William Blum, US Policy Critic Derided by NYT, Dies at 85

DECEMBER 13, 2018
JIM NAURECKAS

You know you’ve lived well—well enough to rattle the establishment—when the New York Times smears you in the obituary it runs about you (FAIR.org, 6/20/13).

That distinction was achieved by William Blum, historian and critic of US foreign policy. Once a State Department computer programmer who aspired to “take part in the great anti-Communist crusade,” he quit government in 1967 out of disgust with the Vietnam War and became a founding editor of the Washington Free Press, one of the first alternative papers of the New Left. In books like The CIA: A Forgotten History (re-released as Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, Blum documented the violent and anti-democratic record of the US empire; he was a reference that FAIR frequently turned to when noting what was missing from the corporate media’s version of history.

How did the New York Times (12/11/18) frame this remarkable life? With this remarkable headline:

William Blum, US Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden, Dies at 85

More:
https://fair.org/home/william-blum-us-policy-critic-derided-by-nyt-dies-at-85/