New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin accused the family that owns the New York Times of hypocrisy after pointing out at least one of their ancestors supported Confederate causes and owned slaves.
“It’s far worse than I thought,” Goodwin wrote in a column published over the weekend on the Ochs family. “In addition to the many links between the family that owns the New York Times and the Civil War Confederacy, new evidence shows that members of the extended family were slaveholders.”
Goodwin claimed he has uncovered “compelling evidence” that the uncle Bertha Levy Ochs lived with for several years in Natchez, Mississippi, before the Civil War, owned at least five slaves.
The uncle, John Mayer, was Bertha’s father’s brother and had dropped the surname Levy, Goodwin explained.
“All that would be bad enough given that the same family still owns the Times and allows it to become a leader in the movement to demonize America’s founding and rewrite history to put slavery at its core,” Goodwin said. “As part of that revisionism, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are suddenly beyond redemption, their great deeds canceled by their flaws.”
In recent years, the New York Times has published a series of investigative and analytical works examining the history of race in America. The 1619 Project, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was authored off the basic premise that America is a racist nation because it was founded so that American colonies could keep their slaves.
“They had not seen this type of demand for a print product of the New York Times, they said, since 2008, when people wanted copies of Obama’s historic presidency edition,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter behind the project, said during an interview with the Atlantic. “I know when I talk to people, they have said that they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.”
Since the death of George Floyd this summer and other instances of police mistreatment of minorities, the New York Times and other national media organizations have published hundreds of reports and opinion pieces demanding the United States come to grips with its racist past and understand the complicated histories of the country’s founders, many of whom owned slaves.
“Forts Bragg, Hood, Benning and seven other military installations named for Confederate generals should be renamed. The Constitution is specific in defining treason narrowly as “levying war” against the United States,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote late last month. “It is dangerous for the government to name buildings or facilities for those who betrayed it — and incredible that the fact escaped wide notice until now.”
Social justice activists have planned and participated in massive rallies proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” and demanding local governments reexamine how they allocate money to law enforcement. Some have targeted Confederate or other monuments of historical leaders, which some activists say are offensive and should be taken down.
Goodwin argued that the New York Times, in particular, should consider its own history with slavery before promoting ideas of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Anyone with such an activist agenda better be purer than Caesar’s wife,” he said. “The Times clearly fails that test and owes its staff, stockholders and readers a full account of the slave holders and Confederates in its past. My hope is that after taking a dose of their own medicine, the owner and editors will focus their efforts where they belong: on making the New York Times a great newspaper again.”
