Yesterday I wrote a little piece making fun of Ben Smith, the New York Times’ newly installed in-house media critic, for uncritically endorsing Bernie Sanders’ sweeping (and, in my opinion, banal) denunciation of the “capitalist” media. In my brief beatdown of both Ben and Bernie, I neglected to remark that if Ben wanted to point to an occasion when “the media” was actually unfair to Bernie, he should have linked to a story appearing the week before in, yes, the New York Times, “As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity”, which labored earnestly to portray Bernie as a perhaps not too innocent pawn of Soviet espionage back in the closing years of the Reagan administration.
I hadn’t look too closely at the story, about a government-sponsored effort that linked dozens of cities in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in a “sister cities” cultural exchange program, the first time around. On the one hand, there was nothing to indicate that Bernie had actually done anything that was wrong, but on the other his many statements expressing admiration and support of revolutionary socialist regimes in Latin America have left me permanently unenthusiastic about the dude. I thought the Times had taken a cheap shot, but since I didn’t care about Bernie that much, I just didn’t care.
But while I was nodding, Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate, “The Times’ Attempt to Create a Bernie-Russia Scandal Is an Embarrassment”, was wide awake. Then John Matlock, President Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, enlightened the Gray Lady as to her stupidity with a letter to the Times, which made more than a few salient points, including the following:
In 1985, three years before Mayor Bernie Sanders of Burlington, Vt., visited the Soviet Union to set up a sister city link, The Times reported that President Ronald Reagan was urging “bold new steps to open the way for our peoples [Americans and Soviets] to participate in an unprecedented way in the building of peace.” Sister cities were among the initiatives he promoted.
This call came despite the fact that, as your article claims, the Soviet Union was “a country many Americans then still considered an enemy.” Will you next publish an article about how President Reagan was the tool of a Soviet propaganda effort?
Fortunately for me, Daniel Larison at the American Conservative spotted the letter and wrote a nice piece properly ventilating the Times’ hypocrisy, which I should have done on my own. In fact, the Times was doubly hypocritical, running what was really a corrupt opinion piece as an honest news story. So where does that leave Ben Smith? Attacking “the media” in general but shielding his own paper in particular? Not a happy beginning.
