June 04, 2007

NY Times Buries Story on JFK Bomb Plot: A Brief History of MSM Suppression of the News

When the leading story of the day doesn't fit its view of the world, MSM often likes to bury it on a back page so that its readership never hears about it.

MSM has been doing this for a long time.

On June 10, 2004, the NY Times buried on page A12 (as noted in this previous post) a story stating that the head of the UN inspectors office reported to the Security Council that, before, and during, the war - Hussein had busted up and shipped out of Iraq factories capable of making WMDs.

...Mr. Perricos accompanied his briefing with a report showing satellite photos of a fully built-up missile site near Baghdad in May 2003 and the same site denuded in February 2004.

His spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said that items removed from the site included fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel-all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.

The NY Times, and MSM in general, didn't follow up on this, and today, it's all but forgotten. MSM sent no reporters to ask, why were these facilities destroyed? Why was evidence of their existence removed? What were they doing at these facilities that made it necessary to destroy them? And for most people reading this post, this may be the first time you've ever heard of it.

On June 19, 2004, the NY Times buried on page 8 (as noted in this previous post) this story:

MOSCOW, June 18 - President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday that Russia gave intelligence reports to the Bush administration suggesting that Saddam Hussein's government was preparing terrorist attacks in the United States or against American targets overseas.

Again, MSM buried the story, and you've probably never heard of it.

For years, and up until the present time, MSM has worked hard to avoid publicizing the tremendous success of the economy under GWB. Few people even think about it. MSM's success in keeping us from thinking about such things is so great that even Newt Gingrich recently said that 'nothing seems to be going right' for the GWB administration - as if the country wasn't enjoying such a great success. Per Larry Kudlow, as long ago as 2005:

Here's one story you won't find on tomorrow's front pages: "The U.S. Budget Deficit Is Shrinking Rapidly." The headline would be accurate, but the mainstream media is much more interested in talking down this booming economy than telling it like it is.

...Behind this really big budget story is the even-bigger story: The explosion in tax revenues has been prompted by the tax-cut-led economic growth of the past eighteen months.

Of course nothing seems to be going right, when MSM, that so many rely on as trusted purveyors of the news, refuses to print stories about the things that are going right. I admire Newt greatly in his views on almost all subjects, but on this topic, he should know better. MSM covers the news about the economy, but with nothing remotely approaching the prominence its significance deserves.

As I noted in June, 2004:

This is how papers like the NY Times get “plausible deniability”—they print a story like this once, on a back page, so that they can’t be accused of not covering it. Most readers never see it. And after that one article, they ignore it. No follow-up articles are printed. The story is suppressed.

And today we see the NY Times burying the story about the attempt to blow up JFK, on page 30 of the Metro section:

A major terror plot to blow up fuel tanks and a pipeline feeding New York's JFK airport and nearby residential communities made front-page news this weekend across the nation. The terror story also led all the major network and cable news shows.

But The New York Times didn't think the story was so important.

In fact, on Sunday the country's leading liberal daily carried a simple one-paragraph reference to the story on its first page, buried in the news brief section. The Times brief said the plot posed "no imminent danger."

The front-page brief referred the reader to a full story on Page 30 in the "New York Metro" section of the day's paper.

Interestingly, the Times story acknowledged the seriousness of the threat, noting that one of the four suspects in the plot, Russell Defreitas, had boasted that the destruction at the airport would be so vast that "even the twin towers can't touch it."

Per the U.S. criminal complaint in the case, Defreitas, the originator of the plot, has been recorded saying that carrying out the plot would assure him, as a Muslim, of going to paradise.

28. During the return drive from JFK, DEFREITAS discussed the extent of the damage they could cause. In particular, DEFREITAS predicted that the plot would result in the destruction of "'the whole of Kennedy," that only a few people would escape and that, due to underground piping, part of Queens would explode. DEFREITAS went on to predict that, as a result of the plot, DEFREITAS and the Source would "get our blessings and our rewards" and "a place in paradise."

Note that per the complaint, Defreitas has said that his view of his religion, Islam, based on his understanding of the Koran, is that it teaches him that to go to Paradise, he should commit a mass murder such as this. Is this what the NYT wants to keep the public from thinking about?

The Times' strategy of burying the news is fraying and is in danger of making that paper, and other mainstream media that practice it, irrelevant. The NY Times must be embarrassed today, as so many other media have not buried the story:

The NY Post and New York Daily News made it front page news. The NY Daily News headlined its story, "They Aimed to Kill Thousands." The Post included a chilling sidebar, "Pipeline Security A Joke."

Will MSM continue to follow up on this story? Or will it follow the NY Times' lead, and bury future references to it? Stay tuned.