The NYT and Sudan

Summit Communications, a company which makes money by taking the prestige of the New York Times and selling it to corrupt third-world governments, has outdone itself today with a "Special Advertising Section" on Sudan in the New York Times, featuring second vice president Ali Othman Taha on the cover. "We have approached the formation of the united government in a spirit of cooperation and partnership," he says in a big pull-quote.

Stefan Geens points me to Summit's website, which features a long video interview with Taha, complete with sycophantic and extremely softball questions. The interviewer, Racquel Picornell, tells us at the beginning that she's going to ask him about "the economic development that will ensure a very rosy economic outlook", and that we will hear "the words of one of the makers of its history, a history that will lead Sudan into a new peaceful era".

Taha does not disappoint: "I feel honored to be what God has bestowed upon me: to be one of the peacemakers in Sudan," he says.

Taha is not a peacemaker. Quite the opposite: he comes in fact very near the top of the list of living genocides. As vice-president of Sudan (a post he still holds, under the presidency of Omar al-Bashir, the strongman who came to power in a military coup in 1989), Taha was the primary architect of the genocide in Darfur. In a nutshell, Taha and the Arab militias have been slaughtering black Sudanese in the western Darfur region of the country.

On Friday, the US State Department put out a press release in which Nancy Pelosi and George Bush both agreed that there is genocide going on in Darfur. The release comes in the wake of Pelosi's visit to Sudan, during which Taha admitted to her group that his government has supported the genocidal militias.

Recently, Taha's genocide has started spilling across the border and into Chad, a development the New York Times abhors in its leader today.

And yet the New York Times is happy to take the Sudanese government's money and run an eight-page advertisement for the country.

Would the New York Times run an advertorial extolling the charitable works of Osama bin Laden? Would it run advertisements from Nambla, or from the Ku Klux Klan? Taha is an evil man, a genocidal war criminal who has caused suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. What he wants now is a modicum of international respectability – and who better to give it to him than the New York Times. So the Times takes Taha's blood-soaked dollars and happily funnels them to its shareholders, even as its very own Nick Kristof files heartbreaking dispatches from Darfur. Here's Kristof from his latest column:

Elie Wiesel once said, referring to victims of genocide: "Let us remember: what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander." And it's our own silence that I find inexplicable.

The only thing worse than silence, of course, is outright complicity. I would love to know what Nick Kristof thought of his employer when he picked up the paper this morning.

Posted by Felix at 0:26 EST

Comments

good job on democracy now this morning...the new york times seem to be nothing more than a bunch of money hungry hypocrites...ah yes! and they did sell the war in iraq...great progressive liberals that they be

Posted by: al at 14:33 EST, March 27, 2006

To answer your question, no. The New York Times would not print ads from any of those groups because of the outrage they would be sure to ignite if they did. The problem here is partly the perception that the Sudan issue isn't a no-brainer for Times readers (yes, despite Kristof's coverage).

And while it's admirable that the two departments (advertising and editorial) are so distinct, doesn't the editorial side have some obligation to at least run a story about the decision to run the ad?

...Haven't seen any such independent evaluation as of yet....What are they waiting for?

Posted by: Kate Pastor at 16:15 EST, September 16, 2006