The editorial board of the New York Times wants us to look to them for real news (as opposed to "fake news") yet the following article in Thursday's edition proves why we need to do the complete opposite.
Times writer Michael Kimmelman's latest article, "Aleppo’s Faces Beckon to Us, To Little Avail," which features four tragic photos of child victims of war, is a classic example of how media warps reality, as not one mention is made to President Obama and his failed foreign policy. Two references, however, are made to President-elect Donald Trump, a man who has absolutely zero -- I repeat, zero -- to do with the situation in Syria.
"They keep coming, both the bombs and the images from Aleppo, so many of them, the munitions raining indiscriminately on trapped families, aid workers and children," writes Kimmelman. "The Russian and Syrian government forces wouldn’t let them leave."
But the photographs and videos have made it out. The faces of the besieged, staring into the camera, at us, and at death, pleading for help, baffled by our indifference to the slaughter, describing the atrocities outside their bedrooms or just on the other side of the door. We see their faces from an angle we ordinarily see a friend’s face, up close, staring straight into our eyes.
It's heart-rending to be sure, and doubly so due to Obama's failure to lead. Newsbusters notes that Kimmelman quickly found a way to twist the Syria narrative to finger Trump somehow. It's all to do with his "playing to anti-Muslim bigotry," you see.
"Does it matter that victims in Syria are Muslims?" an incredulous Kimmelman asks.
"America’s president-elect won the election while playing to anti-Muslim bigotry. He sold himself to the American public as a transactional leader, promising deals, not necessarily decency. He said he admired Russia’s strongman president, Vladimir V. Putin, and campaigned on an isolationist retreat from global involvement."
Trump was invoked a second time in the article (mind you, still no reference to President Obama, who's presided over Middle East policy for eight years now):
We each turn to the news we like. During the Vietnam War, Americans watched the same network broadcasts and thumbed through the same magazine photographs. There was a draft. The war was in everyone’s home. Today a tiny percentage of Americans fight our battles. We watch desperate young strangers from faraway Aleppo from the comfort of a Facebook feed. The images and voices start to blur together. A tweet by President-elect Donald J. Trump or some scandal over fake news distracts us.
As Newsbusters points out, Kimmelman blames only a vague concept of Washington D.C. as we all watch "helplessly as Syrians refuse to go quiety." Meanwhile, "Russia and Syria bomb civilians with impunity" (and we know the inference here is that Trump is all for that, because you know, he's "Putin's puppet").
"Promises to end the conflict were broken over and over," the Times writer laments, without pointing the finger of blame for said broken promises squarely where it belongs.
"We have done nothing to help," he adds.
Perhaps he should recall then that it was Obama who gave Russia free reign in Syria after refusing to enforce the so-called Red Line.