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Ode to The New York Times

O, soulless source of leftist propaganda
Known still throughout the world as “The Gray Lady”—
You promulgate destructive memoranda
From sources Soros-like—depraved and shady.
O, bastion of foul racism—malicious,
And full of maladroit depravity!
You warp the news with communist pollution;
Your social engineering is pernicious;
And where your heart should be: a cavity
So vast it masks your leftist revolution.

O, New York Times, the hatred that you spew!
I marvel at the condescending power
With which you spread your poison witch’s brew
Of bullshit from your high and mighty tower.
That you would like to reboot Stalin’s reign
Seems clear from all the facts that you get wrong.
Truth hides beneath a shell as hard as tortoise.
You hate most Jews, treat Trump with smug disdain,
And schemingly defame the Falun Gong.
O, let this ode presage your rigor mortis!

You thrill to spread wrong data on each region
As moral clarity degrades to gray.
Your staff and columnists are truly Legion
With ethics which seem softer than wet clay.
You claim to motivations which are kind
But cloak what’s real behind a gaslit mist
Of falsity so bright it makes one squint
And fuels your quest to make the sighted blind.
O, Times, you’ve proven Satan does exist
And spins his web both online and in print.

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Brian Yapko is a retired lawyer whose poetry has appeared in over fifty journals.  He is the winner of the 2023 SCP International Poetry Competition. Brian is also the author of several short stories, the science fiction novel El Nuevo Mundo and the gothic archaeological novel  Bleeding Stone.  He lives in Wimauma, Florida.

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40 Responses

  1. Phil S. Rogers

    Brian; You made my morning with one hopeful line.
    “O, let this ode presage your rigor mortis!”

    Reply
  2. Brian Yapko

    Readers, this poem related back directly to Evan Mantyk’s recent article about the NY Times’ shameful coverage of Shen Yun Performing Arts linked here: https://classicalpoets.org/2025/02/the-new-york-times-attack-on-shen-yun-is-an-attack-on-arts-and-culture-a-message-from-the-editor/

    But purely by coincidence this linked article on the New York Times came out this morning:

    https://johnkassnews.com/how-ny-times-and-jacobin-friends-killed-america/

    The following lines especially caught my eye: “Because of its dominant position in corporate journalism, the New York Times has never been held accountable. It leverages corporate media but has never taken responsibility for misinformation and malfeasance. The newspaper’s lies have been rewarded with dominant market position and those Pulitzer Prizes based on lies were wrapped adulation based on fear.

    “Far from its carefully nurtured Hollywood image as the fearless speaker of “truth to power,” the old gray lady is the newspaper of the Deep State and the American Kemalists who control and feed the Deep State.”

    Reply
  3. Roy Eugene Peterson

    “The New York Times” sold its coverage of news to the devil decades ago and continues to attempt to blind the world with their leftist and communist propaganda. Soros is proud of his spawn. Your excellent writing covers all the classical poet bases: meter, rhyme, and message with scintillating insightful lines that clearly invoke the power of the poet.

    Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Roy, thank you very much for a generous comment which is also very observant of the historical context. The NYT did indeed sell its coverage of news to the devil many decades ago. It is worth noting that during the Holocaust, the New York Times buried its coverage of crimes against humanity — especially burying the Jewish identity of victims. I know how interested you are in history, so let me direct you to Professor Laurel Leff’s “Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (2005).” https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust-Important-Newspaper/dp/0521607825
      Professor Leff’s book is a definitive study of The New York Times’ coverage – or lack of coverage – of the German genocide of the Jews of Europe and recalls how news of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ was hidden from readers and – because of the newspaper’s influence on other media – from America at large. The conduct of the NYT makes it consistently easy to be outraged by its consistent lack of a moral compass.

      Reply
  4. Mark Stellinga

    Brian, as you know, you can say the same about the Boston Globe, the L. A. Times, the Washington Post, etc., etc., etc.! If only these deceptive rags could be permanently silenced there would be so far fewer radical left wing protests and Tesla-burnings, etc., and the one minor tweak I’d make to this top notch Yapko sizzler is: O, let this ode INDUCE your rigor mortis! 🙂 Great piece –

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Yes, it is a great piece. Brian’s done it again, with as much vehemence as usual and maybe more ooetic stops. But as I read it I was thinking along the lines of your opening sentence, Mark. We need the paean to the exceptional truthful and insightful rag (if indeed it exists!), where disciplined, hard-nosed research journalism is valued. Maybe this is the next task for Brian.

      Reply
      • Mark Stellinga

        He could certainly handle it, Julian, and, thanks to the Dems, there’ll never be a shortage of raunchy subject matter in this political climate –

      • Brian Yapko

        Thank you so much, Julian! I so agree with you and Mark about the need for that “exceptional truthful and insightful rag.” I wish I could be involved in the journalism of such a rag rather than the writing of a paean to it. But you’ve piqued my interest! It would indeed be a pleasure to write a tribute to a (clearly hypothetical) journal that actually reported the news and reported it objectively.

        Or perhaps it would be worthwhile to pen an authentically sincere tribute to old news figures like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. Ubi sunt? Where are the ethical, objective journalists of yesteryear…? I’ll see if I can come up with something.

      • Brian Yapko

        Mark, I appreciate the vote of confidence but I’m going to skip the “raunchy” submit matter as I’ve had my fill of writing about Democrats. Writing about them gives me a sour stomach. I already did poems on Tim Waltz and Kamala Harris. Next in line would be Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I simply don’t have the strength.

    • Brian Yapko

      Thank you so much, Mark! I’m laughing with approval at your “revision” of my rigor mortis line. You are so right about much of the mainstream media which is in desperate need of reform. Corroborating your point of view, I came across this opinion piece two days ago on Real Clear Politics: https://tippinsights.com/the-medias-kamikaze-death-spiral-lies-hubris-and-a-profession-in-ruins/#google_vignette
      Anyone interested in getting to the truth must develop strong investigative and research skills as well as good personal boundaries to keep the personal attacks at bay.

      Reply
  5. Warren Bonham

    A heart-breaking but sadly accurate depiction of the journalist class. You probably saw the Op Ed that was published last weekend in which the NYT finally acknowledged that the Covid lab-leak theory is probably correct after adamantly labeling anyone as a racist for suggesting this over the past 4+ years. Their idea of journalism is unquestioningly parroting the views of people they agree with while quoting “unnamed sources” who slime people they disagree with.

    Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Thank you very much, Warren. Now that you mention it, you’re right: it is heart-breaking. There was a time when journalism was a noble profession, when journalists could be trusted to do their best to be objective and fair sources of the news, when they kept their personal politics out of it. I’m remembering the days of Walter Cronkite (I’m just barely old enough to remember him and how respected he was.) Yes, I read about the Covid fiasco, which is only the latest in a long series of obfuscations and manipulations. The NYT has this nasty habit of reporting the news as they WANT the news to be. So instead of observing neutrality, they cherry-pick the facts in stories, engage in spin, misinterpret and dictate to readers what they should think about a story. This is all very Soviet. It is also very Third Reich where Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl mastered the art of propaganda. There is a special place in hell for those who take a fiduciary position of trust and turn it into a platform for propaganda, social engineering, event-manipulation and ideological aggrandizement.

      Reply
  6. Joseph S. Salemi

    The Times was infamous in the 1930s for its support of Stalin and Stalinist terror. One of its dyed-in-the-wool liars, Walter Duranty, was a blatant defender of the Moscow show-trials that legalized the judicial murder of thousands of Russians; and Duranty wrote of the Soviet-planned Holomodor of kulaks in the Ukraine, saying that “there is no famine in the Ukraine, but shortages of food have caused great loss of life.”

    One of the earliest conservative “memes” was one that showed a smug Fidel Castro sitting on the island of Cuba, saying “I got my job through the New York Times.” (This was a well-know advertising slogan of the Times back in the 50s and 60s.) The Times did everything it could to shore up and support the Communist regime in that unhappy island.

    The paper is the Pravda of the American Deep State. Thank you, Brian, for this magnificent slam of her. As for the habit of calling her “The Grey Lady,” I think it better to refer to her with the words that Ezra Pound used for a dying civilization: “An old bitch, gone in the teeth.”

    Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Joe, thank you for your very generous and insightful comment. I knew about the Times ignoring or burying the crimes of the Third Reich, but I did not know how much they had supported Stalin and his violent rule over the Soviet Union. Nor did I know the extent to which they propped up Cuba (although I am aware of their strange loyalty to the CCP.)

      That the New York Times could put its finger on the scale to support communists and fascists and do so at the expense of innocent civilians and American interests over such a long course of time is telling and deeply disturbing. It is now becoming clear to me that this is not a unilateral course of action but is precisely how readers want it to be. Such readers apparently will sacrifice much (truth, facts, basic biology, basic humanity come to mind) to preserve their confirmation bias. They do not want to be shaken out of a liberal complacency that the NYT strokes.

      This realization of the bilateral, consensual nature of the relationship between the propagandistic Times and its loyal, unskeptical readers is something of a revelation to me. It explains not only NYT support of the Deep State but a deeply-rooted desire for its readership not to challenge the NYT view of reality. The NYT doesn’t merely attract liberal readership — it actually creates it. Goebbels would be proud of their “mostly peaceful” results.

      Your hilarious comment regarding the Times as “an old bitch, gone in the teeth” gave me both a laugh and a shudder.

      Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Thank you so much, Paulette, for reading and commenting! I appreciate that “Amen!”

      Reply
  8. C.B. Anderson

    Bingo! Brian. This poem could have gone on forever and still not have covered every perfidious detail. I know persons who subscribe to this insidious rag, and some of them are my oldest friends. I’m unsure what to do, but it’s not going to be pretty, I’m sure. New York City is once again a shithole inhabited by rabid rats, but I still live in Massachusetts, which is not much better, so who am I to complain? Assholes are always at the top, and shit rolls downhill. Keep it up.

    Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Thank you very much, C.B. You’re so right! This poem could have gone on and on with specific examples of NYT perfidy. But the stomach can only take so much. I appreciate your personal perspective: had a friend for many years (past-tense since the election) who swore by the New York Times and condescendingly rebuffed my criticisms no matter how many times I demonstrated with examples of great specificity how they were manipulating stories and especially headlines. It’s like leftists in general — no amount of evidence seems to pull them out of the narrative they’ve become invested in to the exclusion of all rationality. They’re like abused wives who can’t be persuaded to think ill of their abusive spouses.

      Reply
  9. fred schueler

    Egad! Isn’t it well known that the NYT is a fountainhead of misinformation supporting the right wing-nut deep state, and excusing all the recent trumpistic unconstitutionality in the Unruly States?

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Maybe you should start worrying about the “Fragile Inheritance” of objective journalism before you come here to shoot your mouth off.

      Reply
      • Brian Yapko

        I agree, Joe. To come here and mouth off on this of all sites in favor of completely biased, ideologically-based reporting is an unwelcome travesty. Objective reporting is a fragile inheritance indeed which, I fear, has been as scarce as hens’ teeth since the 1970s.

    • Brian Yapko

      Well, Mr. Schueler, thank you for reading and commenting. I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about because the New York Times’ left-wing bias is about as well-documented as you can get going back 90 years. And I doubt that there is a paper on the planet that is more anti-Trump than the NYT. They still have a lot to answer for over the discredited Russia-collusion hoax. I’m waiting for the Times to return its fraudulently procured Pulitzer.

      Reply
  10. Scharlie Meeuws

    Brian, I am amazed to find you, the real truth seeker with courage galore, to speak it out what more and more people are truly thinking! Congratulations to this brilliant creation! And greetings from the other side of the pond, the, at the moment, gray and drizzling England

    Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Thank you so much for reading and commenting, Scharlie! I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that people across the pond are familiar with the New York Times. I’m certainly familiar with (though not a fan of) The Guardian. I pray for England’s well-being all the time knowing that the U.K. faces some tough challenges of its own. Warmest greetings back from sunny Florida!

      Reply
  11. Brian Yapko

    Readers: I just came across this resignation letter from the highly regarded journalist Bari Weiss, who was driven from the New York Times by its demands for leftist ideological purity amongs its writers. Their “objectivity” is nonexistent. They are, as Dr. Salemi has noted above, America’s Pravda.

    https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

    Reply
  12. Mike Bryant

    Brian. The poem is brilliant. I like your subtle use of alliteration, but mostly I like the in-your-face disgust. The New York Times has twisted truths and peddled half-lies for over fifty years. It’s a willing prostitute for power, from the CIA’s fingerprints on Operation Mockingbird and Watergate to cozy leaks for Soros and his USAID tainted NGOs. Even before the CIA took over the newsroom in the ‘60s, the Times was already a huge supporter of communism.
    I think the rigor mortis is done… we’re watching the bloated, rotting corpse of a former star of the mainstream media along with her coven which includes CNN and AP News. May Citizen Journalism long reign.

    The New York Times has had many critics, here are a few:

    “I really love the New York Times, I really do. You guys are the best. You do some of the most accurate, precise reporting in news. You never fail to write down exactly… whatever the police have given you to say, really powerful.” – Trevor Noah

    “Well, I’m not sure the New York Times was consciously trying to trivialise me, but the effect of it is to put everything in the same category as the gossip you read in the magazines you pick up at supermarket counters. … Whatever the purpose of such a tone is, the effect is to make it appear that anyone who departs from orthodox political doctrine is in some ways laughable.” – Noam Chomsky

    “The New York Times’ long-standing motto, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ should be changed to reflect today’s reality: ‘Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.’” – Thomas Sowell

    “Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. … I can think of a lot of things that aren’t fit to print that they’ve printed.” – Christopher Hitchens

    Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Thank you very much indeed, Mike. If any entity is deserving of “in your face disgust” it’s the Times. They’re actually worse, in my book, then politicians. We expect politicians to be partisan. They do not purport to be anything other than zealous advocates for their constituents and their causes. We see it coming and so we are prepared. But a newspaper such as the Times — presenting itself as an objective, neutral platform for newsworthy stories and then demonstrating over and over again that it is in fact a source of propaganda for certain causes and against certain causes makes my blood boil. It may have to do with my law background, but I was trained to expect judges to be neutral, news organizations to be neutral and scientists to be neutral. Ethical standards meant something. These professionals had the integrity and lack of self-interested expected of fiduciaries. While this was always something of a naive ideal, ethical conduct and nonpartisanship was nonetheless honorably pursued by the lion’s share of such practitioners. Now there is very little attempt to hide the fact that each of these professions is as partisan as it was in 1930s Russia or Germany, where the scientists were corrupt as they pursued eugenics and efficient methods of mass murder, where the judges simply acted as arms of the gestapo or the politburo, and where the media, dominated by the likes of Goebbels in Germany or Pravda in the U.S.S.R., zealously advocated on behalf of their murderous ideologies. under the phony rubric of “truth.” The U.S.under the Obama and Biden regimes has dangerously flirted with these very tools of statecraft and it is a miracle that we have been spared the full flowering of their cynical manipulations. But the miracle is yet to come. It will take a miracle to bring objectivity and neutrality back to the media, the judiciary and the science industry.

      I was tickled by the quotes you offered regarding the Times and its lack of journalistic integrity. I especially liked your Sowell quote: “Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.” That about sums it up.

      Reply
      • Patricia Redfern

        An excellent write , my friend! Full of hell and fury, and rightly so! Their clear hatred of
        supporters of law and order , so obvious..their obvious hatred of Isreal and right wing Jewish America is non existent, I bet they support the overthrow of the former president Brazil who supports rights and jail hin for life, the left plams the same with President Trump, Be glad we have freedom of speech here. Great Britain id horrid on free Speech, thank you.

  13. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Brian, I just love a good ode – and yours shines. I don’t think I’ve written a satirical one and this is inspirational. I love the serpent’s hiss in the sibilant opening line and the naming of the culprit in the close – very clever. And those delicious malicious / pernicious rhymes, and tortoise / rigor mortis – hats off to that one. It’s a beauty. A perfectly wrought piece exposing the poisonous machinations of “a soulless source of leftist propaganda” – a brave, bold, and beautiful poem! Very well done indeed!

    Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Thank you so much, Susan! Doing an ode in a sarcastic vein just seemed like a natural, snarky way to address an institution which wrongfully claims “venerability.” I’m so glad you liked that tortoise/rigor mortis rhyme! I worried that it was a bit forced but it made me laugh. The region/Legion rhyme probably was a bit too obvious but I had to get the biblically demonic “Legion” into the poem. I simply had to! I always appreciate your supportive comments, Susan, and have great gratitude for your willingness to also speak out for truth bravely, boldly and beautifully!

      Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      This is hilarious, Mike! I actually thought it was real until I saw that The Glorious American is a satire site. That being said, as you indicated, it’s pretty much on-point. For those readers who don’t want to follow the link:

      The New York Times forgets to fill in the template before print: “Nation Shocked as Donald Trump [then think of the worst possible thing and type it right here].

      I’d laugh even harder except that I suspect this satire is 100% true.

      Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Brian, a great deal of the silence of the New York Times (and the Democrat Party) on the blatant anti-Semitism of protesters and freakish types like Ilhan Omar has to do with FEAR.

      Much of mainstream media and the Democrat Party are terrified of their employees and their core base of supporters. Both the Times and the Disney company are completely in the grip of their energized and ideologically fanatical staff of workers, and the Democrats are paralyzed with fear of alienating their most dedicated and active partisans. Look at the current situation with the very liberal and Jewish Senator Schumer — one small misstep in the eyes of the left has made him a hated target.

      A Democratic political operative once said this to me, in the days when I was still active in political campaigns: “A problem for us Dems is the screechy types.” By this he meant activists, feminists, deep environmentalists, hard-core progressives and civil-rights workers, and many left-wing academics and yuppies. The Democrat political organization has to walk on eggs constantly with these screechy types.

      A great deal of the anti-Israel hatred is also coming from Jews, who are left-liberals by commitment and belief, and Jews only by accident of birth.

      Reply
      • Patricia Redfern

        Awesome response, Joseph! I particularly loved your last paragraph. However in this last election to the best of my knowledge knowledge, were unwilling to back Kamala that much, Huzzah,
        If I am wrong about that, please let me know.
        Gracias, Patricia.

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