The truth is hard
The truth is hidden.
The truth must be pursued.
The truth is hard to bear.
The truth is rarely simple.
The truth isn’t so obvious.
The truth is necessary.
The truth can’t be glossed over.
The truth has no agenda.
The truth can’t be manufactured.
The truth doesn’t take sides.
The truth isn’t red or blue.
The truth is hard to accept.
The truth pulls no punches.
The truth is powerful.
The truth is under attack.
The truth is worth defending.
The truth requires taking a stand.
The truth is more important now than ever.*

[signed] The New York Times

Every purchase supports New York Times journalism.

–   –   –

The above is, verbatim, from a full-page ad two or three days ago in the Times’s A section, for hoodies bearing the sentences about truth in light lettering on a dark background.

–   –   –

Then, yesterday, came an example of New York Times journalism inside the same section in a story headline under the headline “Lee Re-edits Series That Features 9/11 Conspiracists.” Staffers Julia Jacobs and Reggie Ugwu get the byline, and Kevin Roose is acknowledged as having “contributed reporting.”

The Lee in question is filmmaker Spike Lee. His HBO series is titled “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½.” The “conspiracists,” apparently, are Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Here’s the top paragraph: “Facing mounting criticism for spotlighting conspiracists in his new HBO documentary series about the Sept. 11 attacks on New York, the filmmaker Spike Lee said Wednesday that he was re-editing the final episode.”

This treatment of the Lee’s series is echoed in a report in the Los Angeles Times headlined “Spike Lee yanks 9/11 conspiracy theorists from HBO documentary series amid scrutiny,”under the byline of Christi Carras.

Here’s the top paragraph: “Prolific director Spike Lee has removed interviews with Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists from his HBO documentary series after raising eyebrows with recent remarks about the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

In the New York Times report, variations of the phrases “conspiracy theorists,” “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy group” appear at least seven times. In the shorter L.A. Times account, which relies in part on the earlier story from New York, three times.

In both stories Lee is quoted expressing hope that, as a result of his series, “Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11.”

In the L.A. Times account Lee refers to what reporter Carras terms “a widely debunked conspiracy theory” about the amount of heat required to melt steel beams. The link is to a short article Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, wrote that appeared in 2005  on the website of Scientific American titled “Fahrenheit 2777.”

(Shermer refers in his article to coverage in the magazine Popular Mechanics, which was dealt with in the 2007 book Debunking 9/11 Debunkers by David Ray Griffin. (To debunk, according to Merriam-Webster, is “to expose the sham or falseness of.”)

Julia Jacobs is a culture reporter for the New York Times. Reggie Ugwu covers film, television, music, and internet culture for the New York Times. Kevin Roose is a technology and business columnist for the New York Times. Christi Carras is an entertainment reporter at the Los Angeles Times who has worked at Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and CNN.

Other coverage of the matter includes THIS by columnist Andrea Peyser in the New York Post, THIS by columnist and film critic Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times, and THIS by pop culture reporter Sonia Rao in the Washington Post.

Of them all, Rao’s seems least alarmist about AE911Truth and its founder Richard Gage.

Roeper is most disparaging of them. This is from his column: “Last Monday, the New York Times reported Lee had devoted about a half-hour of that final chapter to wholly unsubstantiated and categorically false conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks, and in particular to a group known as Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, including the organization’s founder, one Richard Gage, who has been peddling fictional garbage about 9/11 for years.” (The columnist then refers to Slate’s reporting on Gage’s opinions about  Covid-19 and vaccine “hoaxes.”)

The rash of stories on the re-editing was kicked off by a story leading the Arts section of the Times on Tuesday by Ugwu. Headed “Capturing the Spirit of the City,” it is mostly excerpts of an interview in which the reporter talks with the filmmaker.

Here is an exchange near the end of the article:

“You interview several members of the the conspiracy group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Why did you want to include their perspective?

“Because I still don’t . . . I mean, I got questions. And I hope that maybe the legacy of this documentary is that Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11.

”You don’t buy the official explanations?

”The amount of heat that it takes to make steel melt, that temperature’s not reached. And then the juxtaposition of the way Building 7 fell to the ground — when you put it next to other building collapses that were demolitions, it’s like you’re looking at the same thing. But people going to make up their own mind. My approach is to put the information in the movie and let people decide for themselves. I respect the intelligence of the audience.”

Lee is far from alone in his hope for some action by Congress. The entire U.S. Senate seems to be on his side. As this blog reported, HERE, in 2018 the Senate approved a resolution without objection calling for declassification of all 9/11 documents. The resolution was reported HERE in the Congressonal Record on Aug. 21, 2018, but no news organization, including all those mentioned above, covered the matter. Since then those “thousands of pages of documents” remain classified by the Executive Branch of the federal government.

— Mark Channing Miller