Fun Read on (about) the NYT

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(The times still refuses to return the pulitzer prize it was awarded for walter duranty’s coverup of stalin and the ukrainian holodomor)

Bad News, Guys: The New York Times Says We Lost the War — and Iran Is Now a ‘Major World Power’

Scott Pinsker does a fine job dissecting and discarding the Time’s “expert” from the University of Chicago, but first he discusses some of the paper’s earlier attempts at reporting news.

Running in the April 7 edition of The New York Times: “The Iran War Is Turning Iran Into a Major World Power.” The author, Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, offers the following thesis:

  1. Iran will keep control of the Strait of Hormuz for “months or years,” and there’s nothing militarily we can do about it. (Sorry, guys.)

  2. The U.S. and Europe are now in decline — and the axis of China, Russia, and Iran is ascending.

  3. Iran will emerge as a “new major world power” and the “fourth center of global power” (the other three: America, China, Russia). 

But before we pulverize Professor Pape’s preposterously pessimistic proposal, here’s an earlier example of The New York Times’ piercing wisdom, courtesy of author Hans Mahncke:

The New York Times did not dismiss the possibility of powered flight at random. There was a very specific reason behind it. At the time, America’s most prominent scientific authority, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley, had been showered with large amounts of taxpayer funding to build an aircraft, the Langley Aerodrome. Despite all the money, institutional backing, and elite prestige, Langley and his team could not get it to fly, culminating in a series of very public failures, the last on December 8, 1903.

So when the New York Times declared that flight was millions of years away, what it was really saying was that if the most credentialed and well-funded “experts” cannot do it, then it cannot be done.

A mere nine days later, the elites’ proclamation of impossibility lay in ruins. Two totally unknown bicycle mechanics from Ohio achieved the first powered flight using improvised parts, a few hundred dollars of their own money, and sheer persistence.

In fact, in honor of Artemis, there’s also this doozy from Jan. 13, 1920, when The New York Times insisted that rockets cannot function in space:

That professor [Robert] Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. [emphasis added]

It was only AFTER Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins left the surly bonds of earth — on a rocket, by the way — that the Times offered a correction:

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere.

[…]

The Times regrets the error.

Want more?

How about the Times’ 1922 insistence that Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism was overhyped:

But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch messes of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes. 

Or its 1939 prediction that television would lose to radio:

The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it. Therefore, the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if for no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting.

Or its 1985 screed that computers had limited mainstream appeal because we’d rather read newspapers:

On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper… the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can’t imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.

Pinsker:

The colorful moral of our story: Most of the Gray Lady’s white lies come from brown-nosing silver-spoon liberal elites. 

So keep that in mind as we ply apart Professor Pape’s pointless paper:

(His takedown of Pape can be found at the link)