The New York Times: A History of Misinformation | Ashley Rindsberg

Life Audio.

On today's episode of Timeless Wisdom.

The reality was that people like Shire or Edward Murrow, they were reporting very much correctly. They were reporting on things like World War II or the Holocaust or many other events in history that the Times completely botched. These guys got it right and the Times got it completely wrong. So it wasn't just about hindsight.

The New York Times actually reported This is what I said was mind-blowing, that Poland invaded Germany and not the other way around.

Yeah, so the, the lead story on that day in 1939 was basically a reprint of Nazi propaganda.

Yes, that's what the Nazis claimed. That's right, it was— they were responding to a Polish invasion.

Exactly.

That's coming up on Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

Life can be messy, but you don't have to figure it out alone.

Hey, it's the Luskos.

Join pastors and bestselling authors Levi and Jenny Lusko on Hey, It's the Luskos for honest conversations about faith, marriage, family, grief, ministry, and all the unexpected moments in between. You'll laugh, you'll be encouraged, and you'll be reminded that God is faithful through every season.

It will always come back to Jesus in the end.

That's right. Tune in to Hey, It's the Luskos with Levi and Jenny Lusko. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs. And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to dennisprager.com.

Hello, my friends. I'm Dennis Prager. A, a drop introduction before my guest. I think that the world is divided. It's in many ways that the world is divided, as you know, those who believe in wearing masks after vaccination and those who understand the absurdity of it. I mean, you could divide the world into many groups. Among those of us in public life, you can divide the world into these 2 groups: those who care about what the New York Times says about them and those who do not. The only way to moral clarity in this country is not to care about what the New York Times says about you. That's by way of introduction of an extremely important work that has just been published, titled The Gray Lady Winked. The Gray Lady is known as the New York Times. The New York Times: Misreporting, Distortions, and Fabrications Radically Alter History is the subtitle. The author is Ashley Rinsberg, who, when I read his biography, I would say qualifies as a Renaissance man— novelist, essayist, freelance journalist, etc., etc. Born in South Africa, and then the rest is fascinating history. So, Ashley Rinsberg, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.

Thank you, Dennis. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you so much.

What prompted you to write this book?

Well, the book grew out of a chance occurrence when I was kind of thumbing through a copy of William Shirer's great book of history on World War II, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And in a footnote, Shirer just kind of noted almost casually that on the eve of World War II, the New York Times had run a story claiming that Poland had invaded Germany, which was— I was sitting in my chair and it just kind of almost knocked me out of the chair. It was such a crazy idea that the New York Times could print something that was so wrong. It was so opposite to what we know is the truth about World War II. It's fundamental. And that launched me on a mission to understand how that happened, why that happened, what else happened like that, And that eventually evolved into a full book.

That is mind-blowing. I didn't want to interrupt you. I, I want to review this.

It really is.

Well, I, I remember reading that in college, by the way. It is one of the most riveting works of history I have ever read, uh, and I think it stands up in time, don't you?

I absolutely do. And not only does his book or his books stand up, but his journalism does too. And that was really important, something that I went back and looked at how other journalists, how other news outlets were recovering— were covering events like World War II. And, you know, because it's easy to say, well, looking back, it's 2020, very nice of you, you did your research great. But the reality was that people like Shire or Edward Murrow, they were reporting very much correctly. reporting on things like World War II or the Holocaust or many other events in history that the Times completely botched. These guys got it right and the Times got it completely wrong. So it wasn't just about hindsight.

Who did Shira report for?

I believe, if I'm, if I'm not mistaken, that Shira was one of Murrow's boys.

So that was at NBC? What network?

That's a good question. I'm—

Okay, fine. It's not important. But, but Shira was not a New York Times reporter.

No, no.

Right. Okay. I want to get back to your revelation. So you saw in— was it a footnote, did you say?

A footnote in Shira's book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

So the New York Times actually reported This is what I said was mind-blowing, that Poland invaded Germany and not the other way around.

Yeah, so the, the lead story on that day in 1939 was basically a reprint of Nazi propaganda.

Yes, that's what the Nazis claimed. That's right, it was— they were responding to a Polish invasion.

Exactly. Exactly. And, and it wasn't by chance, of course. This was— these were very well-seasoned propagandists, the Nazis. And they decided they would launch the war by deceiving the world as to the fact that would give them enough time, enough credibility. It would confuse the story enough to create a pause. And that's all they needed. As we know, they were— one of their biggest strategies was using the blitz, move fast. Storm. And just having the space of a few days where people said, oh, okay, well, if the Polish, these insurrectionists, actually did invade this German border town, then maybe the Germans are right to invade Poland. It kind of makes sense. And that's exactly what the Nazis wanted. But it all depended on getting this out into the world, and having it printed on the front page of the New York Times was, I would say, qualified as a Okay, so that—

remember, this was all in answer to my question, what prompted you to write this book about the New York Times and its lies? So that footnote sort of triggered this whole thing in you?

Yeah, I, you know, I think a lot of, a lot of people like myself at the time and still today have a sense that something is up when you read certain stories or coverage in the mainstream media, you get a sense that you're not getting the full picture. And sometimes you even get a glimpse where you absolutely know you're not getting the full picture. In my case, I had been living in Israel. I still live in Israel. And I saw the Times reporting here, and I saw the reality on the ground here. And I said, there's just no way to reconcile these 2 things. The reality is so divergent from what I'm reading in, in this illustrious newspaper. How can it be? And when I saw this little footnote in William Shirer's book, I said, okay, there's something more here. There's something going on. And when I discovered what happened throughout the Times' coverage of World War II over the course of a decade, that's when I started to understand that that feeling that I had that something was amiss was actually real. It was what we call, you know, almost like being gaslighted when you discover, aha, it's not me.

Well, of course, it began even before the, the 1939 German invasion because they got the Pulitzer Prize for denying that the Ukrainians were having a famine.

Yes, definitely, definitely. That, and that was at least on the same level, the same proportion as their coverage or their botched coverage of World War II, which is that Famously, a reporter named Walter Duranty covered up the Ukraine famine. He denied it in his reporting. He was, I would say, the most famous English-language reporter in the world at the time. He was a brilliant person, spoke 5 languages, Oxford-educated. And the Times' narrative still today is that he was kind of a rogue reporter. He was slovenly. They really pinned it on him, but that isn't the story. Duranty knew very well what was going on in Russia and Ukraine. He was there. He was on the ground. He was very well connected. He covered it up, it turns out, because he was instructed to. And this is the story the New York Times has never really let out, and I've never really seen it pieced together or told in this way. You know, the question is, why would Duranty do this? Why would he risk his whole career, his journalistic reputation, to peddle such a big lie? I mean, the Ukraine famine was big news. It was a big story. And if you're a journalist, you want that story. You don't want to cover up the story. You don't want to make it seem as if there's no story. So that's the question. Why did he do it? It's a question no one really asks. And the answer to it is because the New York Times ownership wanted it to be told in this way, because they were pushing for American official recognition of the USSR. This was the early days of the Soviet regime. And you could not convince the American public that their government should recognize this regime if it had just killed 2 to 3 million of its own people. Turns out the number was actually much greater than that, but that's what was known at the time. And they buried it for that reason, and it worked. FDR recognized the USSR. It was with Walter Duranty's help who really shepherded the process, and everybody kind of got what they wanted aside from the American public.

Why did he get a Pulitzer Prize? Were they as corrupt as the New York Times?

You know, it's one of these things that's very hard to digest, and it's that the reporter who, during World War II, on the eve of World War II, printed the Nazi lies on the front page of the New York Times received a Pulitzer. The New York Times reporter who called the Berlin Nazi Olympics the greatest sporting event of all time—

Who said that? Who said that?

This was a man named Frederick Berchow. Who is— he doesn't have the profile of a Duranty.

Right. I know, I was just curious. I'm impressed that you even remembered the name. But that's what he wrote from Berlin in the New York Times?

That's what he reported from Berlin, and that was a lot of the Times' coverage, was very much carrying that water. And again, the Berlin Olympics were very clearly propaganda.

Yes, totally. I'll be back in a moment. The book The Gray Lady Winked about the New York Times, up at the The Dennis Prager Show.

This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

For nearly 3,000 years, Homer's The Iliad has shaped the Western imagination. As one of the foundational works of Western literature, it explores permanent questions about honor, courage, leadership, friendship, justice, and what it means to live a noble life. In one of the epic's defining moments, Achilles returns to battle after the death of his beloved friend Patroclus. Setting aside his wounded pride, confront the responsibilities that come with greatness. His decision reveals one of the central themes of The Iliad: that true greatness requires more than strength. It demands character, sacrifice, and the pursuit of what is right. That's why Hillsdale College has released its newest free online course, The Iliad. Taught by Professor Stephen Smith, the course reveals why Homer's masterpiece remains one of the greatest works of Western literature.

hillsdale.edu/iliad.

Read the classics. Study the West. hillsdale.edu/startnow.

Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.

Hello, my friends. I'm speaking with Ashley Rindsberg. Book is up at DennisPrager.com. The Gray Lady winked. How the New York Times misreporting distortions and fabrications radically alter history. Let me give you an example. You meaning you, my listeners, and you, Ashley. New York Times this past Saturday: GOP intensifies. This is the front page headline: GOP intensifies nationwide push to restrict.

Vote.

There you go. That's propaganda. Ashley, you'll find this of interest. I studied international relations at Columbia, and I learned Russian. And I learned Russian solely in order to be able to read Pravda, Soviet Communist paper. And I read Pravda almost every day while I was at graduate school. And it was fascinating to read because I wanted to see how they covered issues that I knew the truth about. And I read the New York Times and the LA Times, not just the Washington Post, in the exact same way I read Pravda. Just looking to see, not to learn anything, But to see how they covered anything that I knew about.

Right.

So that's how bad it's become. So we've discussed— I mean, these are just amazing— the Ukraine issue and the Nazi Olympics issue and the invasion of Poland issue. Give us some more examples.

Well, the book takes us right through the 20th century. You know, a big one for me personally is the Holocaust, which obviously the reporting was— or the non-reporting, I should say— was concurrent with their World War II debacle. But the Times from New York chose effectively to, quote unquote, bury the Holocaust. They did not cover it. They acted as if it didn't— it wasn't happening. And if you were reading their newspaper day by day, When reports were coming out of the deaths of 700,000 Jews, 1 million Jews. I mean, we're talking about an epic story, a story of once in a generation or even bigger than that. And they just were silent. And again, it kind of boggles the mind. This is a news gathering organization. They their mission in life is to bring people the facts. And this is a fact of all facts. People were being slaughtered en masse in Europe by a so-called civilized nation. And that to me was really the height of it, because that's more than failure, more than even malfeasance. That's something of a— on a tragic level. And diving into it again, the question I kept bumping up against was how could How? And the answer there was a very disturbing answer, and it touches on everything that I think we've learned about false media narratives and why they happen, why they go wrong. And in this case, it is because there's a dynasty, a dynastic family in control of the New York Times, no checks and balances on them. They own the company. They are the publisher. They appoint the editors. They can do whatever they want, and they did. And in this case, they were afraid of being seen as a Jewish newspaper. That was part of it. They were afraid it would hurt their newspaper, hurt their business. And on the other hand, they had some very esoteric theories about what it meant to be a Jewish person or Jew, what it didn't mean. And for them, it didn't mean that you were part of a nation. It just meant you worshiped in a particular way. So the fact that, quote unquote, Jewish people were being slaughtered in Europe, Didn't mean anything to them. It was just other people, part of the war, wasn't anything particular. But we know for a fact that the Holocaust was a war within the war. It was fought— you know, Hitler had been on record saying if nothing else happens, so long as he destroys the Jewish people, he will have succeeded.

And the Times completely just chose to ignore that for both ideological reasons and for interest-related reasons, reasons of How did the New York Times, given its record of lying, how did it become known as the paper of record?

Up until that point, the paper had been very well respected and quote-unquote gray. I mean, that's where the name the Gray Lady comes from, is that the reporting was pretty down the line. The founder of the dynasty I was just talking about was a German-Jewish immigrant to America who loved America and appreciated all that it had done for him. His name was Adolf Ochs, and he decided that he would report the news without fear or favor. That's his famous proclamation. He wrote it in the New York Times as a business announcement, and he kept to his word. For as long as he was there at the helm, they reported things in a very gray manner. They brought the facts. They tried to keep things pretty sedate. But, you know, this is the nature of a dynasty, is that the founder might have great intentions and good ideas, ideals and good values. But what happens with a dynasty, this is something we see over and over in politics and media and business, is that the rest of the dynasty down the line are more interested in maintaining or growing their wealth and their power and their prestige than they are in fulfilling the original ideals of the founder. And that's exactly what's happened at the Times. And, you know, these are individuals, they're people. They are not imbued with special powers, but they've been given this huge amount of power. It's— we lose sight of it. We think of this as just a newspaper, but it's not. It is an institution, a business, and a company that controls how we perceive the world. It controls how we understand what's going on around us, and that is a lot of power for a very small number of people.

So President Trump's claim, fake media, It well, well predates his presidency.

Yes, yes, it does. And you know, that term fake media and fake news, that became a political football in and of itself, and it sort of distorted the deeper issue, was that the real issue here is that there are false media narratives. They happen, and they don't just happen. It doesn't just— they don't just fall out of the sky. It's somebody is making a decision. Somebody is deciding that we are going to do this in a coordinated and deliberate and concerted way because, you know, you can publish a story about something that's false and most people won't notice it. And those that do, half of them won't believe it anyways. In order to build what I've called a false media narrative, you need a lot of people. energy, a lot of people, a lot of resources pounding away at this same message. You really are trying to do this. And that's— this is where we have to be very careful, because this is something that's precious in a democracy, which is trust in information, trust in our media.

Well, democracy dies in darkness, the motto of The Washington Post. I want to ask you about Vietnam and the coverage there when we come back. Ashley Rindsberg, the Gray Lady winked.

This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

Life can be messy, but you don't have to figure it out alone.

Hey, it's the Luskos!

Join pastors and best-selling authors Levi and Jenny Lusko on Hey, It's the Luskos for honest conversations about faith, marriage, family, grief, ministry, And all the unexpected moments in between. You'll laugh, you'll be encouraged, and you'll be reminded that God is faithful through every season.

It will always come back to Jesus in the end. That's right.

Tune in to Hey, It's the Luskos with Levi and Jenny Lusko, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Now back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.

A deeply needed book. The Gray Lady winked By Ashley Rindsberg. Rindsberg, R-I-N-D-S-B-E-R-G. By the way, I see in the bio about you on the leaf that you, in 2010, Rindsberg traveled to Nicaragua to investigate the disappearance and death of his best friend. There's nothing else said about that, and I'm I'm very, very intrigued. Did you find out why he disappeared?

No, it's not clear, actually. I went and I was there for a few months, Nicaragua. I went, I hiked up with guides and harnesses and ropes and everything to this volcano where my friend disappeared and was eventually found. His remains were found. Nobody knows why that happened or how that happened, still to this day, unfortunately.

Where is he buried?

He's buried in San Diego, California, where he was from, where I grew up with him. And we were fast friends from an early age, and we went to university together, and after university he was working in theater and decided to take this trip to Nicaragua and never came back. Wow.

I'm very sorry about that. Losing a friend is horrible. It's horrible.

It is.

All right, let's go back to the New York Times, about which you have written here. So let's go to— there are 2 more, at least 2 more subjects I want to get to about The Truth and the New York Times, Cuba and Vietnam. So we'll take it in chronological order, and then we'll start, start with Cuba.

Yeah, yeah, Cuba. You know, Cuba was one of these cases where Vietnam is a case the New York Times's involvement there is a little bit more complex. Cuba is actually quite straightforward, which is that In the late 1950s, Fidel Castro, the man we know today as Cuba's dictator, former dictator, was all but defeated. He was down to his last few men, no money, hiding out in the mountains in Cuba. They weren't even bothering to look for him at that point, the Batista regime. They had stopped searching because it didn't really matter. He was kind of nothing.

Hmm.

Then comes along this New York Times reporter by the name of Herbert Matthews who decides he's going to track down this rebel and interview him, which he does. But the decision Matthews makes is to turn this rebel, this lone rebel, into Cuba's democratic messiah. And he actually uses these words. He speaks about in his reporting, he spoke about Fidel Castro as a messiah, as a prophet, as, you know, the savior of Cuba, democratic savior. And through this notoriety, because the Times, like today, was so important, so influential, maybe even more so then than now, that suddenly Castro is a celebrity. He gets money, he gets guns, he gets attention, most importantly of all. And that really is what launched him. onto the world stage, made him relevant, and put him in a position to overthrow the Batista regime in Cuba. And this was to the point that Castro later came to the New York Times not once, not even twice, 3 times at the very least, 3 times we know about, to thank the publishers of the New York Times for what they did for him.

Was Herbert Matthews a communist?

No, actually, Herbert Matthews was a very romantic reporter. He had all these ideas about—

Oh, okay. He romanticized, like they romanticized Che Guevara. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, all right.

So he was one of these fellow travelers. That's what he was. All right, so they lied about Castro, and now we're going to go to Vietnam, and you say it's more of a mixed record.

Well, Vietnam was— it's more— I would say it's more complex. I think what happened there is pretty clear-cut, which is that the New York Times is— at that time, he was a young sort of rising reporter, 29 years old, named David Halberstam, and a colleague who would later replace him named Neil Sheehan. And the two of them decided that they were not there to just cover the news or gather the facts. They were there to have a hand in the events unfolding, and they did not like certain things about the way the war was being run, including the fact that the U.S. had partnered with the South Vietnamese government led by a man named Diem to, to try to—

Right. All right. Hold on there. This is really important.

Dennis.

Dennis.

Dennis. Dennis Prager.

Do you have a question you've always wanted to ask Dennis Prager? Well, now's your opportunity. For upcoming Ask Me Anything episodes of Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager, we're inviting you to leave Dennis a voicemail. He'll personally answer selected questions, and your question could be featured on a future episode. Whether it's about faith, morality, politics, history, relationships, happiness, or simply navigating life, Dennis would love to hear from you. Just call 877-243-7776 and leave your question. Oh, and be sure to include your first name and where you're calling from. That's 877-243-7776. While we can't feature every question, Dennis will listen to every voicemail, so call today. You may hear Dennis Prager answering your question on an upcoming episode of Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. And thanks for listening and supporting Dennis Prager.

My guest here Is Ashley Rindsberg about how much the New York Times has not told the truth, and it's, it's a revelatory book. Glenn Greenwald, who's a man of the left but who is intellectually honest, writes, the New York Times, by far the most influential newspaper in the world, and thus receives far too little journalistic scrutiny due to its power to affect careers. Any book that casts a critical eye on the paper of record's history, as this book does, is performing a valuable service. In an account brimming— this is Daniel Pipes— with fascinating, if morbid, detail, Ashley Rindsberg rigorously exposes the dark side of the New York Times. Not sure that there's any longer anything but a dark side, but that's another issue. So you were talking about that we were— we have covered the Berlin Olympics, we have covered the Ukraine famine induced by Stalin, created by Stalin.

Yes.

We have talked about the denial or the— not denial, just the omission of Holocaust reporting. We talked about the building up of Fidel Castro. Now we are at the New York Times And Vietnam. Now, you mentioned David Halberstam, and who was the other person?

The other person was Neil Sheehan, who was later— after Halberstam left Vietnam, he— Sheehan became the Vietnam correspondent for the Times.

And Halberstam was also with the New York Times, right? So, yeah, he wrote the— he wrote The Best and Brightest, which was very influential about our mistake about Vietnam. Okay, so go ahead.

So between the two of them, Halberstam and Cheyenne, they decided they were not pleased with how the war was being fought and the alliance between the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government. They, for whatever reason, they felt their values were misaligned, whatever it was. The key thing is that they decided to take matters into their own hands. And they understood that they already had something in their hands that was very powerful, which was the New York Times, or in Cheyenne's case, his reporting at UPI, and they could start to shape a different kind of narrative. And that's exactly what they started to do. They started to seed this idea that the, number one, the Kennedy administration was increasingly unhappy with the South Vietnamese government, And number 2, that the South Vietnamese government, the leadership, were unhinged crazies that were doing all sorts of repressive things like massacring Buddhists, Buddhist monks. And in one case, Halberstam reported for the New York Times that the South Vietnamese government had killed 30 Buddhist monks. The problem was that it just never happened. Not only were not 30 killed, Zero Buddhist monks were killed. And this is the same kind of thing where you're coloring, you're using this kind of misreporting to color perceptions of this government to make them seem as if they're evil and illegitimate and not worthy of U.S. support. And this reporting was directed through certain channels of the American government that were also in favor of an overthrow of the South Vietnamese government, and it was used on that basis. to perform this coup, this coup d'état, which happened. When Kennedy, President Kennedy found out about the coup, which resulted in the president of— the South Vietnamese president being executed, his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said he had never seen Kennedy more upset than on that day because not only was Diem, the South Vietnamese president, a fellow Catholic of Kennedy's, But Kennedy also knew that the only way for him to pull the U.S. out of Vietnam was if there were a stable South Vietnamese government. And the moment that Diem was executed and his government overthrown, that option went out the window. And as we know, it was another many years, I think it was close to a decade at that point, of war in Vietnam on account of the interference of these 2 young, barely 30-year-old reporters in Vietnam who had their own ideas.

And then there's the Tet Offensive. Do you cover that?

No, I didn't go into that. I did research it a bit, and, you know, from what I understand, there was some complexities there, but I didn't include it.

Okay, that's fine. So what's— is there a next big lie after Vietnam?

Yeah, there was another chapter after Vietnam. I mean, chronologically it's earlier, which is the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States, which there was— everybody knew about it, it was reported after it happened. The lie that was perpetrated was that there was no such thing as radiation poisoning, which is what the US government wanted people to believe. And in order to help spread that belief, they put the New York Times' chief science writer, a man named William Lawrence, on their payroll. And in exchange, the New York Times got to put their man on one of the bombers that was part of the armada that was headed to Nagasaki to drop the second nuclear bomb on Japan.

Boy, this, this is— I never knew that. Back in a moment.

This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

Life can be messy, but you don't have to figure it out alone.

Hey, it's the Luskos!

Join pastors and best-selling authors Levi and Jenny Lusko on Hey, It's the Luskos! Hey, it's the Luskos for honest conversations about faith, marriage, family, grief, ministry, and all the unexpected moments in between. You'll laugh, you'll be encouraged, and you'll be reminded that God is faithful through every season.

It will always come back to Jesus in the end.

That's right. Tune into Hey, It's the Luskos with Levi and Jenny Lusko, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Now back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.

Dennis Prager here. I'm exhaling because it's so, it's so terrible a subject. The amount of lying in the New York Times history. So I asked you about post-Vietnam, and of course you do cover post-Vietnam because you cover the 1619 Project. Our founding ideals were false, and they make up this falsehood, which is now in thousands of schools. And the Russian collusion on the Trump campaign, the lies from the New York Times are coming so fast and furious that it sort of is at least as great as any in the past. So you did cover the— That woke issue. Any final thought?

Um, yeah, the woke issue is in The 1619 Project is, I think, one of the most damaging in the entire book because this is not anymore trying to cover anything up. They're saying it on the face. They're saying we are trying to change history, that they use those words. So they have thrown truth out the window with The 1619 Project. Which is— which explains why there are so many huge bombastic errors. And the idea there is that those errors that everybody was catching when the project came out aren't errors. They are intentional distortions. As I've said before, it's that if you're trying to change history, you literally have to change it. And that's what the New York Times has been— is still doing with the 1619 Project. And I think that's the— The most insidious of all these examples, and it's the one that we're watching happen in front of our eyes.

Well, you could write the same book about the Washington Post, almost the same. Certainly the Los Angeles Times, CNN. I mean, it is a very, very bad thing, the media in the West. You're living in Israel. What do you think of the media there?

You know, I think here it's much more mixed. There is— it's much more— there's more diversity in a way. I mean, the US media is, I think, very concentrated. It's concentrated in ownership. It's concentrated in ideology. And here there's a little bit more diversity. There's more constituencies that the media here are speaking to, though there are some of the same trends as well here.

Right.

And everywhere else in the world.

All right, listen, let me congratulate you on your book, and I have a feeling that a lot of my listeners will be reading it. The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times Is Misreporting— Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. Congratulations, Ashley Rindsberg.

Thank you so much, Dennis. This is a real pleasure and privilege.

Thank you. Okay, everybody, take care.

Tomorrow on Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

Today's subject is the biggie. Well, there are a number of contenders for the biggie, but I want to get to this one in a somewhat different way than I have in the past. What is the single most important component of happiness? Give me— come on, Sean, that was a question. It necessitates tick-tocking. God, the most— what, what is your answer?

My answer is joy.

All right, well, joy is related to it. Watch, you'll like this though. All right, the answer— give me the buzzer please— is gratitude. Gratitude. You cannot be happy if you're not grateful. You cannot be. It's not possible.

Join us tomorrow to hear more on Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs, and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles. We want to take just a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the podcast. Go to lifeaudio.com to find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network, including shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.

Life can be messy, but you don't have to figure it out alone.

Hey, it's the Luskos!

Join pastors and bestselling authors Levi and Jenny Lusko on Hey, It's the Luskos for honest conversations about faith, marriage, family, grief, ministry, and all the unexpected moments in between. You'll laugh, You'll be encouraged and you'll be reminded that God is faithful through every season.

It will always come back to Jesus in the end.

That's right.

Tune into Hey, It's the Luskos with Levi and Jenny Lusko, available now wherever you get your podcasts.