NY TIMES CENSORS LETTER CRITICAL OF TOM FRIEDMAN 2049

alexy

(you did read this of course, " Steve Harris, to the editor of the Times. . . First, there's the word limit. Our first letter came in at 490 words, a length we felt was appropriate to address the major pieces of misinformation in Mr. Friedman's attack. This was also after the Times ran four letters in support of Friedman's column on Friday, June 2, totaling 480 words. "The Times told us it would 'consider' our response only if it were limited to 175 words max. And I note that today's Times has a 304-word letter from two Democratic senators, Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. We countered by offering to cut our letter to 300 words. They offered to go up to 200 words. OK, we reluctantly concluded, 200 is better than nothing."

then of course this, "Then came the editing. They removed our invitation to Mr. Friedman to come to Detroit to learn the facts about what GM's doing to reduce our nation's oil consumption. They removed a sentence in which Steve said falsely accusing GM of 'buying votes' in Congress was irresponsible. We didn't like those edits, but the rest of the letter was left largely intact, with one exception. Our letter opened with a paragraph that accurately summarized the most bizarre elements of Mr. Friedman's attack, then reacted with this one-word sentence: 'Rubbish.' . . . The Times suggested 'rubbish' be changed first to, 'We beg to differ.' We objected. The Times then suggested it be changed to, 'Not so.' We stood our ground. In the end, the Times refused to let us call the column 'rubbish.' "Why? 'It's not the tone we use in Letters,' wrote Mary Drohan, a letters editor."

what ever happened to equal time? i will tell you what happened. we have allowed a ridged ideology that will allow no dissenting views to own the media. it would be one thing if this was right wing talk radio that is of course slanted, and full of half truths, innuendo's, character buttignations, and of course bald faced lies, but this is supposed to be the nations premier newspaper with no ideological axe to grind. freidman is of course a shill, and he is not a journalist. the nyt should not be in the editing content of a response business to one of their so-called journalist because that is what totalitarians do, they edit dissent. what part of censorship do you not understand?)

(i am sure that the nyt is quacking in their boots over this. millions probably read parts of the times reprinted in other papers. the number of viewers of this site are probably very small. i am not knocking them, i see they are badly needed. but with a obvious piece of propaganda in the nyt, and their blatant attempt to control the response, they are not being held responsible.)