Seldom has a historically highly regarded icon fallen as swiftly as has The NY Times. For so long it was the paper of record but more recently it has become merely a print version of Think Progress or Media Matters, just another arm of the Democrat National Committee or the official publication of the Hillary 2016 campaign.
At the Washington Times, Joseph Curl asks
What has happened to the New York Times?
On Sunday, we got the answer, from none other than Paul Krugman, an op-ed columnist at the paper. “I think Christie was the one guy that really scared them for 2016,” he said of Democrats. “I mean, Christie is in a no-win situation, even if there isn’t any smoking gun.”
A no-win situation, even without evidence. Just a claim of evidence, Mr. Krugman implied, was enough.
So, in the end, The Times ran a thin story with an unsubstantiated claim of “evidence” directly linking Mr. Christie to the lane closures because it didn’t need a “smoking gun” — or any evidence at all. The allegation alone was enough to put the governor in a “no-win situation.”
“Could we have made this more clear? Yes,” The Times reporter who wrote the piece, Kate Zernike, said Sunday on CNN. “Did we make it more clear? Yes.” And all those changes, softening the lede, the headline? “That’s a typical newspaper process,” she said.
No, it’s the typical newspaper process for a rag on Grub Street, where hack writers churn out stories light on facts and heavy on innuendo. Which, in 2014, now includes The New York Times.
Well, the Times finally ran a correction. James Taranto:
So, other than that the story was accurate? Not quite. Evidence exists tying reporter Kate Zernike to having erred. We borrowed that awkward language from the letter that led her report, which was written by Wildstein’s lawyer, Alan Zegas, to Darrell Buchbinder, general counsel of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
(For readers who are new to the story or need a refresher: The Port Authority, which runs the George Washington Bridge, engineered a traffic jam there last September after being urged to do so by Christie administration officials. Christie denies having known of the traffic scheme before last month.)
Zernike quotes the Zegas letter as asserting that “evidence exists . . . tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures, during the period when the lanes were closed, contrary to what the governor stated publicly in a two-hour press conference.” The final version of her piece–the one that appeared in Saturday’s paper and is now online–quotes the “evidence exists” language in its lead.
But that’s not how it was originally written. The Puffington Host has a screen shot of the lead from the story’s first version, posted online Friday afternoon: “The former Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge in the scandal now swirling around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Friday that the governor knew about the lane closings when they were happening, and that he had evidence to prove it.”
You can see what happened here. Zernike (or perhaps her editor) didn’t pay close enough attention to Zegas’s weaselly wording. She got the impression one imagines he intended to convey–and it was a journalistically attractive impression. “He had evidence to prove it” is a more compelling claim than “evidence exists.”
Do read it all.
The NY Times could not bring itself to use the word “lie” for Obama’s 2013 Politifact “Lie of the Year.” They used fabric softeners like “incorrect promise” and “misspoke.”
The NY Times did its best to whitewash the Benghazi debacle to smooth Hillary Clinton’s coronation.
Today we learn that Obamacare will cost the country millions of jobs. The NY Times says that’s a good thing:
The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law. Of course, Republicans immediately tried to brand the findings as “devastating” and stark evidence of President Obama’s health care reform as a failure and a job killer. It is no such thing.
The report estimated that — thanks to an increase in insurance coverage under the act and the availability of subsidies to help pay the premiums — many workers who felt obliged to stay in a job that provided health benefits would now be able to leave those jobs or choose to work fewer hours than they otherwise would have. In other words, the report is about the choices workers can make when they are no longer tethered to an employer because of health benefits. The cumulative effect on the labor supply is the equivalent of 2.5 million fewer full-time workers by 2024.
There is unrest growing at the Times. It appears that the editorial board failed to inform the reporters that the Times was joining the Democrat Party and they’re not happy about their integrity being reduced to tatters.
Reporters in The New York Times newsroom deeply resent the paper’s editorial page, and the dissent has “reached the boiling point,” the New York Observer reports Tuesday.
It’s not an ideological dispute, the Observer says, but rather the sense that the paper’s editorials and columns are boring, ineffectual, poorly written and poorly read. The story was based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Times staffers, mostly on condition of anonymity out of fear of editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal.
Rosenthal was described as a petty tyrant, and lazy in his supervision of an opinion staff that is widely seen outside the newsroom as the voice of the Left-wing establishment.
But many saved their most pointed criticism for foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, noting that his writing in recent years has been widely parodied and ridiculed.
Be sure to read all of that as well.
Celebration of this decline would be inappropriate. It is a sad event. There was a time I would read every bit of the Times seeking to be informed. It has been transformed into a throwaway rag, highly partisan and biased. It’s embarrassing for everyone.
It is still the paper of record- if you seek only the record of left wing opinion.
As a proper and trusted news source, it’s gone.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
The Times has been a liberal rag for years.
.
LOL
60% of NYC voted to elect an admitted Communist for mayor. Why would the NYT be in trouble with these subscribers? I think the Gray Lady will continue to limp along for many years in this progressive city until NYC finally becomes a giant version of Detroit.
@Tom:
They are not nearly that good.
@Tom:Besides that, I think most of them are gay.
@Angel Artiste:
No, the taxes are too high there. They are raising enough money off foreign business people to stay afloat for a while. Chicago will be the first huge city to croak.
Yeah, borrowing $900,000,000 just to finance their city debt and pay off commercial paper loans.
In other words just for one-time expenses!
Chicago has the highest per capita general obligation debt than any other city other than New York.
Chicago Tribune.
I hope it doesn’t take too long to sink. I still remember when it reported that we were tracking obama by the cell phone he was using, then the phone went dead.
The article states: “merely a print version of Think Progress or Media Matters, just another arm of the Democrat National Committee or the official publication of the Hillary 2016 campaign. ”
This should be more ACCURATELY stated as: ” merely another arm of the internationalist communist movement!”
And has been since the 1930’s
they try to rebuilt HILARY AND THE DEMOCRATS ALREADY LYING DOWN,
UNABLE TO GET UP, LET THEM ALL LY DOWN, THEY MADE THAT BED AND LAY IN IT, they can speak of GOD WHILE
MAKING DEAL WITH THE DEVIL,
WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE, THEY ARE FROM THE SAME OLD GUARD WHO IS HURTING AMERICANS DEPRIVING THEM FROM JOBS THE PEOPLE NEED SO TO SURVIVE AND FEEL GOOD,
NOW THE REAL CHANGE FOR THE PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN, IS
THE CANDIDATES who ARE CONSERVATIVE AND
REPUBLICAN, AND TEA PARTY, THEY CARRY THE FLAG ,FOR AMERICA, THEY ARE IN GUARD FOR AMERICA,
THEY ARE STRONG AND BEAUTIFUL, AND DEPENDEBLE THEY CAN ENTERTAIN THE AMERICANS, with the TRUTH ALONE,
they will never remove one good worker from his job because he came to expose publicly a wrong done by the leadership,
WHILE THEY CLEAN ALL THE CRACKS AND CRANIES OF DEM BUGS,
THEY DO NOT MAKE PACK WITH THE DEVIL TO SAVE THEIR NECK, NO THEY SEND THE DEVIL BACK IN THE PIT OF FIRE, AND AMERICA WILL BE A SHINNING LIGHT AGAIN FOREVER,
PROTECTED FROM THIS
HAPPENING AGAIN, BECAUSE EVERY ELECTED WILL BE ASK TO PROVE THEIR ALLEGIANCE, AND IT HAS TO BE 100/CENT AMERICAN, OR WILL NOT SET FOOT ON THE GOVERNMENT WHITE HOUSE OR ANY OTHER SEAT THERE ON,
AND THE PEOPLE WILL RECLAIM THEIR LEGITIMATE OWN POWER,TO BE ON GUARD FOR THEE,
AND THEIR SO LOVED COUNTRY, THE USA OF AMERICA
The New York Times announced Thursday that operating profits had fallen 12% in the fourth quarter of 2013 compared to the same period a year before.
Earnings per share dropped by roughly two-thirds, from $0.76 to $0.24.
Total revenues were down 5.2% and advertising revenues were down 6.3%, with print advertising revenues falling by 7.0% and digital by 4.3% over 2013.
Gee.
Don’t liberals support their own?
Fact is, many times liberals write left-leaning books and cannot sell them.
See:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/08/22/conservative-books-sell-better-than-liberal-books-why/
Top liberal book (A People’s History of the United States) is required reading at many public schools!
LOL!
Talk about forcing garbage on innocents!
Cons have been predicting the demise of New York City for decades, but real estate prices and investments in real estate still are going up.
John
HI,
of course if they go down they won”t advertize it until it is evident to all,
with Cueomo there now, it might speed the fall,
BYE
@Nanny G:
Nothing Dimocrats do that require input from the Dimocrat masses ever work. Remember Air America. Remember all liberal talk shows? The liberals that run things depend on the ignorance and dependence of their masses. Once any liberal actually starts to get real knowledge, they become conservatives.
@john:
I’ve never seen that. While the politics of New York would doom it, fortunately enough World business is done there, paying high taxes that it should be ok. That’s not true of the center of the Dimocrat Party, Chicago. It’s gonna die.
What is really ironic about the Grey Lay slowly sinking, is that the holes that are being shot into it that allow the water to come in are being shot from the inside.
@Nanny G: #11
The liberal radio talk show, Air American didn’t sell ONE ad that I know of. Soros and other wealthy liberals had to fund it. I don’t even know if it still exists, since I don’t drive across the USA any more.
What the liberals haven’t figured out yet, is that even conservatives don’t want to listing to a conservative show that only talks politics. I have listened to conservative radio talk shows that never mentioned ANYTHING political. Liberal shows had NOTHING BUT liberal political propaganda. One liberal host even said, “If you’re a republican, you’re stupid.” They can’t figure out why people don’t want to listen to this stuff all day, even liberals.
Smorgasbord
yes any lib s who accuse a CONSERVATIVE IS HIMSELF SHOWING,
HE IS AN IDIOT,
to all
SOSHI DID NOT LET THE WORLD DOWN, SPECTACULAR OPENING SHOW,
A must see,
@Smorgasbord: Air America died a slow agonizing (to the 4 liberals that listened to it) death about 2010, not too long after it started actually. Rachael Madcow was one of the talkers on that network and she moved to MSNBC (and took her 4 listeners with her) Liberals are all LIV (low information voters), they don’t listen to liberal tv or radio, they just pass on bogus info from one welfare mom to the next. Eddie Schultz was another talker on that network, he is believed to have had 2 listeners on good days, down to 0 if those had to go pick up their welfare checks that day. Those 2 have claimed they never did understand how to find him on tv, so they didn’t follow him to MSNBC.
Air America was not supported by advertisers, only by George Soros.
Air America sank several years ago.
I wonder if all the dems will quit their jobs and become artists?
Artists no one will support any more than the current lefty authors and and writers?
The unintended consequence would be a lack of funding for dem party campaigning.
LOL!
Go for your dream!
@Nanny G: #21
My dream is to have the USA be what the founding fathers intended.
@Redteam: #20
I try to be neutral in things until I decide I want to be for or against it, so I listened to Air America for many miles as I drove across the country. All the hosts talked about was hating George Bush and ANY republican. I was just about to change stations one time when the host said, “If you’re a republican, you’re stupid.” I never listened to it after that.
There were different conservative radio talk show hosts that said Air America was trying to get advertisers, but no company wanted to advertise on it. If you own a company, and you want people from ALL political parties to buy your products, you aren’t going to advertise on a program that condemns all parties EXCEPT the democratic party. That would be like telling people you want only democrat customers.
KENTUCKY STUDENTS the best i heard so far,
AT THE LAND OF THE FREE, WHERE’S THE VIDEO,
I WANT IT,
IN THE LAND OF THE FREE, FOREVER GUARDED
@Smorgasbord: Tracking Osama’s cell-phone…you bet he stopped using the phone in 2002 when he died of retinal failure. The entire Osame/AlCIAda/Terror was nothing but a huge false flag & yet the NY Times can get away w/ faking everything about it as well as the NeoCons/Bolsheviks that created Osama me Mama!!