No Amount Of Journalistic Malpractice Embarrasses The New York Times
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In your case, you probably long since gave up on reading the New York Times. In my case I still look at it, but that has nothing to do with finding out what’s happening in the world. Rather, I’m only performing a service to my readers by trying to get a handle on the latest fantasies of the crazy left in their efforts to oust what they see as the illegitimate occupants of the White House and the Supreme Court. Any relationship between what is found in Pravda and actual fact could only be some kind of pure coincidence.
For two plus years in the Times, it was the Russia Collusion hoax. Every day a new front page headline, trying to keep the story alive until finally the Mueller Report would vindicate it all. Then the Mueller Report came out, and the whole thing was fundamentally wrong from the get-go. Was there ever a correction, a retraction, an apology of any sort? I’m still looking for it. Instead, the Times’s Executive Editor Dean Baquet got up in front of the staff back in August and offered nothing but praise for the catastrophe:
Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.
In recent weeks new initiatives have been coming faster and faster; but instead of taking two years to blow up, the cycle from new “bombshell” disclosure to complete discrediting now only lasts a few days.
On September 14, it was the op-ed by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, promoting their new book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh.” In their op-ed, Pogrebin and Kelly dropped an apparent big scoop from their book of what they claimed was a “previously unreported story” of Mr. Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party,” abusing yet another woman. But within one short day, the Times had been forced to append this correction to the op-ed:
An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.
And then things quickly got even worse. Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist apparently already had an advance copy of the book, and noticed that “buried at the end of the book” was further information from one Leland Keyser, the good friend of Christine Blasey Ford whom Ford had identified as attending the infamous summer party at a house outside Washington that had been the focus of Ford’s Senate testimony. The information:
We spoke multiple times to Keyser, who also said that she didn’t recall that get-together or any others like it. In fact, she challenged Ford’s accuracy. “I don’t have any confidence in the story.”
OK then. I’m still looking for that one to turn up in the Times. Meanwhile, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Kathleen Parker on September 24 detailing efforts of Kavanaugh opponents to get Keyser to change her story, and calling Keyser the “true hero of the Kavanaugh saga” for sticking to her guns in the face of immense pressure to support the accuser.
And then there is the “Ukraine-gate” exposé that has dominated the headlines this week. It started last Friday (September 20) with the lead front-page story in the Times headlined “Trump Pressed Ukraine’s Leader on Inquiry Into Biden’s Son.” The key point of the story, and the only thing really making it a story worthy of anyone’s interest, was the supposed “pressure” put by Trump on Ukraine’s new President during a July telephone call to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter for his dealings in that country. From the first paragraph of the Times’s story:
President Trump pressed the Ukrainian president in a July call to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, according to a person familiar with the conversation, an apparently blatant mixture of foreign policy with his 2020 re-election campaign.
Yesterday the White House released a near-verbatim transcript of the telephone call. Here it is. Go ahead and look through it and see if you can find anything remotely resembling “pressure” from Trump to investigate Biden or his son. I can’t. Then Zelenskyy showed up at the UN and sat next to Trump and explicitly denied that he was pressured by Trump in any way.
Do you think the Times would be embarrassed? Would they at least downplay the story going forward, or perhaps even issue some kind of a correction or apology? Don’t be silly. In today’s print edition, despite the transcript being available, there is a banner headline going across the front page all the way from left to right: “Trump Asked For ‘Favor’ In Call, Memo Shows” (different headline in online version). Here are the first two paragraphs of the story:
President Trump repeatedly pressured Ukraine’s leader to investigate leading Democrats as “a favor” to him during a telephone call last summer in which the two discussed the former Soviet republic’s need for more American financial aid to counter Russian aggression.
In a reconstruction of the call released Wednesday by the White House, Mr. Trump urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Attorney General William P. Barr and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, on corruption investigations connected to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.
As you can see, they are not only still going with the word “pressured,” but they’ve upped the ante to “repeatedly pressured,” even in the face of a transcript that totally fails to support this characterization, and in the face of the Ukrainian President’s denial. But it’s far worse than that. Do you get the impression from the Times’s words that the “favor” Trump asked for related to Biden? If so, you have fallen for their mis-direction. Read the transcript, and it is completely clear that the “favor” Trump requests has to do with matters relating to the 2016 election and the role of the Crowdstrike firm in the question of the DNC email servers:
The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.
A few hundred words later in the call, it is Zelenskyy, not Trump, who raises the subject of the work of Rudy Giuliani that relates to Biden:
President Zelenskyy: . . . I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. . . . I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. . . .
Only then does Trump respond as to Hunter Biden:
The President: . . . The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.
“Whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.” That’s what the Times calls getting “repeatedly pressured” for “a favor” relating to Biden.
Compare and contrast, Joe Biden describing his meeting in Ukraine in 2015 where he demanded the firing of the prosecutor who was planning to question Hunter Biden:
So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a b-tch. (Laughter.) He got fired.
That corresponds to my idea of “pressure,” but what do I know? The Times has yet to run a major story about that one.
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