The New York Times Does It Again
29th November 2022
Let me tell you a story, dear reader. It is about a land — a quasi-dictatorial kingdom no less — where locals huddle round trashcan fires on the streets of the great metropolis, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps. Once there was good government, but a plebiscite some years ago brought with it autocracy, plague and a nation “falling apart at the seams.”
Which land could this be? Why it can only Cockburn’s ancestral homeland, the dear old United Kingdom, as seen through the eyes of the average New York Times subscriber. For years now Cockburn has been chronicling the Brit-bashing excesses of America’s least reliable news source. Whether it’s peddling dubious clickbait about the vaccine regime or comparing everything to Brexit, there are few articles that the NYT won’t run to please its audience of superior left-leaning Americans and self-flagellating Brits.
And now the NYT has done it again, running two extremely questionable articles in the space of two weeks. The first concerned a young man called Ademola Adedeji. According to the Times, Adedeji was “swept up” in a “murder-conspiracy case with no murder.” The young black man, the paper gasped, “never attacked anyone or owned a weapon.” British policing, the NYT implied, was to blame, given how its “war on gangs disproportionately targets young Black men.” Unfortunately, conspiracy to murder is still bad — even if the person involved doesn’t manage to commit a murder. That’s probably why it is a crime on both sides of the Atlantic.