The New York Times does not have any room to play games with its credibility. At a moment when everyone from the President of the United States to the average voter has finally recognized the paper’s abject liberal bias, the onus is on the Times to prove they can do better.
For a split second this past week, it seemed they were indeed aspiring for a higher level of journalism than they’ve been pumping out for the past three years. While The New Yorker ran wild with a flimsy second accusation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the Times acknowledged that they, too, had run a check on this accusation…and had come away wanting.
“The New York Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate Ms. Ramirez’s story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge,” they wrote after Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer went forward with the story. “Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the episode and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.”
This was a responsible piece of journalism from a paper that has been an arm of the Democratic Party for the entirety of the Trump presidency (if not long before). But apparently someone in the editorial brass decided that it was not kosher to cast doubts on a women, especially not one who could be the key to keeping this pro-life conservative off the Supreme Court. Thus, in a move arguably even more irresponsible than the original New Yorker story, the paper went in to their article and started making some changes.
The first change? To remove the paragraph quoted above.
The second? To add a new paragraph pretending as though the first one never existed!
“For Republicans, the hearing and the women’s accusations are fraught with political dangers,” the current version of the article says. “In the #MeToo era, Republicans cannot afford to attack Judge Kavanaugh’s accusers. So they have instead trained their fire on Senate Democrats, accusing them of waging a campaign of character assassination, and on the news media — in particular The New Yorker. Many cited a Times article that said the Times had conducted numerous interviews but was unable to corroborate Ms. Ramirez’s story. But the Times did not rebut her account and, unlike The New Yorker, was not able to obtain an interview with Ms. Ramirez.”
After news watchdogs began publicizing the differences in the two versions, the piece’s author, Sheryl Gay Stolberg claimed that the troublesome section that people were citing “was never there in the first place.”
For a media outlet that loves to compare the Trump administration to the Orwellian world of 1984, this is one remarkable piece of memory-hole self-censorship. We have always been at war with Eurasia, and the New York Times never wrote what it wrote.
Welp, that’s why we call it fake news.
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