Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted by Bob Kohn

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From the Publisher

A life-long reader of the New York Times proves how the once-vaunted newspaper has replaced its original noble mission to present straight news with a new subversive mission to manipulate attitudes and promote leftist agendas.For over a hundred years, the New York Times has purported to present straight news and hard facts. But, as Bob Kohn shows with absolute clarity, the founders' original vision has been hijacked, and today, instead of straight news, readers are given mere editorial under the pretense of objective journalism. Kohn shows point by point the methods by which the Times' mission has been subverted by the present management-routinely slanting the presentation of the facts in leads, headlines, and placement; utilizing polls, labels, and loaded language to convey particular views, not genuine news; and staffing the newsroom with hacks who manipulate information to further a leftist agenda. Kohn shows how such fraudulence directly corrupts hundreds of news agencies across the world; and by revealing all their methods of manipulation, he teaches readers how to decipher the slants in even the subtlest of cases, providing an entertaining and enlightening lesson in fraud-busting.

About The Author:

Bob Kohn is an attorney and seasoned executive with experience in both the entertainment and high-tech industries. He is currently the vice chairman of the board of Borland Software Corp. and chairman of Laugh.com, a comedy record label. A former associate attorney at a prominent Beverly Hills entertainment law firm, Kohn served as associate editor of the Entertainment Law Reporter. Kohn also co-authored with his father the legal treatise, Kohn on Music Licensing, hailed by USA Today as the "bible of legal issues in the music world."

Library Journal

The ongoing public debate on bias in the media has a new entry on the side of "too liberal" with a specific examination of the New York Times. Kohn, an entertainment lawyer, describes himself as a news consumer who has been an avid reader of the Times since the 1960s, and he laments the changes that he perceives in the news coverage. He argues that journalists at the Times do not know how to produce factual leads, they create misleading headlines, and their articles contain distortions of facts. The coverage of the war in Iraq is used to bring a focus to his accusations of liberal bias. Although he is aware that contemporary journalism education explores the complexity of the concept of objectivity, he rejects that approach and insists on impartial news writing. Kohn's methodology cannot prove his argument as his analysis is applied to select articles, mostly from 2002, rather than to a content analysis of all news articles over a specified time period. The entire book is, in effect, an editorial rant directed at the New York Times and should only be purchased by libraries following the debate's back and forth.-Judy Solberg, George Washington Univ. Libs., Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.