sulzberger
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</div><div style="font-size: small;"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/el-mozote-massacre-reagan-war-on-press" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/el-mozote-massacre-reagan-war-on-press</font></a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>a <span style="box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: white 0px 1px 0px, rgb(17, 17, 17) 0px 4px 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">RETIRED AIR FORCE</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">general in El Salvador</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/01/25/world/24reuters-elsalvador-massacre.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; letter-spacing: 0.01em; box-sizing: border-box;">admitted</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">in court last Friday that the country’s armed forces carried out the infamous El Mozote massacre in December 1981. This acknowledgement marks the first time the Salvadoran military has taken responsibility for the atrocity.</span></b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">
</span></font></div><div data-reactid="219" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Over a period of days, the Atlacatl Battalion, a Salvadoran army unit created and trained by the U.S., slaughtered <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/world/americas/oas-to-reopen-inquiry-into-massacre-in-el-salvador-in-1981.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">more than 800</a> civilian men, women, and children in several villages in the mountains near El Salvador’s border with Honduras. The Reagan administration immediately acted to protect its Salvadoran allies, engaging in a far-reaching coverup.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">There was wholesale torture and rape, and many victims were burned alive. The <a href="http://www.markdanner.com/articles/127" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">level of cruelty</a> is most comparable currently to the actions of the Islamic State. One survivor remembered hearing an officer threaten to murder a soldier who wasn’t willing to kill kids.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Today, Americans may see El Mozote as an obscure tale from the misty past. But this is not the case. In fact, this week’s final, complete confirmation of the events 38 years ago holds critical lessons about the Trumpist war on the media now.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Raymond Bonner, who broke the El Mozote story for the New York Times, says that assaults on journalism by the government have “gone to an extreme [under President Trump], but it’s certainly not new. … What happened to me is an example of attacks on reporting.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The key things to understand about this war is, first, that it didn’t start with Trump, but rather with Richard Nixon almost five decades ago. Second, the right-wing fury at journalism has never been about the press’s many faults; instead, conservatives are most enraged when reporters do their job well. Third, officials who lie successfully are not punished, but are instead rewarded by the GOP apparatus for a job well done.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Reagan administration entered office in January 1981 filled with fervor about rolling back communism in Central America. The Cuban revolution in 1959 had been bad enough. But then the Sandinistas had overthrown Nicaragua’s dictatorship in 1979, and left-wing guerrillas in Guatemala and El Salvador threatened to do the same to their autocrats.</font></span></p></div><div data-reactid="230" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In retrospect, it’s clear that these were “<a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/walter-lafeber-3/inevitable-revolutions-the-united-states-in-cen/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">Inevitable Revolutions</a>,” the title of one history of the period. Tiny, cruel white oligarchies had ruled over Indigenous peasants across the region for hundreds of years, and sooner or later, the dam was going to break. But to the Reaganites, this was all the work of the international communist conspiracy, headquartered in Moscow, and had to be crushed by any means necessary.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There was a roadblock to Reagan’s plans, however: Congress was queasy about the U.S. alliance with the Salvadoran government and had required the president to certify by January 29, 1982 that El Salvador was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.” If it did not, all U.S. aid would be cut off. It was therefore unwelcome at the White House when word began circulating that something extremely bad had happened in the Salvadoran mountains. That New Year’s Eve, the head of the Salvadoran’s junta was forced to declare that rumors of a massacre were just “a guerrilla trick.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Then came — from the perspective of the Reagan administration — catastrophe. On January 27, both the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/27/world/massacre-of-hundreds-reported-in-salvador-village.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">New York Times</a> and the Washington Post published accurate, front-page stories about what had happened.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Thomas Enders, a career diplomat who at the time was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, later said that “El Mozote, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort” in El Salvador. What to do?</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier. As was borne out by Nixon’s direct experience during Watergate, few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore, as a top Nixon aide <a href="https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearchers/find/histories/haldeman-1988-04-12.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">later recalled</a>, Nixon believed that it was necessary to “fight the press through … the nutcutters as [the president] called them, forcing our own news. Make a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Reaganites shared this perspective. News outlets were “the opposition” that had to be brutally, viciously attacked, and individual journalists were fair game as a way to discredit their employers. Bonner was therefore caught in the White House crosshairs.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The pushback began with congressional testimony by Enders. “There is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians,” he told a House subcommittee.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What about the number of victims? Bonner’s article had mentioned a list of 733 compiled by villagers, as well as a tally of 926 from a human rights organization. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Elliott Abrams, who’d just taken office as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, informed the Senate that “the numbers, first of all, were not credible. … Our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.” This was clear, conscious deceit on the part of Abrams. Both the Times and Post articles had mentioned that the massacre had taken place in several locations.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Then came the assault from the administration’s outside allies. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a <a href="https://www.newspapers.com/image/65962448" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">lengthy editorial</a> headlined “The Media’s War.” Americans were “badly confused” about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the U.S. press.</b> El Mozote was not a massacre, the Journal wrote, but a “massacre.” On the one hand, the number of dead had obviously been exaggerated and on the other, maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was “credulous,” “a reporter out on a limb,” and, like reporters in Vietnam, a sucker for “communist sources.” <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of the editorial’s authors appeared on <b>PBS </b>to proclaim that “obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation.”</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Accuracy in Media, the conservative media criticism organization, went further. Bonner, it declared, was waging “a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.” Meanwhile, a Times editor later said, the administration was engaging in a “really vicious” whisper campaign about him....</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The message was received loud and clear in the executive offices of the Times. </font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">While Bonner considers Punch Sulzberger, then the publisher of the Times, to have been “a great, great man,” he also recalls that he “supposedly said to [Times editor] Abe Rosenthal, ‘Who the hell is this guy down there that’s causing us all the trouble?</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">’”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In August 1982, Rosenthal pulled Bonner out of Central America and back to New York for additional “training” in journalism. Bonner believes that Rosenthal made this decision not simply due to his El Mozote coverage, but because Rosenthal was a committed anti-communist who felt that Bonner was generally too sympathetic to the Salvadoran guerrillas and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Within the Times newsroom, says Bonner, “It was certainly perceived as if I were being punished. I had a reporter who told me, ‘I’m not going to let this happen to me.’ … There is no question that this had a chilling effect on the reporting out of Central America.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This coincided with a period of Grand Guignol violence by the Salvadoran government and its allied death squads that’s truly <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=BU9tAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA426&dq=%22as%20if%20each%20body%20was%20stroking%20its%20own%20head.%22%20-chomsky&pg=PA426#v=onepage&q=%22tonita%20is%20a%20peasant%22&f=false" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">beyond human comprehension</a>. About 75,000 Salvadorans were killed during this time, the per capita equivalent of about 5 million Americans today. According to a later U.N. investigation, the government was responsible for 85 percent of the murders, all committed with U.S. arms and training.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For Bonner’s part, he quit the Times three years later in 1984. “When I told Abe I was leaving there were no tears shed,” he remembers. He eventually returned to work for the paper after Rosenthal’s retirement. Now 77, he <a href="https://www.bookoccino.com.au/about-us/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">owns a bookstore</a> in Australia.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Meanwhile, the key personnel who squelched the story went on to greater and greater heights. Enders retired from government service and enjoyed a lucrative career on Wall Street. Abrams was later a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council. Today, he is the special representative for Venezuela for the Trump administration.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Given how well pressure on the media worked with El Mozote, it’s no wonder that the U.S. right has used the same strategy over and over since. With the rise of conservative talk radio, and then Fox News, it’s become ever easier for politicians to simply ignore any inconvenient aspects of reality. <b>Trump privately explained to journalist Leslie Stahl <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/05/22/lesley-stahl-donald-trump-said-he-attacks-the-media-so-when-you-write-negative-stories-about-me-no-one-will-believe-you/" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">in 2016</a> that he strategically attacks journalism “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Thus, while Bonner lived through a lot in 1981, he believes that “today it has gotten much worse.” Today, he says, “public officials simply lie with impunity,” and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it.</b></font></p></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/us/politics/trump-allies-news-media.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/us/politics/trump-allies-news-media.html</font></a></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump Allies Target Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The operation has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at prominent news organizations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The operation has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at prominent news organizations.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Kenneth P. Vogel and Jeremy W. Peters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Published Aug. 25, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Updated Aug. 26, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WASHINGTON — A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House’s allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.</span></b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">It is clear from the cases to date that among the central players in the operation is Arthur Schwartz, a combative 47-year-old conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. Mr. Schwartz has worked with some of the right’s most aggressive operatives, including the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“If the @nytimes thinks this settles the matter we can expose a few of their other bigots,” Mr. Schwartz tweeted on Thursday in response to an apologetic tweet from a Times journalist whose anti-Semitic social media posts had just been revealed by the operation. “Lots more where this came from.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The operation is the latest step in a long-running effort by President Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The information unearthed by the operation has been commented on and spread by officials inside the Trump administration and re-election campaign, as well as conservative activists and right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart News. In the case of the Times editor, the news was first published by Breitbart, immediately amplified on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and, among others, Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, and quickly became the subject of a Breitbart interview with Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary and communications director.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The White House press office said that neither the president nor anyone in the White House was involved in or aware of the operation, and that neither the White House nor the Republican National Committee was involved in funding it.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Trump campaign said it was unaware of, and not involved in, the effort, but suggested that it served a worthy purpose. “We know nothing about this, but it’s clear that the media has a lot of work to do to clean up its own house,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The campaign is consistent with Mr. Trump’s long-running effort to delegitimize critical reporting and brand the news media as an “enemy of the people.” The president has relentlessly sought to diminish the credibility of news organizations and cast them as politically motivated opponents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Latest Updates: 2020 Election </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Asked about Russian bounties, Trump says his phone call with Putin focused on ‘other things.’</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A new poll shows Biden tied with Trump in Georgia.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The president floats the idea of giving his renomination speech in Washington, a likely Hatch Act violation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See more updates]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Journalism, he said in a tweet last week, is “nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The operation has compiled social media posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and stored images of the posts that can be publicized even if the user deletes them, said the people familiar with the effort. One claimed that the operation had unearthed potentially “fireable” information on “several hundred” people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“I am sure there will be more scalps,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Mr. Trump who is a friend of Mr. Schwartz.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Nunberg and others who are familiar with the campaign described it as meant to expose what they see as the hypocrisy of mainstream news outlets that have reported on the president’s inflammatory language regarding race.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Image</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Arthur Schwartz, a conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to the president’s eldest son.]</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Two can play at this game,” he said. “The media has long targeted Republicans with deep dives into their social media, looking to caricature all conservatives and Trump voters as racists.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If it’s clearly retaliatory, it’s clearly an attack, it’s clearly not journalism,” said Leonard Downie Jr., who was the executive editor of The Post from 1991 to 2008. Tension between a president and the news media that covers him is nothing new, Mr. Downie added. But an organized, wide-scale political effort to intentionally humiliate journalists and others who work for media outlets is.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s one thing for Spiro Agnew to call everyone in the press ‘nattering nabobs of negativism,’” he said, referring to the former vice president’s famous critique of how journalists covered President Richard M. Nixon. “And another thing to investigate individuals in order to embarrass them publicly and jeopardize their employment.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, said in a statement that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They are seeking to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with the leading news organizations that are asking tough questions and bringing uncomfortable truths to light,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In a statement, a CNN spokesman said that when government officials, “and those working on their behalf, threaten and retaliate against reporters as a means of suppression, it’s a clear abandonment of democracy for something very dangerous.</span>”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The operation is targeting the news media by using one of the most effective weapons of political combat — deep and laborious research into the public records of opponents to find contradictions, controversial opinions or toxic affiliations. The liberal group Media Matters for America helped pioneer close scrutiny of public statements by conservative media personalities</span>.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those familiar with the campaign described it as meant to expose what they see as the hypocrisy of mainstream news outlets that have covered the president’s inflammatory language regarding race.Credit...George Etheredge/The New York Times]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The conservative operative James O’Keefe has twisted that concept in ways inconsistent with traditional journalistic ethics, using false identities, elaborate cover stories and undercover videos to entrap journalists and publicize embarrassing statements, often in misleading ways, to undercut the credibility of what he considers news media biased in favor of liberals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the case of the pro-Trump network, research into journalists is being deployed for the political benefit of the White House. It is targeting not only high-profile journalists who challenge the administration, but also anyone who works for any news organization that members of the network see as hostile to Mr. Trump, no matter how tangential that job may be to the coverage of his presidency. And it is being used explicitly as retribution for coverage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Some reporters have been warned that they or their news organizations could be targets, creating the impression that the campaign is intended in part to deter them from aggressive coverage as well as to inflict punishment after an article has been published.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Trained as a lawyer, Mr. Schwartz has endeared himself to members of the president’s family by becoming one of their most aggressive defenders, known for badgering and threatening reporters and others he believes have wronged the Trumps.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">He has publicly gone after Republicans he views as disloyal, including the former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, about whom he admitted spreading an unsubstantiated rumor.</span><b> He has called himself a “troll on Twitter,” which is where he has boasted of being aware of, or having access to, damaging information on dozens of journalists at CNN and The Times that could be deployed if those outlets ran afoul of Mr. Trump or his allies.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The operation’s tactics were on display last week, seemingly in response to two pieces in The Times that angered Mr. Trump’s allies. The paper’s editorial board published an editorial on Wednesday accusing Mr. Trump of fomenting anti-Semitism, and the <b>newsroom published a profile on Thursday morning of Ms. Grisham, the new White House press secretary, which included unflattering details about her employment history</b>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One person involved in the effort said the pro-Trump forces, aware ahead of time about the coverage of Ms. Grisham, were prepared to respond. Early Thursday morning, soon after the profile appeared online, Breitbart News published an article that documented anti-Semitic and<b> racist tweets written a decade ago by Tom Wright-Piersanti, who was in college at the time and has since become an editor on the Times’ politics desk</b>. The Times said it was reviewing the matter and considered the posts “a clear violation of our standards.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to the Breitbart piece before 7 a.m., which Donald Trump Jr. retweeted to his 3.8 million followers </b>— the first of about two dozen times that the president’s son shared the article or its contents.<b> Other prominent Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, joined in highlighting the report.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Image</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Mr. Schwartz is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son</b>.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Breitbart’s article quoted several people or groups with close ties to Mr. Schwartz, including Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Germany, and the Zionist Organization of America. It was written by the site’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, whose relationship with Mr. Schwartz started when Mr. Bannon ran the website.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Boyle’s article included a reference to the Times profile of Ms. Grisham, which it characterized as “attacking White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham.” Mr. Wright-Piersanti was uninvolved in the editing of the article about Ms. Grisham.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The tweets revealed in the Breitbart article quickly spread to other conservative outlets favored by the president and his allies, including the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Wright-Piersanti apologized on Twitter on Thursday morning and deleted offensive tweets. Mr. Schwartz then issued his warning that he had further damaging information about Times employees.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Mr. Wright-Piersanti, 32, said the tweets, posted when he was a college student with a Twitter following consisting mostly of personal acquaintances, were “my lame attempts at edgy humor to try to get a rise out of my friends.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But he said “they’re not funny, they’re clearly offensive,” adding, “I feel deep shame for them, and I am truly, honestly sorry that I wrote these.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>He said he had forgotten about the tweets as he started a career in journalism.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“For my generation, the generation that came of age in the internet, all the youthful mistakes that you made get preserved in digital amber, and no matter how much you change and mature and grow up, it’s always out there, waiting to be discovered,” Mr. Wright-Piersanti said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like Mr. Wright-Piersanti, other targets of the pro-Trump network have been young people who grew up with social media and wrote the posts in question when they were in their teens or early 20s, in most cases before they became professional journalists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Image</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The photojournalist Mohammed Elshamy in 2014 in South Sudan. Tweets he wrote in his teens became the basis for articles in conservative news outlets.Credit...Andrei Pungovschi]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A week after a White House reporter for CNN sparred with Mr. Trump during a news conference, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a tweet by the reporter from 2011, when the reporter was in college, that used an anti-gay slur. Other similar tweets quickly surfaced, and the reporter apologized, though Mr. Schwartz has continued to antagonize the reporter on Twitter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In recent months, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a nearly decade-old tweet in which a reporter for The Post had repeated in an ambiguous manner a slur used by a politician.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In March, Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to an article from Breitbart, written by Mr. Boyle, about a reporter from Business Insider whose Instagram account included anti-Trump references and a photograph of the reporter demonstrating against the president.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In July, around the time CNN published an article exposing old posts by a Trump appointee spreading suggestions that Barack Obama was a Muslim whose loyalty to the United States was in question, Mr. Schwartz resurfaced anti-Semitic tweets from 2011 by a CNN photo editor. Mr. Schwartz suggested that a CNN reporter who specializes in unearthing problematic archival content should “look into the social media activities of your employees.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The tweets became the basis for several articles in conservative news outlets and hundreds of tweets from <b>conservatives targeting the photo editor, Mohammed Elshamy</b>, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">which did not stop even after he resigned under pressure from CNN and apologized.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It felt like a coordinated attack,” said Mr. Elshamy, who said he had <b>received death threats. “It was overwhelming.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Mr. Elshamy, who is now 25, said he posted the tweets when he was 15 and 16 years old, growing up in Egypt, when he was still learning English and did not fully grasp the meaning of the words.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“I was repeating slogans heard on the streets during a highly emotional time in my nation’s history,” he said. “I believe that my subsequent work and views over the years redeems for the mistakes I made as a kid.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While he said he understands “the severity and harm of my comments,” he questioned the motivation of the campaign that cost him his job. “It is a very dirty tactic that they are using to cause as much harm as they can to anyone who is affiliated with these media outlets,” he said. <b>“It actually feels like a competition and every termination or vilification is a point for them.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Mr. Bannon, at the time the head of Breitbart, oversaw the site’s efforts in 2015 to attack Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, after she called out Mr. Trump for tweets disparaging women as “fat pigs,” “dogs” and “slobs.” In an interview, he said the work that Mr. Schwartz was undertaking should be seen as a sign that Mr. Trump’s supporters were committed to executing a frontal assault on news media they considered adversarial.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">“A culture war is a war,” he said. “There are casualties in war. And that’s what you’re seeing.”</font></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div>