The NYT Prefers its Own Conspiracy Theories

April 1, 2025 by Jack Cashill

Here’s what to know,” insisted the New York Times Adam Nagourney in a lead editorial the day the JFK files dropped. “Oswald still did it.” If there was such a thing as a Confirmation Bias Olympics, Nagourney would have earned the right to represent the U.S. Reviewing and dismissing 64,000 pages of National Archives material in fewer than 24 hours is no small accomplishment even by the standards of the New York Times.

As opinion writer David Wallace-Wells reminded his readers a week later, the Times decides what is a valid conspiracy theory and what is not. Apparently, JFK theories are not. Wrote the supercilious Wallace-Wells, the JFK files “turned out to be, by the standards of conspiracy hype, a total dud.”

Although Wikipedia describes me as “an American author, blogger and conspiracy theorist,” I remain agnostic on the JFK assassination. If the files turn out to be a “total dud,” so be it. Similarly, if they indict LBJ and a rogue crew of CIA contractors, I would not be surprised.

In either case, what is eerily true is that Wallace-Wells used the same Alinskyite strategy to ridicule conservative investigators that the Times used nearly 30 years ago to defame JFK’s legendary press secretary Pierre Salinger. Salinger’s sin was to reveal the truth behind the 1996 shootdown of TWA Flight 800, a genuine conspiracy in which the Times played a critical role.

According to Wallace-Wells, “we are living in a golden age for conspiracy theory.” In the way of example, for instance, he wrote, “It is now perfectly reasonable, for instance, to believe that a novel virus that killed more than 20 million people worldwide and upended for years the daily life of billions was engineered by scientists and then released by accident, with a global cover-up improvised in the months that followed.”

Coy with his language, Wallace-Wells refused to acknowledge that this “conspiracy theory” proved to be true, and that the Times played a critical role in suppressing the truth, a truth he has a hard time swallowing.

Last month Wallace-Wells headlined an opinion piece, “The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else.” If there were an Olympics for Jesuitical reasoning, Wallace-Wells would be a gold medalist. To make this argument, he ignored all contrary evidence and elevated a few floating, unverifiable numbers to the “gotcha” level.

The people he mocked, the “Covid minimizers and vaccine skeptics,” were the ones paying attention in 2020, the ones least susceptible to the hysteria ginned up by the Times. As tangible proof of the same, I would refer Wallace-Wells to a survey done by Franklin Templeton-Gallup during the last six months of 2020.

In the survey, some 35,000 Americans were asked a series of questions, the most revealing: “What percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?” Democrats proved particularly vulnerable to major media propaganda. Some 41 percent believed that 50 percent or more of those who contracted COVID would end up in the hospital. Another 28 percent answered 20-50 percent.

The correct answer was 1-5 percent. In sum, 69 percent of Democrats were deeply misinformed, and they translated their unfounded alarm into public policy. These policies often bordered on tyranny and ruined more lives, especially young lives, than COVID did.

Making the age of conspiracies so golden is the one technology that the major media still resent, what Wallace-Wells described as “a network of infinite wormholes, some opening up into full-on alternate realities like QAnon and sudden vaccine death.” Ah, yes, the internet, forever condemned for costing the major media their monopoly on information.

Reading Wallace-Wells’s internet bash recalled the Times treatment of Salinger. In the way of background, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747, en route from New York to Paris on July 17, 1996, crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. At the time, Salinger was working in Paris where the interest in TWA 800 was understandably high. Some 36 French citizens were killed in the crash.

With a likely assist from French intelligence, Salinger was put in touch with retired United Airline pilot and accident investigator Dick Russell. Having gathered information through his own network of aviation insiders, Russell sent a summary e-mail to his associates with the message, “TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy guided missile ship which was in area W-105. It has been a cover-up from the word go.”

Salinger remained a loyal enough Democrat to sit on his information until it lost its political punch. He broke his silence at an aviation conference in the French resort city of Cannes two days after Bill Clinton’s reelection on November 4, 1996.

There, Salinger told the assembled executives that he had “very important details that show the plane was brought down by a U.S. Navy missile.” He added the obvious: “If the news came out that an American naval ship shot down that plane it would be something that would make the public very very unhappy and could have an effect on the election.”

Without making a direct accusation, Salinger offered a plausible motive for the cover-up by the Clinton White House, namely to assure reelection. The U.S. Navy would not have, and could not have, concealed this disaster on its own. To execute the cover-up, the White had the FBI illegally seize the investigation from the NTSB and the CIA shadow the FBI.

When Salinger went public with his missile intel, the FBI was still a year away from closing the case. That uncertainty did not stop the Times from going full Alinsky on Salinger -- "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” -- for challenging the shifting party line.

In 1996, the Times pushed back hard against Salinger’s reliance on the internet. In the month of November alone, the Times ran four articles with headlines that mocked him. On November 24, 1996, for instance, just four months after the crash, the Times ran an all-too-typical article headlined “Pierre, Is That a Masonic Flag on the Moon?”

In the first sentence reporter George Johnson ridiculed the internet with its “throbbing, fevered brain.” Johnson directed his contempt at those ordinary Americans whose Internet use threatened the Times’ hegemony on the news. “Electrified by the Internet,” Johnson complained, “suspicions about the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 were almost instantly transmuted into convictions that it was the result of friendly fire.”

“It was all linked to Whitewater,” Johnson scoffed, “unless the missile was meant for a visiting U.F.O.?” Johnson’s reference to “Whitewater” was not uncommon. He made slighting illusions as well to Waco, Ruby Ridge, Arkansas state troopers, Vincent Foster, and other sources of amusement in Clinton-era newsrooms. A generation later, Wallace-Wells was doing the same with “alternate realities like QAnon and sudden vaccine death.”

What Johnson was attempting to do was to paint TWA 800 as one wacky anti-Clinton conspiracy out of many. What he did not do -- no one at the Times did -- was speak to any of the 258 FBI witnesses to a likely missile strike, an unconscionable act of journalistic malpractice.

Nearly 30 years after the TWA 800 disaster, the Times is still suppressing information and mocking those who resist. As Wallace-Wells assured us, “The new age of political paranoia obviously reflects a toxic efflorescence of grass-roots distrust, not to mention the structural pathologies of a new information environment.”

Huh?