The “Big Lie” is such a big part of NYT rhetoric - and beyond the NYT itself, such a big part of progressive denunciation of ideas that lie outside the charmed circle of wokeness - that it is useful to go back to the origins of the concept. You can skip the next paragraph if you prefer to avoid close encounters of the Third Reich kind. Let me leave the Michelle Goldberg story hanging just a little longer. people who do not rely on the NYT to judge the accuracy of a claim. The Times also takes the trouble, now and then, to recapitulate the underlying concept: make your lie big enough and sufficiently beyond the realm of credibility, and a substantial number of really gullible people will believe it, i.e. But since the 2020 election, the Times has reveled in calling any claim about the integrity of the president vote “the Big Lie.” “ The Art of the Lie? The Bigger the Better” by Andrew Higgins, January 10, 2021, exemplifies the genre, but hardly a day goes by that the Times doesn’t remind readers that any doubts about 2020 election integrity are the pillow-stuffing of the Big Lie. Krugman’s attribution of “Big Lies” to Trump is only one of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of such stories and opinion pieces in the Times over the last several years to deploy this conceit. A year ago, before the election, Times columnist Paul Krugman served up “ The War on Truth Reaches Its Climax: Trump is telling two big lies, and a third will come soon.” Per Krugman, “The first big lie is the claim that America is being menaced by hordes of ‘rioters, looters, arsonists, gun-grabbers, flag-burners, Marxists.’” The other Big Lie, Krugman nominates, was Trump’s “dismissal of the pandemic threat, his mocking of precautionary measures like mask-wearing,” actions which, Krugman explained, “have done a lot to help the coronavirus spread.” Times writers used it tirelessly during and after the Trump years. forcibly sodomized) in a girl’s restroom in a Loudoun County, Virginia school, she serves up her diversion under the title “ The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia.”Īmong the attractions of calling what happened in Virginia “the Big Lie” is that Times readers know the term so well. Thus when New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wants to reassure progressive voters that they can ignore the story about a ninth-grade girl who was raped (i.e. Damnable lies used to be the most condemned, but today the foulest of all perfidious, incarnadine, silken and sulfurous lies are Big Lies. To sideline their interests is to accede to a backlash that has just begun.Lies come in all shapes and sizes, colors, odors, textures and tastes. Some are only little white lies, but more often the accompanying adjective suggests something unpleasant. “The focus must be on protecting the groups of people who are targets precisely because of their identities. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

She is an on-air contributor to MSNBC, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Guardian and many other publications. Her first book was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, and her second won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize and the J. She is the author of three books: Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, and The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since 2017 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.

Michelle goldberg nytimes today