Ashley Rindsberg: NYT Is ‘Godfather of Fake News’

The New York Times is the “godfather of fake news” that has been “deliberately and radically altering history” for over a century, the author of an explosive new book on the newspaper told Breitbart in an exclusive interview.

“The New York Times is guilty of everything it claims to abhor – patriarchy, fake news and, most egregiously of all, of distorting history,” Israel-based American author Ashley Rindsberg told Breitbart in an interview on Monday.

Rindsberg’s forthcoming book, The Gray Lady Winked, took 15 years to research and contains explosive revelations about how the misreporting by the so-called “woke” Times has, for over a century, altered history—from World War II to Stalin’s Russia to the Cuban Revolution, Vietnam, the Iraq War, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and even today’s 1619 Project.

“I wanted to understand how the loss of trust, the violating of norms, and the creation of false narratives really works,” Rindsberg said. “What I discovered was that the ‘errors’ were very rarely errors. More often, they were deliberate attempts to change history in major ways.”

Among the most shocking of the revelations made in the book is that, on the eve of the Second World War, the New York Times reported that Poland invaded Germany—a narrative that was created as part of a Nazi propaganda effort. How did Nazi propaganda wind up on the front page of the New York Times? According to Rindsberg, the reason is disturbingly simple: the Times’s Berlin bureau chief during and leading up to World War II, a man named Guido Enderis, was a Nazi collaborator.

“The Times knew Enderis’ pro-Nazi sympathies presented a huge problem,” Rindsberg said. “But they also knew they were sitting on a journalistic gold mine since Enderis had unparalleled access to German sources. Of course, this was because the Nazis loved him.”

At the same time that Enderis was reporting a pro-Nazi line from Germany, the Times’s Jewish owners were whitewashing the Holocaust back home. “A toxic stew of interest and ideology led the Times to deliberately bury news of the Holocaust, something that, to my mind, constitutes the greatest journalistic crime in American history.”

You don't know this man. His name is Guido Enderis. He was the New York Times Berlin bureau chief during WWII and was a known Nazi collaborator. I detail this & much more in #TheGrayLadyWinked, out May 3 – International Press Freedom Day https://t.co/1p9aFtxbcd pic.twitter.com/brM6n41g5w

— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) April 13, 2021

Far from being a historical trend, however, Rindsberg explains that these patterns are still at work. He points to the now infamous 1619 Project, whose many serious errors—such as false claims that Abraham Lincoln was a racist and that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery—have been slammed by critics on both the left and the right.

“The aim of the 1619 Project is to change history, which is what explains the many so-called errors the Project has made,” Rindsberg says. “They’re not errors at all. The distortions are the point. After all, if you want to change history, you literally have to change it.”

But all this raises the question of why a newspaper would want to revise history.

The answer, Rindsberg says, lies in the dynasty that owns the New York Times.

For 125 years, the New York Times has handed the role of publisher from male heir to male heir, making it one of the oldest, most entrenched patriarchies in America. As with all dynasties, at some point maintaining power, prestige and wealth becomes the overriding priority. When an organization with too much power, too much money, and too much ideology concentrated among too few people is also entrusted with telling the truth, things tend to go horribly wrong.

Tellingly, the book has received praise from across the political spectrum. Leftwing journalist Glenn Greenwald said the book “performs a valuable service” while influential conservative scholar Daniel Pipes said it “shows the dynastic owners’ triad of problems: capitalist guilt, Jewish self-hatred, and an ambition for power, wealth, and status.”

According to Rindsberg, the book is drawing bipartisan support because there’s real consensus concerning the extreme polarization unfolding in our society—and the role the media plays in it.

However, Rindsberg’s attempts to publicize his revelations were often stonewalled, even by people who strongly supported his efforts.

Clashing with what he terms the “raw power” of the social institution that is the New York Times, Rindsberg inadvertently learned how false media narratives – or fake news — get perpetuated.

“When I first wrote the book 15 years ago, I naïvely assumed that people would be eager to uncover these truths about the Times,” Rindsberg said. “But, again and again, powerful figures in publishing and media slammed the door on this book—in some cases, while telling me how important and valuable they found it. They were simply too afraid of crossing the Times.”

The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications is available now for presale on Amazon and will be released on May 3.