RUTHFULLY YOURS

Project Veritas has just released a video further confirming what we already know about the New York Times. It is a leading member of the anti-Trump fake news media club. In this video, Nick Dudich, Audience Strategy Editor for NYT Video, who manages videos displayed on social media for the Times, admitted on hidden-camera that the Times “always” makes sure that anti-Trump stories make it to the left-wing newspaper’s front page. When asked about being objective at the Times, which its ethical handbook says is so important to preserving its reputation, Dudich replied, “No I’m not, that’s why I’m here.” Indeed, Dudich carried his political biases from his days working on the political campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to the Times without missing a beat.

Dudich explained how he would target President Trump as a “journalist.” Dudich would go after the president’s businesses and family. His objective would be to “ruin the Trump brand” through relentless investigations. “He cares about his business more than he cares about being President,” Dudich said. “He would resign. Or he’d lash out and do something incredibly illegal, which he would have to.”

In response to the Project Veritas video, a Times spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, sought to marginalize Dudich’s role at the newspaper. She claimed that “a recent hire in a junior position violated our ethical standards and misrepresented his role. In his role at The Times, he was responsible for posting already published video on other platforms and was never involved in the creation or editing of Times videos. We are reviewing the situation now.”

Notably, the Times spokesperson did not comment on the substance of Dudich’s revelations. The fact is that Dudich is not an outlier at the New York Times. To the contrary, he embodies the Times’ fanatic anti-Trump resistance. According to a study conducted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, analyzing news coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days in office, the New York Times’ news stories on President Trump were 87 percent negative during that period.

The New York Times editors and columnists can vent all they want on the opinion pages. Readers can determine for themselves whether the arguments put forward in the opinion pieces hold up or not. However, it is unethical and intellectually dishonest for reporters who purport to present factual information in their articles to shed objectivity and take sides in their reporting. Yet the Times’ media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote during the presidential campaign that there was nothing wrong with reporters, who believed Trump would be too dangerous if elected president, doing just that.

“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous,” Jim Rutenberg wrote, “then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”

Rutenberg added, “Balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy.” The Times’ top editor, Dean Baquet, said he thought Rutenberg’s column endorsing “oppositional” journalism when it came to Donald Trump “nailed it.”

Rutenberg’s column appeared on the front page of the Times, just where Nick Dudich, the Times video editor, admitted on Project Veritas’s hidden camera that anti-Trump articles were “always” steered.

The Times and its cohorts in the anti-Trump media failed to take down Trump’s candidacy. Unbowed, they are now intent on taking down his presidency with fake news articles putting their writers’ own negative spin on the president’s words and actions. For example, New York Times chief White House reporter Peter Baker wrote a bylined story billed as a “news analysis” last month entitled “A Divider, Not a Uniter, Trump Widens the Breach.” Baker distinguished his so-called “news analysis” from mere opinion, claiming to Fox News his “analysis” was based on “observation” while covering the president.

“Never in modern times has an occupant of the Oval Office seemed to reject so thoroughly the nostrum that a president’s duty is to bring the country together,” Baker wrote. Instead of reporting fairly on both sides of the national conversation over President Trump’s call for football players to stand up in silence during the pre-game singing of the national anthem (as required by the NFL’s own rules), Baker took one side of the issue and accused President Trump of being the “deacon of divisiveness.” He compared the president’s actions to those of “President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.”

Baker’s article was a hit piece, not an attempt at conscientious, professional analysis. This is the “journalist” who tweeted shortly after last year’s election, “For a new president from reality television, a cabinet selection that resembles a pageant.”

Another New York Times article, this time appearing on page 1, accused the Trump administration of planning to take action against “affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.” The reporter, Charlie Savage, imposed his own interpretation of an internal document that made no reference to white applicants. It called for “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.” Savage jumped to a conclusion that would support the leftist media’s portrayal of the Trump administration as white supremacist when in fact the Trump Justice Department has shown interest in a case involving possible discrimination against Asian-Americans at Harvard University.

The New York Times all but conceded the institutional anti-Trump bias that permeates its news coverage of the Trump administration when it fired its sole conscience at the paper last spring, its Public Editor Liz Spayd. Ms. Spayd, who had been on the job less than a year when she was fired, committed the unpardonable sin of speaking truth to power. She pointed to evidence of Times reporters’ bias against President Trump in their tweets, which she said were “outrageous” and “over the line” and should face “some kind of consequence.” She sinned even more against the Trump-hating leftist media orthodoxy by voicing some of her complaints on Fox News.

As Liz Spayd wrote in her final Public Editor column, “Whether journalists realize it or not, with impartiality comes authority — and right now it’s in short supply.” She asked rhetorically whether, in its efforts to hold the Trump administration accountable, the New York Times would “make reckless decisions and draw premature conclusions.” She asked “who will be watching, on this subject or anything else, if they don’t acquit themselves well?”

Following the purge of Ms. Spayd and the elimination of her Public Editor position, it will be left to outside institutions such as Project Veritas to keep watch.