The streets of New York City have been clogged this week with smart black limousines ferrying world leaders and diplomats to and from the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. The meeting, as usual, has been an opportunity for the UN to show the world how useless it is and for far too many heads of state to use the platform to give morally confused perorations.

As always Israel was the focus of attention and the UN Secretary-General António Guterres set the bar for extravagant mendacity. He claimed that the “scale of the killing in Gaza is unlike anything I’ve witnessed in my years as Secretary-General.” Hamas claims 73 000 people have been killed in Gaza since it launched the war, so Guterres is Helen Keller-like in his lack of awareness of the “scale of killing” in other conflicts. As UN Watch has pointed out, since Guterres has been in his role, there have been more than 200 000 killed in Yemen, 150 000 killed in Sudan, nearly 165 000 killed in Ethiopia, and more than 120 000 killed in Syria. Perhaps what Mr Guterres meant to say was: “Jews are not killing people in these other theaters of war, so those deaths don’t count.”

Then there was France’s Emmanuel Macron who claimed that Hamas didn’t operate in the West Bank, which is not only a blatant lie, but a particularly malicious one given that Hamas operatives murdered a French citizen in the West Bank only days ago.

A bloviating President Donald Trump gave a speech directed to domestic audiences and with an eye on his sinking approval ratings in the run-up to the midterm elections. But at least the president pointed out the rottenness at the core of so many UN organisations, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Criminal Court. Trump went on to say that he would “annihilate” Iran if a deal wasn’t reached. So far these remain just words and Trump has yet to demonstrate that he is able to finish the war against the Islamic Republic.

Argentina’s Javier Milei was particularly fiery in summing up the UN, delivering his remarks while wearing an Adam Smith tie:

“It’s become a useless organisation whose only purpose is to sustain a cast of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats. I would remind them of [von] Mises said: ‘good people do not think about controlling the lives of their fellow human beings.’

Those who are supposed to guarantee collective security and human rights failed in their task. Instead, they allow chaos, violence, and international terrorism to flourish. The alleged defenders of human rights have sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets. They have systematically voted against Israel while remaining silent in the face of Islamic terrorism and a genocide of Christians in Africa …”

Milei went on to speak about Argentina’s rights to the Falkland Islands, which is where I part ways with the great free-market reformer.

Blocked roads

On Thursday, as if the traffic congestion was not bad enough, protesters, including Susan Sarandon, made it worse by blocking the roads because Bibi Netanyahu arrived. Israel’s Prime Minister made a strong defence of Israel in a speech more likely aimed at voters at home than at other heads of state, many of whom decided not to listen in any event. Bibi explained that, in addition to the seven-front war his country is fighting, Israel is also battling an eighth front, the war for truth. Israel is fighting coordinated campaigns in the media and on social media, which I delve into a bit below. Bibi, drawing on remarks made by his war hero older brother, Yonatan, also made the point that Israel has won every war since its foundation in 1948 because it has no other choice.

China’s President Xi skipped the UN and went straight to Washington, DC, where Trump rolled out the red carpet, gave him a state dinner, and presented him with a large statue of an eagle. What the US gets in return remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t count on China suddenly ceasing to provide aid to Iran and other enemies of civilisation. The ongoing and unjust imprisonment in Hong Kong of human rights campaigner Jimmy Lai remains at the forefront of the minds of many of us. Trump previously boasted about how easy it would be to get Lai released. Mr Trump’s negotiating does not seem to have worked. Maybe Xi and his communist cadres don’t care about the reputational harm that would arise were this brave and principled man to die in a dank prison cell.

The latest in Britain’s revolving cast of prime ministers sat down with Mr. Trump and showed the world what mediocrity looks like. The less said about the former mayor of Manchester, the better.

But enough with the UN and global politics. This week I will focus on several media-related stories, most related to the once-venerable The New York Times, and none of them good.

ESA or ES Nay

Last week The New York Times ran a breathless article about a proposed rule change from the Trump Administration that would “strip a core protection of the Endangered Species Act.” What the Administration reportedly wants to do is not hold people liable if they accidentally kill an endangered species; there would still be punishment for those who deliberately kill such a species.

The specifics aren’t clear yet, but one thing is clear: the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is in desperate need of reform. The ESA was passed in 1973 with strong bipartisan support and at a time when hunting, deliberate poisoning, and land-use changes had led to precipitous declines in several species, including the bald eagle, peregrine falcon, and grizzly bear. Things have changed, however, and considerable efforts to protect these species and their habitats and to support breeding programmes have led to recoveries in their populations.

The problem with the ESA, however, is that the presence of a protected species on a property becomes a major headache for any landowner. A farmer or rancher should be happy to find a whooping crane on his land; instead, he would be devastated. Finding an endangered species means the federal government will swoop in and forbid you from using your land in any kind of productive way. This leads to the practice of “shoot, shovel, and shut up,” whereby the landowner quickly dispatches the animal, buries it, and says nothing.

The incentives with the ESA are all wrong. Instead of punishing landowners, the federal government should be providing benefits to them for protecting species and making it financially advantageous to protect the environment. The Property and Environment Research Center, which does outstanding work in environmental economics, shows the way forward with ideas on not only protecting species but getting them to recover and thrive.

The truth is that many once-endangered species are recovering very well and now we must start balancing the rights of landowners with the goals of protecting the environment. As the segments below will show, The New York Times is increasingly an activist rag. Its reporting on the ESA portrays the Trump Administration as trying to destroy the environment. It isn’t. For all the noise and bluster coming out of the White House, there are many sensible regulatory reforms taking place all the time and we should praise Trump when his Administration does the right thing.

Bias Much?

I may have ranted a little in the past about the bias at The New York Times when it comes to its coverage of the war against Hamas. There was, for instance, the infamous front-page photograph of an emaciated Gazan child being held by his mother, which The New York Times used to claim Israel was deliberately starving civilians. The outlet surely knew that Israel had facilitated the transfer of millions of tons of aid into Gaza, but it pressed ahead regardless.

What emerged later was an unedited version of the photo, which showed the child’s brother in the background, looking well fed and healthy. The New York Times cut that child out because it would have interfered with the starvation narrative. The emaciated child had an underlying genetic illness totally unrelated to the conflict, but the “paper of record” chose to lie and present him as a victim of Israel’s withholding of aid.

The interesting thing is that the mother holding the child appeared perfectly well fed and healthy. Did The New York Times’s editors calculate that their brain-addled readers, so consumed by their hatred of Israel, wouldn’t question what kind of a mother would fill her plate and starve her own child?

Then of course there was The New York Times opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof that claimed Israel had trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. The facts laid out by Kristof are absurd and would be laughable were we not surrounded by highly irrational and hateful actors likely to increase their attacks on Jews based on these lies.

Now we have a new paper by Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management, who studied how The New York Times covered the war between Israel and Hamas. Pinker examined 1 559 news articles and found that The New York Times almost always assigns agency and responsibility to Israel and diminishes Hamas’s role in the conflict. As Pinker explains, The New York Times “…largely [omits] Israeli casualties post-October 7, Hamas fighter casualties, and post-October 7 Palestinian violence. Personal accounts of Palestinian suffering appear two out of every three days, while comparable accounts of Israeli suffering rarely appear.”

A recent The New York Times story provided an excellent example of the outlet’s bias when it wrote “But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”

Readers, you simply do not hate the outlet enough. But the good news is that there is now a legal action against The New York Times, brought by two shareholders, the State Board of Administration of Florida, and the National Center for Public Policy Research. Both shareholders are asking a New York court to compel The New York Times to turn over internal records that should determine whether its board is adequately complying with its own standards of sourcing, corrections, and editorial integrity.

A Mother’s Love?

Readers may be somewhat familiar with a controversial The New York Times project, the 1619 Project, which was launched in 2019 on the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans being brought from Africa to what was to become the United States (US).

The Project was the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who sought to establish that the true founding of the country was in 1619, not 1776, and that it was on the backs of slaves. Controversially, Hannah-Jones and her contributors sought to explain that one of the primary reasons that the colonists sought independence from Britain was to protect the institution of slavery. That, along with the overemphasis of the role of slavery in America’s economic growth and the extent to which modern management and financial practices can be traced to plantation slavery, has been debunked. The 1619 Project was not a work of history but a racialist anti-American campaign seeking to delegitimise the very existence of this country. The shoddy scholarship and extreme bias didn’t stop it being picked up by school districts around the country, with 1619 reportedly being taught in 4 500 classrooms.

I won’t delve into the 1619 Project more than necessary and will point readers to the far more historically accurate and morally sound response, 1776 Unites, which was established by the late great Bob Woodson.

Aside from writing, inaccurately or otherwise, about history, Nikole Hannah-Jones has long been a campaigner against segregated education. Hannah-Jones has been in the news again this week thanks to a lengthy essay she penned for The New York Times Magazine about her own daughter Najya’s education. Even though Hannah-Jones and her husband are wealthy, they decided to place their daughter in a low-performing, majority-black public school in Brooklyn. I would have thought that a parent who wants to see desegregation would choose to send her child to a more multiracial school, but let’s glide over that.

Hannah-Jones wrote that she believed that she and her husband would be able to participate in the parents-teachers association and lift standards. It turns out that The New York Times writer did not do much to lift standards at all and seemed to think that her daughter was doing just fine at this school, even though Najya complained about the chaos and lack of attention from teachers. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that her child ended up barely being able to read or do maths. Bizarrely, Hannah-Jones writes that she only learned that her daughter couldn’t read properly or do basic maths after Najya tried to get into a more elite school that required an entrance exam. Are we really to believe that Najya’s parents never read with her? The photos accompanying the piece show an apartment filled with books … books that they apparently never handed their daughter to read.

Another of the many odd things about Hannah-Jones’s piece is that nowhere does she discuss the teachers’ unions which have a stranglehold on public education. Did it not occur to her that the overpaid teachers had little incentive to teach Najya, mark her work, give her homework, or care about her academic future because the unions protect them and they can never be dismissed? Maybe she is truly oblivious to public choice theory and human nature. Hannah-Jones complains about underfunding of public schools, but the school has a budget of $52 000 per pupil and only nine children per teacher. Money is clearly not the problem.

Hannah-Jones is being praised by many for coming out with this piece and admitting that she betrayed her daughter by placing her own political ideology over Najya’s future. The problem, though, is that Hannah-Jones never acknowledges that her own ideology may be flawed and so this ends up being a long piece without any real self-reflection.

I will leave it to National Review’s Charles CW Cooke, one of America’s most incisive and quick-witted commentators, to close out this section:

“I do not mean to be unduly waspish here, but it ought not to be a surprise that Nikole Hannah-Jones believed that her daughter was getting A’s despite doing no homework, given that getting A’s despite doing no homework is exactly how Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own career has played out thus far. Hannah-Jones is a writer who doesn’t write; a historian who knows little history; an advocate with no mastery of her brief — and for this, she has been rewarded with extravagant public-speaking fees, a cushy sinecure at The New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize in commentary, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and at least ten years of the sort of detached, flighty, consequence-free existence that allows one to sacrifice the mind of one’s own child for a couple of mawkish newspaper pieces and the cheap mollification of one’s ego.”

The White House Press Pool

The White House Correspondents’ Association decides which journalists should participate in a small “pool” that accompanies the President when there isn’t room for the entire press corps. The pool then reports and provides photographs for other news organisations. This week the White House decided to bar journalists from three news organisations, CNN, MS Now, and Politico, claiming that they report “fake news.” and that they don’t report favourably on Mr Trump.

The outlets sued, claiming that their First Amendment rights had been violated, and on Thursday a US District judge, Timothy Kelly, who happens to be a Trump appointee, issued an order requiring the White House to immediately restore the credentials.

This spat seems like another own goal for the Trump Administration. First, Mr Trump is a reality TV showman; doesn’t he realise that combative exchanges with hostile reporters makes for the great TV that he’s always after? Second, does he really think that banning these outlets from the White House is going to lead to favourable coverage? Conservative outlets ordinarily favourable to Trump have joined with their left-of-centre colleagues in condemning this move.

I’m sure Mr Trump would love to be surrounded by toadies who report on how wonderful he is, what a “stable genius” America elected, and how swimmingly everything is going. That, however, is not how the world works and it is not how a constitutional republic operates.

And finally…

For your amusement and for a little insight into just how completely nuts some people in this great nation are, take a look at what happened when a lesbian bar in western Massachusetts decided to allow patrons to remove their KN95 masks for one night of the week. If you think this was a story from the height of the pandemic, think again. This is all playing out right now, with some very odd people desperate to cling on to Covid restrictions because doing so somehow validates their disabilities. It’s an amazing and sometimes hilarious saga, but a real insight into the trouble the Left gets into when it constantly rewards victimhood.

With that I’ll conclude this media-heavy Dispatch and wish you all a happy weekend.