Why would the New York Times stoop to running an Islamophobe's ad?

The newspaper delivers an air of legitimacy, even when those words are paid for by xenophobes to spread alarmist messages

Raya Jalabi

A screenshot of the Investigative Project on Terrorism's full-screen ad on the New York Time's home page, before amendment. Photograph: nytimes.com

By its own admission, the New York Times does not accept advertisements that are "gratuitously offensive on racial, religious or ethnic grounds or that are considered to be in poor taste." So it's difficult to comprehend how a full-screen online ad by a right-wing group warning readers about the"Islamist groups" out to undermine America's security, liberty and free speech passed those allegedly rigorous standards,

But, according to the Times's interpretation, the Investigative Project on Terrorism's plea for readers to "learn more" about the unnamed terror groups wreaking havoc on these United States was nothing more than a sober and warranted distress signal.

"STILL HERE. STILL FREE. BUT FOR HOW LONG?", the all-caps ad read, the words neatly positioned against the haunting backdrop of the smoking twin towers.

Readers who clicked on the ad were taken to a website for the IPT, the group who paid for the prominent space. A non-profit group, it claims to be "recognized as the world's most comprehensive data center on radical Islamic terrorist groups" – though the metrics by which it measures itself are as-yet unclear. Clicking through its vast troves of "terror data" and "reports", readers could stumble on the Call To Action by the American People, an "educational" pamphlet that urges citizens to fight back against the "campaign of censorship" that the supposedly "main radical Islamic groups" have been waging against the most sacred freedom: free speech.

Never mind that the groups whom the IPT calls "radical Islamist terrorists" are actually mainstream Muslim-American groups – like theCouncil on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) and the Muslim Students Association – or that the IPT makes strenuous efforts to delegitimize them on its website by stretching beyond recognition their alleged ties to anti-Semitism, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Painting such mainstream groups as secret terrorists who are plotting the demise of America seems to be a significant goal of the enterprise.

In a letter to the Times about the ad, Cair said:

"It seems that since no credible media outlet will quote discredited self-described "terrorism expert" Steven Emerson, he is reduced to publishing paid ads to spread his disinformation about Islam and Muslims… His new ad takes up this defamatory theme by bizarrely attacking the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, for rightly stating that "Islam is not the problem; extremism and violent extremism is the problem" when it comes to terrorist attacks."

Interestingly, a week before the ad went live, the IPT criticized the Times for publishing a "hysterical" story about the NYPD's trampling of Muslim civil rights, calling it another symbol of the "Times's paranoid narrative" and their desire to make "the world a safer place for terrorism".

You have to wonder why the Times would tread such controversial waters.

A Times spokeswoman initially told Digiday that "This is the online version of an ad that ran on page A17 in yesterday's paper. The ad was reviewed internally and complies with our police on advocacy ads." But the language was later amended, as a Times spokesperson told Digiday: "We think the phrase 'radical Islamists' would have been better than 'Islamists' … The advertiser agreed to the change and the ad has been updated on nytimes.com."

The IPT, however, noted that the request to change language came as a surprise, seeing as the ad was only vetted on Tuesday:

1. Erin @sqwerin

   You don't need to be a fan of @TheIPT to be concerned about @nytimes editing their ad. https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/469571803921543168 …

InvestigativeProject @TheIPT

Follow

Part 4 @sqwerin This was all a surprise, since our ad was vetted and approved by their compliance department Tuesday.

10:08 AM - 23 May 2014

As Cair national communications director Ibrahim Hooper told Digiday, "Thank god for small favors, I guess." But making such a minor change seems hardly significant, given that many consider "Islamist" to be a loaded term, and it was allowed to run freely.

The aforementioned full-page ad on page A17 of the Timesdemonstrates that some serious planning went into this entire endeavor. The print ad references "Islamic terror" 19 times, while making veiled references to the dormant threats within the US. The Times's decision to run both print and online ads is even more surprising when one realizes that the package was all but certainly timed to coincide with the opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum to the public.

Though there is a long history of advocacy ads in the dead-tree version of the Times, a sitewide interstitial seems infinitely more aggressive than a print ad. It is also most certainly significantly more expensive.

The IPT was founded in 1995 by Steven Emerson, whom Cair described as a "self-described terrorism expert" in its disgruntled letter to the Times. He's no stranger to Islamophobic sloganeering unsupported by facts. For instance, the year that he founded the IPT, he characterized the Oklahoma City Bombing as one with a "Middle East trait", and claimed that "Oklahoma City, I can tell you, is probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East." (Two right-wing Americans, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols – neither of whom had ties to Muslims – were later convicted of the bombing).

More recently, he implicated a Saudi national in the Boston Marathon bombing based on his supposed access to "classified information". (No Saudi national has ever been publicly linked to the Boston Marathon bombings.)

Right-wing groups such as the IPT are not going to go away, and will continue to spout fear-mongering anti-Islam messages protected by the First Amendment. But those protections don't require that the Times (or any newspaper) give them a platform from which to proselytize a worldview based in hate and xenophobia. As ever with "advocacy" such as the IPT's, it is important to remember that there is a persistent battle for narratives.

The New York Times delivers a gleaming air of legitimacy to the words on screen – even when those words are paid for by Islamophobes to spread their alarmist messages. So one has to ask why an organization with such high ethical standards on its editorial side would not apply those standards to their advertising content.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/23/new-york-times-islamophobic-ad