The New York Times threw a journalistic hand grenade into the middle of Washington, D.C. politics this week — but not everything is what it seems.
Tuesday, the editorial team at the “Old Grey Lady” made the controversial decision to publish a scathing opinion article from an anonymous “senior source” inside the White House.
The article was received gleefully by President Donald Trump’s political opponents. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat, even rushed to CNN on Thursday and demanded that Trump be removed from office.
“If senior administration officials think the President of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” Warren told CNN.
Pump the breaks there, Lizzy. If Democrats think this article means the end of the Trump administration, they’re wrong.
Dead wrong.
The New York Times has a long history of exaggerating the seniority of “anonymous officials” critics say — and this story may be no different.
In 2003, Times reporter Jason Blair was caught by another newspaper editor plagiarizing their material. When critics started digging, they found years of fabricated “anonymous sources” that Blair had invented. It was so bad, the public relations chief at Enron even called The Times editorial board and told them to “hang in there.”
During the lead-up to the Iraq War, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the newspaper, Judith Miller, was caught reporting on information from Iraqi “sources” that were all lies.
“During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by [Ahmad Chalabi] and his allies — almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate,” The New Yorker wrote in 2004. These reports were later used by former President George W. Bush’s administration as evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq in Mar. 2003.
In 2007, The Times was caught giving “hefty” discounts to a far-left political group for advertisements in their newspaper that used incorrect facts.
Later that year, the credibility of the newspaper’s editorial board was called into question when critics accused them of extreme bias in the reporting of the Duke Lacrosse rape scandal. The editors were accused of having a “‘lynch mob mentality” by defense lawyers for pushing a front page article attacking the accused players when the prosecutor’s case seemed to be falling apart.
And in 2011, The New York Times was caught giving faked “senior official” titles to anonymous sources in a series of front page anti-fracking articles.
According to NPR, the “senior officials” and energy experts quoted in the article were a goat farmer known her cheese business and a former intern, who was anonymously quoted using two different titles.
In fact, this has been a growing problem at the paper for years.
In a 2013 opinion article, a New York Times journalist admitted it was a serious (and growing) problem at the newspaper. Skeptical readers “are right to protest when they see anonymity granted gratuitously. That’s happening too often,” then-Times editor Margaret Sullivan wrote. “It’s time, once again, to pull in the reins.”
Sullivan, who no longer works for The Times, wrote an article Thursday slamming the “gutless” anti-Trump opinion piece that was “fraught with issues of journalistic ethics and possibly even legal concerns.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxYXYsQOtO4&feature=youtu.be
–The Horn editorial team