April 1, 2025
The NYT Prefers its Own Conspiracy Theories
By
Jack Cashill
Here’s what to know,” insisted the New York
Times Adam Nagourney in a lead editorial the day the JFK files dropped. “Oswald still did it.” If there was such a thing as a Confirmation Bias Olympics, Nagourney would have earned the right to represent the U.S. Reviewing and dismissing 64,000 pages of National Archives material in fewer than 24 hours is no small accomplishment even by the standards of the New York
Times.
As opinion writer
David Wallace-Wells reminded his readers a week later, the
Times decides what is a valid conspiracy theory and what is not. Apparently, JFK theories are not. Wrote the supercilious Wallace-Wells, the JFK files “turned out to be, by the standards of conspiracy hype, a total dud.”
Although Wikipedia describes me as “an American author, blogger and conspiracy theorist,” I remain agnostic on the JFK assassination. If the files turn out to be a “total dud,” so be it. Similarly, if they indict LBJ and a rogue crew of CIA contractors, I would not be surprised.
In either case, what is eerily true is that Wallace-Wells used the same Alinskyite strategy to ridicule conservative investigators that the
Times used nearly 30 years ago to defame JFK’s legendary press secretary Pierre Salinger. Salinger’s sin was to reveal the truth behind the 1996 shootdown of TWA Flight 800, a genuine conspiracy in which the
Times played a critical role.
According to Wallace-Wells, “we are living in a golden age for conspiracy theory.” In the way of example, for instance, he wrote, “It is now perfectly reasonable, for instance, to believe that a novel virus that killed more than 20 million people worldwide and upended for years the daily life of billions was engineered by scientists and then released by accident, with a global cover-up improvised in the months that followed.”
