do we do it? We lie, cheat, steal and kill.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
The mask has come off, as Musk said it blunt,
We will coup whosoever we want,
Doing the dirty, all the dirty being done,
If you don’t quite believe it, just ask Imran Khan.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Yanukovich, Mossadegh, Arbenz, Allende,
If you don’t do our bidding, we will screw you, comprende?
Otherwise we’ll invade based on despicable lies,
Or use our dumb proxies with Neonazi ties.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
We are exceptional, we call the shots,
Don’t you dare look at history, don’t you dare join the dots,
Just blindly obey our great Rules Based Order,
To turn every Ukrainian into dead cannon fodder.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Our reserve dollar status grants far more than we need,
It confers unearned riches, beyond any greed,
Bretton-Woods was a crooked confidence caper,
To exchange real world wealth for green toilet paper.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
China kills Uyghurs! We lied as we cried,
Crocodile tears over fake genocide,
Meanwhile we support indiscriminate slaughter,
Of every Palestinian wife, son and daughter.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
If you dare speak up for Palestinian plight,
We will ruin your life, we will use all our might,
To smear your good name until it is mud,
We are Nosferatu, WE SUCK YOUR BLOOD!
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Here is the (rather creepy) artwork:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cdw8b9cblzqei20qcp9wt/VAMPIRE-EMPIRE.pdf?rlkey=n07tjt14squq0ttapc03g34ub&dl=1
Dr. Zorn
This should be preformed by a punk band. You know of any punk bands who can record this?
Paul Citro
I no longer trust The New York Times.
Ezra Teter
The author forgot to include the appropriate qualifier “small” when describing the anti-abortion protests. “Tiny” might be biased but “small” is realistic.
foster
Letter to the editor : I was ashamed to hear that a newspaper of your standing, chose to ignore the HUGE pro Gaza protest in DC o n Jan 13!
I have heard this is not unusual an so I am led to believe you dont care that much about humanity. Sad to say.
Sincerely,
Foster Goodwill, Boulder ,CO.
Kathleen Galt
I have also attended marches protest in D.C. since 60’s Civil Rights marches, anti Vietnam War, Afghanistan, Iraq. The officials know how to estimate a crowd. I attended the March 4 Gaza in D.C. on Jan 13th. It was huge. Most credible newspapers, articles had that crowd at 300,000-400,000. I believe those figures. The massive crowd spilled over from Freedom Plaza down many of the side streets.
While the march to White House took place I watched for awhile from sidelines went on longer that two hours.
The most repeated chant was “Biden, Biden you can’t hide. We charge you for genocide.” Huge image of Biden on side of building near White House. Below his image it said “Genocide Joe” He has already lost Michigan. He has lost the votes of young and older human rights and social justice activist. He has lost the vote of Muslim Americans. He is very likely to lose the election this fall partially based on his unbridled support for Israel, even while they conduct a genocide.
Kathleen Galt
I quit buying and reading the New York Bloody Times after they allowed Judy “I was fucking right” Miller to fill the NYBT’s front pages with known lies about WMD’s in Iraq.
John Walter
FWIW, I believe that a number of years ago FAIR documented a 7:1 pro-Israel bias in the NYT coverage of victims and conflicts in Palestine.
More generally, can anyone actually think of when the NYT coverage opposed imperialist pro-war policies from the get go (not years after the fact when failures are all too apparent)? I can’t but again I quit reading that paper decades ago, although I do appreciate FAIR keeping tab on media that promote the status quo.