DAILY SABAH: NEW YORK TIMES DECLINES TO RUN PRO-RECONCILIATION 1915 ADS
19:30 23/04/2015 ” SOCIETY
The New York Times refused to run a pro-peace and reconciliation
advertisement over the 1915 Armenian atrocities because it did not
recognize the Armenian genocide, an e-mail correspondence between the
newspaper’s advertising department and the Turkish-American Steering
Committee revealed yesterday, Daily Sabah reports.
The ad, which was published by the Washington Post today instead,
is written as an open letter addressing President Barack Obama and
members of Congress, informing them that the Turkish-American community
would march through downtown D.C. on April 24, beginning at the White
House and ending in front of the Turkish Embassy to commemorate the
100th anniversary of the 1915 atrocities. “Our most sincere hope is
that Armenian Americans will join us on this walk. We will walk to
pay our respects to the lives lost from all ethnicities and creeds,
and to kindle a spark for what we believe should be our shared future”
the letter reads.
However the e-mails obtained by Daily Sabah revealed that The New
York Times asked the Steering Committee that represents over 145
Turkish-American associations to remove three out of five paragraphs of
the letter, which depicts the 1915 incidents as a civilian tragedy that
cost the lives of millions of Ottoman citizens including Armenians,
Turks, Kurds and Arabs. The targeted paragraphs underline the fact
that there is no academic consensus on the incidents by referencing
substantial number of international scholars who declined to label the
atrocities as genocide. “My legal team crossed out the first three
paragraphs that do not pass acceptability,” wrote Michael Hayden,
the officer responsible for Advocacy Advertising at The New York
Times. Hayden also said in the email that the legal team had wanted
to exclude the slogan “Unite Us, Not Divide us,” and this sentence
in the fifth paragraph: “One hundred years ago, a brutal war started
neither by Turks nor Armenians cost the Ottoman Armenians, the Ottoman
Turks and many other groups so dearly.”
The newspaper made it clear that the letter must be changed before it
could be published. Subsequently, emails from the Steering Committee
asking for an explanation, Mr. Hayden had explained that as a matter of
policy, they do not accept ads that deny great historical events that
are generally accepted as facts, including the Armenian “genocide,”
the Holocaust, and the World Trade Center bombing.
From: A. Papazian