James LeMoyne (c. 1953- ) wrote regularly for the New York Times from 1983 to 1990. He was their top reporter in El Salvador from 1984 to 1988.
Noam Chomsky said:
James LeMoyne is an absolute crook, he’s one of the most dishonest journalists I’ve ever seen.
Some examples:
1. Voters shot dead by guerrillas:
Before the elections in El Salvador in 1988 LeMoyne reported that two men registered to vote and later had their registration cards put in their mouths by guerrillas who then shot them dead. The State Department used this story to show Congress how the guerrillas were undermining the elections.
LeMoyne reported the story as if he had been in that part of the country. Which was odd because the military did not allow reporters to go there. Stranger still: LeMoyne was not even in El Salvador at the time!
What LeMoyne did not tell us is that he copied the story out of a newspaper in El Salvador – and then left out the part that it was just something some army officer said!
As it turned out, one of the two voters was very much alive and the other one had never been born!
2. Nicaragua supplying arms to the guerrillas:
After peace was made in Central America in 1987, much against American wishes, LeMoyne reported there was “ample evidence” that Nicaragua was supplying arms to the guerrillas in El Salvador. He and others at the Times repeated this over and over again. But they would not say what the “ample evidence” was. Because, as it turned out, there was no ample evidence: it was just hearsay.
3. Weakening support for the guerrillas:
In 1988 most observers said that 20,000 came out for the May Day parade in El Salvador, yet LeMoyne said it was only 3,000. He said this showed weakening support for the guerrillas since two years before 40,000 came out. Except that two years before LeMoyne himself said that it was 20,000.
At each turn his printed lies supported the American foreign policy favoured by the US Embassy, the rich and powerful in El Salvador – and by his editor back in New York, A.M. Rosenthal.
In 1989 he wrote an article on the civil war in El Salvador for Foreign Affairs magazine.
Next he works for the United Nations.
In 2001 the UN said:
Mr LeMoyne has worked in peace processes, complex crises and peace-building for 20 years. He has been involved with the processes in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, Guatemala and Colombia.
His part at the UN does not become big enough to make the news, however, till 2002 when Kofi Annan sends him to Colombia to try to make peace between the government and the FARC guerrillas.
He is now at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Switzerland, which employs people good at stopping wars.
LeMoyne was born in Germany. He grew up in Europe, Latin America and the States and is an American citizen. He went to Harvard, Oxford and the London School of Economics. He wrote for the Harvard Crimson from 1974 to 1975.
See also:
Tools, tools everywhere. It’s so much easier than caring about ordinary people, and so much more $ too.
I’m sure these types are all over the MSM…
That’s an understatement, CDF! I worked on a Murdoch newspaper in the nineties and it was a very rude awakening. I leave it to John Swainton — chief of staff with the New York Times in the 1860s-70s — to sum it up:
“There is no such thing as a free press. You know it and I know it. There’s not one of you who would dare to write his honest opinion. The business of a journalist is to destroy truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell himself, his country and his race for his daily bread. We are tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks; they pull the strings, we dance; our talents, our possibilities and our lives are the property of these men, we are intellectual prostitutes.”
(quote from his retirement speech to his staff, from an article by Dana Baker on “Media Suppression” in Profile Magazine)
@ maruja
Thanks for the quote!
@ Abagond
How did you zero in on this one?
I was looking to see if Chomsky had anything to say about the PBS NewsHour (MacNeil/Lehrer) and found out about LeMoyne.
Once again, Abagond…. you have superceded mine and others’ expectations. It’s a definite honor to frequent your blog.
Once again, good stuff abagond! the media is and has always been double edged sword. Cheezy scumbags like this make it smell bad. Lucky we have Wikileaks and some journalists who still do that job.
People like James LeMoyne don’t make the mainstream media smell any worse than it is. They serve the purpose of its owners, which is to sell advertising, foment consumerism, and keep us all ignorant of the outside world and focussed on house/car/kids/internet debates about who’s hotter.
I find it difficult to take your arguments seriously when you refer to the country Colombia as “Columbia.” Given that you seem desperate to convey a high level of argumentative sophistication in this post, one would think you would correct such an obviously glaring error.
@ drifter26
Thanks for the correction.