The Lying Photo That Started It All

How many of you reading this brand-new blog have heard of Tuvia Grossman? Just two?

I thought so.

Grossman was the innocent Jew attacked ten years ago by a rabid mob of Palestinians doing what they do best (showing how they feel about Jews) in Jerusalem while riding in a taxi on his way to visit the Temple Mount. A photo of Grossman bleeding profusely with a baton-wielding Israeli policeman in the background was mis-captioned by the New York Times to once again make Israel look bad. Keep in mind that this was in September of 2000, before 911 and at the height of the second intifada, when negotiations for the turnover of Gaza to the Palestinians were in full swing. The Times was on an important mission to sway public opinion in favor of an Israeli withdrawal, and even though suicide bombers were spraying the insides of their intestines and shrapnel onto the pink tiled walls of kebab shops on a regular basis, the New York Times provided favorable coverage to the wrong side two-thirds of the time.

One could reasonably argue that dishonest reporting in disgusting newspapers like the New York Times and other self-serving left-wing rags was a direct catalyst of the Hamas takeover of Gaza, not to mention many other unfortunate events around the Western world.

It is amazing to see with what glib condescendence the newspaper of record regards its journalistic duties to inform with impartiality. The elites in their glass towers can not be bothered with a reality and a public opinion that do not conform to their wishful-thinking vision of utopianism.

In the case of the Grossman photo, the Times was slow to publish a correction and when they did it was a weak apology, and anyway the damage had already been done: Israael was once again cast as the aggressor. Meanwhile, in the Metro offices of the Grey Lady, affirmative action hire and plagiarist Jayson Blair was hardly working and working hard to undermine the paper's believability even further by making stuff up, not because he had an agenda like his employer, but because he simply wasn't up to the task. Since that story involved accusations of preferential treatment that touched on the scary scary subject of race, the Times went to enormous lengths to make things right by "Correcting the Record" and "Preventing a Second Jayson Blair." Of course the simplest way to prevent a recurrence of the Blair scandal would be to ban quota hiring, but the NYT could never have that, because after all, according to the laughably predictable op-ed columnist Bob Herbert: "Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair's reporting." Well, there might be a bit of a conflict of interest to that assertion, as Herbert might be an AA hire himself. (He's definitely an AA, always but always whining about "social justice").

On this belated 10th anniversary of the Tuvia Grossman lie, we at COTT are mournful that America's newspaper of record has only gotten worse since that particularly blatant crime, but we rejoice in being able to expose it to such a large audience, in the same way that the Grossman photo inspired these people to do - perhaps one of the most positive things to emerge from this most scandalous of Crimes of the Times.