The New York Times’ attraction to murderous dictators continues apace.
The paper of record on Monday reminded everyone of the glowing, heroic coverage it gave Mao Zedong 43 years ago on the day of his death.
“Mao Zedong died on this day in 1976,” the Times archive’s Twitter account said in a since-deleted note published on social media. “The Times said he ‘began as an obscure peasant’ and ‘died one of history’s great revolutionary figures.’”
A regular Jesus Christ, that Mao.
Never mind the fact that his disastrously conceived (and named) “Great Leap Forward” killed an estimated 45 million human beings. Then there were the political purges, the labor camps, the exterminations, the execution quotas, etc. In all, Mao is suspected of killing an estimated 70 million people with his brand of genocidal totalitarianism. But other than all of that, yes, he was “one history’s great revolutionary figures.”
It was not long before social media users noticed and took exception on Monday to the Times’ weirdly glowing description of the 20th century’s most prolific mass murderer. The pushback became such that the paper deleted the tweet eventually, issuing a sort of half-hearted mea culpa.
“We’ve deleted a previous tweet about Mao Zedong that lacked critical historical context,” the account tweeted Monday.
Which is to say, ‘Ah, yes. The murders. We forgot about the murders.’
To the Times’ credit, its stupid Mao Zedong tweet lasted for roughly three hours before it was deleted and disavowed. That’s a massive improvement from the nearly 60 years it took for the Times to disavow Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty and his efforts to obscure and cover-up the brutal realities of Stalinism.
Now if someone at the Times would like to do something about the paper’s past softball coverage for Fidel Castro and Kim Jong Un, that would be great.
