1619 & All That: On The New York Times’s Recent Disinformation Campaign.
23rd December 2019
Roger Kimball is not impressed.
We are a bit late in getting to that dog’s breakfast called “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times’s effort to “reframe”—read, “wildly distort”—the history and governing impetus of the American Founding. Readers of the satirical classic 1066 and All That know what fun can be had if you go about your job as a storyteller serving up “all the History you can remember” and pretending that it is the truth. “Histories,” we read in 1066 and All That, “have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. The object of this History is to console the reader.”
It was to console its core readership that The New York Times undertook The 1619 Project in a special flood-the-zone issue of its Sunday magazine in August and then in a snazzy, graphics-heavy series of features on its website. For two years, the Times had invested heavily in the vaudeville entertainment called “Trump–Russia.” The spectacular failure of its leading man, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to deliver a happy ending to that fiasco underscored the essential futility of the entire enterprise.