The New York Times sees a white devil under every doily.
The paper of record published an exceptionally deranged news report this week suggesting that the official seal of New York City is problematic because it depicts a Dutch sailor holding — and this is a direct quote — “a rope with what appears to be a loop on its end.”
Sounds an awful lot like a description of a noose, does it not? Oh yes, the New York Times knows what it is doing — scaring the hell out of everyone for no reason. All the panic that’s fit to print.
The depicted “rope” with the “loop on its end” is called a plummet, or a plumb line, which is a nautical tool used for measuring water depth. The Dutch settler portrayed on the seal is a sailor after all. In other words, there is nothing at all nefarious about the imagery, though the New York Times clearly sees some political angle in making its readers believe otherwise.
The story’s opening lines read:
Like the rest of the country, New York is engaged in a heated discussion about race and societal bias, a discourse that has spilled onto the streets in the form of protests, graffiti and, for a while, an encampment next to City Hall.
The report, written by a journalist with degrees from both Cornell University and Columbia University, features an image with a caption that likewise reads, “The seal also features an early American settler holding a rope with what appears to be a loop on its end.”
Amazingly, the caption also adds, “The official New York City website describes the rope as a tool used to measure the depth of water.” Then why not just refer to it as a plummet? Or perhaps better, why not write a story about how this controversy, to the extent that it even exists outside the New York Times’s pages and its ignorant reporter’s writings, is actual fake news?
Why play this “some people say” game? (By the way, that is not even a loop at the end of that rope — it is a piece of lead tied to the end so that it will sink into the water for measuring its depth.)
Official New York City sources even clarified for the paper that the Dutch sailor is holding a plummet. But the New York Times frets nevertheless that the seal is troublesome, giving serious consideration to ignorant voices who say it should be redesigned because of its problematic imagery, including the “rope” with the “loop on its end.” The article includes, for example, a quote from a local reporter who asked New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio this week about redesigning the seal.
“This is a little bit out of left field here,” said WCBS reporter Rich Lamb. “It’s a man in pantaloons holding a rope with a loop at the end of it, presumably a trap or something.”
“Presumably a trap or something”? Why even ask the mayor a question about the issue without first doing a little background reading?
Lastly, there is this passage from the New York Times article [emphasis added]:
The Whitesboro seal portrayed no such thing, by the way — although an earlier iteration of it did show the white settler’s hands in the general vicinity of the Native American man’s throat. It has always depicted a friendly Indian-wrestling match between Whitesboro’s founder Hugh White and a chief of the Oneida Nation, according to the village’s website.
So, here is a question: Do journalists in New York know anything about New York?
Reading the news today in the New York Times feels a lot like reading the results of a Rorschach test administered to a race-obsessed paranoiac, where everything from plumb lines to milk to the “OK” hand sign to Hawaiian shirts and even white parents are evaluated based on the alleged roles they play in perpetuating so-called white supremacist power structures.
Then again, I suppose we ought to be grateful that the most powerful newspaper in the United States did not go full USA Today and suggest that the bald eagle depicted on New York City’s official seal is reminiscent of the Nazi Reichsadler. So, at least there is that.
