New York Times’ hypocrisy hits new heights over Dominion trial
It’s hard to know if the gormless editors at The New York Times suffer from a severe lack of self-awareness — or just an overabundance of chutzpah.
“Will there be a price to pay for profiting from the spread of misinformation?” a Times front-page “news analysis story” asked of Monday’s trial pitting Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, over claims the network’s reporting and commentary on Trumpist claims of election fraud are defamatory.
That’s beyond rich: Not only does the paper spread muck and bunk; misinformation has been a big commercial winner for the paper of record.
From the get-go (with Paul Krugman’s July 2016 “Siberian Candidate” column days after Trump’s nomination), the Times has been among the worst spreaders of false, shoddily sourced claims about Trump and his supposed Russia-connected misdeeds — including the totally fabricated Steele Dossier.
The paper even shamelessly shared a Pulitzer for coverage of nonexistent Russian interference in the 2016 election.
And it’s not just its endless Russia, Russia, Russia stories. Consider the outlet’s effort to discredit, along similar lines, The Post’s scoop about the 100%-authentic contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, a story whose willful suppression may have helped swing the election.
On COVID, the paper pushed for the most anti-science policies imaginable, like cruel school closures and universal masking, long after data suggested they weren’t effective.
Recall its now-infamous 1619 Project, a multi-platform, Pulitzer-winning disinfo push hawking the factually inaccurate idea that the American Revolution was undertaken primarily to preserve the slaveholding rights of southern colonies.
How many internal emails from the Times’ own newsroom would express private concerns over coverage, even as bogus stories are rushed into print to juice subscription revenues?
The paper’s been doing land-office business since 2016 in large part because it’s been telling its deep-blue audience exactly the histrionic nonsense it wants to hear.
Shall we ask the Times to share its internal exchanges between reporters, editors and the data analysts in its “audience development” department?
Those would probably reveal how these analysts are ordering up stories on liberal hot-button issues, not because of pure, high journalism intent, but to convert users into subscribers — even if they clearly haven’t got 100% proof or indisputably believe what they are reporting is fact.
Add to that a breed of journo at the Times, imbued with feverish ideological zeal that could easily, in a courtroom, be categorized as “actual malice” against conservative personalities (not just Trump) and institutions.
So when Maureen Dowd said in her rant, sorry, column this weekend that Fox “isn’t a news organization” but “a greedy business” trafficking in falsehoods, she could have been talking about her own employer.
Remember, too, that the Times won a crucial legal victory for US media at the Supreme Court in Times v. Sullivan.
That decision strictly limited the extent to which papers can be sued for defamation of public figures.
Now the same paper cheers on the tearing-down of that standard, just because it sees Fox as a champion of an alternative viewpoint, which it despises.
The Times and the liberal media complex should be careful what they wish for. We wonder whether the Times will like the result if Dominion prevails: namely, its own inevitable comeuppance for publishing newsworthy claims that offend powerful people.
