“An outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth” — that’s how an American Friends Service Committee spokesperson responded to the paper’s refusal to run paid digital ads that call for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The New York Times Building in Manhattan. (Adam Jones on Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
By Eloise Goldsmith
Common Dreams
The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, announced Wednesday that it has cancelled planned advertising with The New York Times after the outlet rejected one of the group’s proposed ads that read:
“Tell Congress to stop arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza now! As a Quaker organization, we work for peace. Join us. Tell the President and Congress to stop the killing and starvation in Gaza.”
AFSC alleges that after receiving the text of the ad, the Times suggested they swap the word “genocide” for the word “war.” The word war has “an entirely different meaning both colloquially and under international law,” the Quaker group wrote.
AFSC said they rejected this proposed approach and then received an email from the outlet’s “Ad Acceptability Team” which read, in part, according to AFSC:
“Various international bodies, human rights organizations, and governments have differing views on the situation. In line with our commitment to factual accuracy and adherence to legal standards, we must ensure that all advertising content complies with these widely applied definitions.”
“New York Times Advertising works with parties submitting proposed ads to ensure they are in compliance with our acceptability guidelines. This instance was no different, and is entirely in line with the standards we apply to all ad submissions,” a spokesperson for the Times said in an email to Common Dreams.
Arch Street Friends Meeting House in Old City, Philadelphia, November 2022. (Billy Wilson, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
AFSC counters that a number of entities and individuals, such as the international human rights organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have determined that Israel is committing genocide or acts of genocide in Gaza.
“The New York Times advertises a wide variety of products and advocacy messages on which there are differing views. Why is it not acceptable to publicize the meticulously documented atrocities committed by Israel and paid for by the United States?” said Layne Mullett, director of media relations for AFSC, in a statement.
Joyce Ajlouny, general secretary of AFSC, said that “the refusal of The New York Times to run paid digital ads that call for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is an outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth. Palestinians and allies have been silenced and marginalized in the media for decades as these institutions choose silence over accountability.”
The AFSC has been a loud voice calling for a cease-fire and ending U.S. military support for Israel. For example, in April, the group announced a Tax Day campaign, a day of action where people held events and met with their members of Congress to demand they stop voting to spend U.S. tax dollars on military assistance to Israel.
AFSC staff in Gaza have also provided 1.5 million meals, hygiene kits, and other units of humanitarian aid to internally displaced people since October 2023, according to the Wednesday statement.
Eloise Goldsmith is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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If you guys love money in politics so much, has anyone ever tried a worldwide donation based PAC? Then the entire world that is directly affected by your brutal policies gets a say.
Obviously the New York Times is pro genocide.
The upside here is that the Times has lost its credibility among significant numbers of intelligent people, and that this kind of egregious editorial mendacity in the service of official propaganda will continue to undermine its already considerably diminished prestige. Needless to say, this is why the paper has been having a protracted hissy fit over “disinformation”. At last, good riddance. It should not have taken this long.
For the record, the paper’s patronizing, smarmy, and evasive response here, which purports to justify the rejection of the ad, has certain characteristics that should be remembered, because they comprise a subtle method that can still be effective and thus still needs to be exposed. It‘s a hodgepodge of lawyerly vagueness and elision, faulty logic, material omissions, and lying.
The claim is that “war“ is more accurate as a descriptor than “genocide” because there is disagreement among human rights organizations, governments, etc., all of which are unnamed, about what is happening, and that this somehow translates into the first term being more legally accurate than the second. It does not support this specious argument; it just asserts it. It also says this in the face of statements from all of the most well-regarded human rights organizations that it is indeed genocide, and the ICJ and ICC, respectively, all but declaring that a genocide is happening and issuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials for war crimes, the factual predicates of which support a finding of genocide. This rank casuistry does not require further comment, just contempt.
It is not an accident that this response reprises the MO behind the NYT’s rationales for not using the word “torture” during the Bush years, but “enhanced interrogations” et al., and then opting to use it when it was too late to have an effect. See here: hxxps://fair.org/media_criticism/ny-times-and-torture-a-decade-too-late/. On the contrary, it is of a piece with the paper’s function as propaganda and virtual state media.
The editorial guidelines of the NYT concerning Gaza were released months ago. If the publication is willing to censor and control its own “talent”, why would anyone think they would accept advertisements that contradict the “truth” that they are already controlling? The existence of such guidelines exposed the NYT as a group of fiction writers who create the fiction that they are paid to create.
Besides, we knew a couple of decades ago, back when the Cheneys were in charge, that such attempts fail due to censorship. I suppose we are approaching an anniversary of a different anti-war group seeing its money rejected when it wanted to pay for a Super-Duper Bowl Ad.
An outfit like CommonDreams won’t say it, of course …. but the final conclusion of all such stories is that these corporate media outlets should all be turned off. We know they present a fictional and controlled view of the world to us. Our main goal should be to banish them from our lives, and to help others to do the same.
If tribunals are eventually convened, will the New York Times be finally held to account for its active complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, pillage, torture, assassination, apartheid and genocide? One can but hope. What was good enough for Streicher and Rosenberg should suffice for Sulzberger and his cohorts.
Crazy thought, but perhaps the New York Times (being a news organization and all) could use its resources to actually investigate whether or not genocide is occurring. Seems to me that would be pretty newsworthy. Of course an actual investigation would reveal the Times own complicity in genocide…so they can’t do that. Now they’re in the position of pretending to be unsure genocide is occurring while doing nothing to find the truth of the matter. They’re true function as propagandists for empire becomes completely obvious.
“Various international bodies, human rights organizations, and governments have differing views on the situation.”
Yeah, only bc the few with differing views are totally controlled and dominated by Zionist money and influence. Period.
The Times mealy-mouthed crap is all the more insulting in that the biggest HR organizations in the world (who are often reticent to criticize Israel) recently came out and declared what the Jewish supremacist sadists have been doing to the Palestinians over the past 15 mos is indeed genocide.
Thank you for Smoking.
That is of course the same logic that was used regarding the health effects of cigarette smoke. That ‘various’ groups of experts had differing views. And of course, we must consider both opinions with equal weight, no matter how unworthy the fake one is. That is only one of many examples of this PR technique used to hide horror. Perhaps a more recent version concerns climate change … experts disagree.
Of course, with some of these other examples, we can perhaps see the way in which the strings are pulled in concert. They way that the string-pullers create the ‘experts’ who then produce the ‘expert opinions’. Then the professional propaganda artists create their smoke screen by giving the fake experts equal weight and covering it all with layers of mealy-mouthed words.
Never forget that the NYT is a capitalist business who will do anything to make a profit. Ethics and Morality always have to take lower places to Profit in such a situation. Putting trust in people who put making a profit as their top priority is always a mistake.
Using mass media to both cover up and promote genocide is not new. As a commenter above noted, there were defendants at Nuremberg for being a part of such a machine. The conductor of the orchestra, Goebbels, committed suicide at the Berlin Bunker in the final days of The Thousand Year Reich, so he did not appear at Nuremberg.
Follow the money, and one will undoubtedly find a right wing, domestically based Jewish lobby pulling the strings on the NYT continual stonewalling against the obvious truth of Genocide being carried out by the State of Israel. These are folks who want to link religion and state into one, here and there–a big mistake that history has proven to be a fatal choice. The NYT has long since proven that it is owned by such dangerous people, and has traded dedication to the truth for the lies and money of those who hold an ideology above journalism with integrity. The Gray Lady has become a whore.
I would consider it highly likely that no matter what the Quakers offered to pay, there were ‘counter-offers’ to double the amount in exchange for refusing the ad. In America, its called ‘the free market’. Some might call it oligarchy.
She’s been the Gray Whore for a long, long time. Should I go back and see if the NYT promoted the “Missile Gap Theory” in 1960? I’m pretty sure they promoted the “Gulf of Tonkin Theory” for the years that led America into the Vietnamese genocide. I don’t think they’ve ever disavowed “The Warren Report.” I rather suspect that if I went back and looked at the lists of ‘journalists’ who in the 1970’s were revealed as being CIA or FBI “assets”, that I’d find members of the NYT family.