New York Times' Hannah-Jones became star with liberal media help despite 'flawed' 1619 Project: Author

Originally Published on FoxNews.com

'They are glazing the 1619 Project with this kind of really protective coating of celebrity, which in American culture today goes far,' Ashley Rindsberg says

The controversial 1619 Project is considered credible because the media helped turn New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones into a star, according to author Ashley Rindsberg. 

"The media really helped Nikole Hannah-Jones be catapulted into this celebrity status, which also and I think this is the bigger point, catapulted the 1619 Project into this kind of national initiative [that] made it seem completely bulletproof," Rindsberg told Fox News Digital. 

The outspokenly left-wing Hannah-Jones, who founded and curated the initiative, is seen as a hero to liberal media organizations and Hollywood alike despite widespread backlash to the award-winning project that aimed to "reframe the country's history" by bringing slavery and racism to the forefront of the national narrative. 

"[The media] painted the 1619 Project with this kind of lacquer that shielded it from criticism. That's exactly what we're seeing today," Rindsberg continued. "When Nikole Hannah-Jones gets on to Oprah, and she's doing spots on NPR, and she's going on PBS, and she's being interviewed by rival newspapers, the New York Times itself was covering her as a headline, as a subject of the reporting, not as a reporter."

Rindsberg, who penned the 2021 book "The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History," feels that "manufacturing a celebrity out of Nikole Hannah-Jones" allows her work to thrive without the appropriate criticism. 

"They are glazing the 1619 Project with this kind of really protective coating of celebrity, which in American culture today goes far. So we think about the media not just as the news media, but as the wider media that includes the entertainment media and the trade media, the trade journalism media," he added. "They really went to bat for her, and they brushed off a lot of the major criticisms by historians, even historians from the left and also from the radical left that had harsh criticism for her."

As a result, the mainstream media "made this really more about this journalism on this righteous crusade and not a journalist who was engaging in this very kind of bizarre form of history in the pages of a newspaper" which is supposed to focus on factual news. 

The 1619 Project has prompted a fierce debate over U.S. history and how schoolchildren should understand the influence of race on current institutions, as liberals have attempted to push Hannah-Jones’ vision of history on students. The 1619 Project has since been turn into a book, which landed on both Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists in its first week. There's also a children's version of the book, titled "The 1619 Project: Born on the Water."

Conservatives and critical historians have generally argued that the 1619 Project distorted the true history of the U.S. with many of Hannah-Jones’ claims, but the mainstream media has largely turned a blind eye to negative feedback. Newt Gingrich called it a "propaganda campaign on race," and Washington Post columnist George Will said the project was "malicious" and "historically illiterate," but liberals have glorified it nonetheless…