It’s not the first time, just the latest that the once-venerable New York Times is getting blasted for appearing to normalize the far right. In recent years the Times has published articles that critics say do just that, from Hitler’s rise a century ago to modern day neo-Nazis. Its latest isn’t an article, but a wedding announcement for a top Trump official, Senior Advisor to the President Stephen Miller. Miller is a white nationalist who quietly advances and controls the worst of the president’s anti-immigrant polices.
The wedding announcement does “credit” Miller with “serving as Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, directly shaping policies that aim to restrict the number of immigrants coming to the country.” It’s unclear if the couple or the paper wrote that.
It’s not the first time Miller has been, as one journalist put it, “romanticized” on the pages of the Times. Just last summer the Old Gray Lady decided to call Miller a “young firebrand,” despite the fact that his policies have harmed countless thousands, if not more.
In late 2017 the Times came under fire for a fanciful profile, “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi sympathizer next door.”
The condemnation of the paper and its piece went on for weeks and forced the Times to publish a rare “response,” simply titling a selection of letters to the editor, “Was Our Profile of a Nazi Sympathizer Too … Sympathetic?”
About a month later, Times’ conservative columnist Ross Douthat argued Miller was a “necessity.”
And less than one year later there was this:
The Times has a long and unfortunate history of normalizing right wing extremism, including Nazism. As Hitler came on the scene in Europe the Times published articles suggesting he would not be as bad as his own words promised. In 2016 Vox took a look at the Times’ first article on Hitler, noting “its assertion that ‘Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded.'”
Vox also pointed to this portion of the Times’ 1922 article, which says: “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.”
Fast forward to 1937. “WHERE HITLER DREAMS AND PLANS,” the title of a NY Times piece that added: “At the Berghof on a Bavarian Peak He Lives Simply, Yet His Retreat Is Closely Guarded Hitler Has Transformed His Simple Chalet Into a Mansion and Impenetrable Fortress.”
Now, the Old Gray Lady is being accused of, as one journalist wrote, “normalizing Nazis again,” with the Miller marriage announcement:
A CBS News White House Producer does note the announcement wasn’t all roses:
Here’s what some are saying today about the Miller marriage announcement: