We’ve run this piece before, but it needs to be seen again. — Ed.
Sept 18, 2008
About a month ago, theNew York Times reported that the new projected “year of minority” for whites will be 2042, instead of 2050, as previously predicted.
The next day, a vigilant Times reader telephoned the writer of the story, Sam Roberts, with a proposal. The coming minority status of whites is a huge, absolutely huge, story. The Times could fan reporters out across the country looking for reactions and thoughts to it. Whether good, bad or indifferent, there would be no shortage of opinions. “What’s your opinion of it?” Roberts asked the reader, who responded that he didn’t think it was a positive thing. But, the reader offered, surely there are any number of opinions on the topic, all of which would make for a hell of a story. In all seriousness, you could quote Morris Dees, David Duke, and everyone in between. Roberts agreed that it was a good idea, and promised to pass the idea along.
Thus far, the New York Times has not written such a story. And, I’m fairly confident that it will never run such a story, for reasons I’ll explain below (yet if I am proved wrong, I will be very pleased). In the meantime, I found it telling that about a month later, Mr. Roberts appeared in print again, not with a story about the white view of impending minority status, but witha story suggesting that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish spies executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union, were treated unfairly.
By his own admission, the Rosenberg case is an obsession for Mr. Roberts, who has written a book about it, which was adapted toa play.
I don’t know whether Mr. Roberts is himself Jewish, but his deep interest in the Rosenberg case (he was “haunted” by the funeral procession outside his Brooklyn home as a small boy) and eagerness to defend the Rosenbergs certainly tracks Jewish interests. The Rosenberg case was of intense interest to Jews for many different reasons, one of which was that it exposed Jews as tending to be disloyal to the United States and favoring the Soviet Union and communism generally. So, it would serve Jewish interests for a journalist to “uncover” any information that would complicate this view, and Mr. Roberts has certainly obliged. He has been quoted as saying that the Soviet Union would have created the weapons they intended to create with or without the spying by Julius Rosenberg (as if this excuses the treason).