New York Times - Paper of Record - Intellectually Lost

Who would have ever thought such an newpaper icon could completely melt down into just another organization willing to do anything someone elses tells them to do.

How can we believe anything they print as the truth? Is this how freedom of the press was suppose to operate as founded?



John Swinton (1829-1901) was a Scottish-American journalist, newspaper publisher, and orator. Swinton also served as chief editorialist of the New York Times and New York Sun during two stints totaling more than a dozen years.

This Man Who Came to Dinner as far back as 1880, had an interesting opinion about the American Press Corps, which pretty much leads the western media if not the World. John Swinton, the doyen of the New York press corps, upon his retirement , made the following speech:

“There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with.

Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any, of you who would be foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty four hours, my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting of an independent press?

We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men.

We are intellectual prostitutes.”