Join the 14 Percent Club! We Won!

beat the devil

By Alexander Cockburn

This article appeared in the May 30, 2005 edition of The Nation.

May 12, 2005

Sign here to become a member of the 14 Percent Club. Twenty bucks plus shipping and handling gets you the T-shirt. Credentials for membership derive from a recent study from the Pew Research Center disclosing, in the words of Katharine Seelye of the New York Times on May 9, that "45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing of what they read in their daily newspapers.... When specific newspapers were mentioned, The Times fared about average, with 21 per- cent of readers believing all or most of what they read in The Times and 14 percent believing almost nothing."

Chalk up another victory for the left. We've been at it for thirty years at least, saying that most things in the Times are distortions of reality or outright lies, and here is a robust slice of the American people agreeing with us.

Of course, the fainthearts who believe that the left can never win anything will say that the credit should go to moles at the Times, boring from within, hollowing out the mighty edifice with year upon year of willful falsehoods until at last the whole ponderous structure is crumbling into dust, crushing all within. True to a point. Heroic moles, entombed in the rubble of your own making, Judith Miller and all the others, back through to the suzerain of sappers, A.M. Rosenthal, we salute you all!

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About Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn has been The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist since 1984. He is the author or co-author of several books, including the best-selling collection of essays Corruptions of Empire (1987), and a contributor to many publications, from The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal to alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. With Jeffrey St. Clair, he edits the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch, which have a substantial world audience. more...
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