Back in the late 1990s, when I began my writing career, I remember meeting a professor of journalism who had been a journalist for decades for the Gannett network of newspapers. If I recall correctly, he was a professor at Rutgers University. We got to talking about journalistic ethics and he told me candidly, “If you know what you are doing, you can completely eviscerate a person or a group and still stick to the rules of journalism. It is done all the time, although I think it is unethical.”
When I read the New York Times “investigative report” on Sunday, prominently featured “above the fold” on the front page of the paper, the first thing I thought of were the words of that professor.
(As an aside, my colleague, Rabbi Yochonon Donn, wryly remarked, “80 years ago [when Jews were being slaughtered en masse], we were stuck on the bottom of page 26. Now we’re on the front page, on top of the fold.”)
You see, they obviously handpicked journalists with Jewish names to avoid allegations of anti-Semitism and chose the low hanging fruit, the Satmar community and those similar, but they are really referring to all visibly frum Jews who are not as “enlightened” as they are.
The New York Times Disapproves for Your Lifestyle
That means me and you reading this article. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are Satmar-style chassidish, yeshivish, American frum, or whether you live in New York or anywhere else. The New York Times disapproves of your lifestyle. Not only that, but they want to make you and me into criminals for educating our children the way that we see fit. There are numerous passages in the article that prove as much.
Firstly, however, I want to say that I am not here to condone the Satmar style secular education standards, nor do I feel that it is my place to disparage them. I will say that it is not the way I was raised, nor are their standards those with which I educate my own children.
That said, the article was there not just to criticize the level of secular education provided in that network of schools, but to underhandedly cast aspersions on the entire chareidi community’s right to educate their children in the way they see fit.
Here are a couple of quotes from the article, where the so-called investigative journalists show their real agenda, as they criticize schools for imposing standards that actually impose religious standards on those attending the schools.
