Lolwut?
As I was winging my way back to the City of Angels on Friday after helping to bury my father-in-law in Indiana, news broke that Hillary Clinton claimed that someone in the Democratic presidential field was being groomed by the Russians. I wrote about it here. (BTW, what did we do before airplane internet?) Tulsi Gabbard, being done caught out, lashed Hillary like a woman scorned.
As soon as I arrived home, I wrote the above piece, chortling in my joy. I have very little use for Assadist lickspittles and handmaidens to tyranny. Yes, she served in the military. So did Benedict Arnold. So did Robert E. Lee. Your point?
However, it seems we may have all been laughing based on a fallacy.
As this thread attests, from which I screencaptured the head graphic, all of our attagirls were based on The New York Times getting the basic fact of the story wrong. As you can see, she said that the Russians were backing Gabbard, and Republicans were grooming her to run as a third party candidate to give their guy Donald Trump any chance to steal another election.
Other news which broke last week was of the State Department clearing Clinton of any wrongdoing in l'affaire e-mail server. The Washington Post displayed the story prominently; the Times, which also spent all of 2015-16 excoriating Clinton over the "scandal", buried it on Page A16.
These two data points must make one wonder.
Surely, the crack reporter who wrote the Russian grooming story had audio of Clinton's podcast with David Plouffe. I mean, the words were right there. And if there's something we know about Hillary, it's that she enunciates quite well. No slobbering and slurring like Trump. No one could have mistaken her meaning or her statement.
And yet. The Times wrote that she said Russia was grooming a Democratic candidate, and we all went with the story and the tweets, and thus was a tempest engendered.
We have to stop thinking of these as honest mistakes. And, of course, there's no longer a public editor to keep the newsroom honest. We really have to consider that when a new hire is taken on in the Times, the one thing they have to do is swear ever-lasting enmity to all Clintons, much like Hamilcar Barca forced his young son Hannibal to hate Rome and do everything he could to destroy it. There can really be no other explanation for the litany of stories filled with animus for Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea. But, of course, Hillary is the one bearing the full brunt of the Paper of Record's ire.
The Times does a lot of good work. But from WMD in Iraq to EMAILZZ, it plays to what it perceives as being power. It helped usher in America's worst geopolitical disaster before 2016 with its Iraq reporting. And it helped usher in the shredding of the Republic with its reporting and opinion on the 2016 election. The Post also got in on the emails game. But, to its credit, it has spent the past three years holding the Trump regime's feet to the fire. Dean Baquet, editor of the Times, averred that they're not part of the Resistance.
I look askance at no one who encourages people to drop their Times subscriptions. I look askance at no one who blasts the Times for its supine both-siderism. The Times is a major locus of power in our society, and too often it doesn't use that power for good. In our nation's crisis, it hasn't done as much as it could, or should. To quote Howard Zinn, you can't be neutral on a moving train. And Trump wants to turn this train into cattle cars.
My criticisms of the Times aren't frivolous. We're at an inflection point in our history, and too often it tries to play by rules which no longer exist. We're far from the days of the Pentagon Papers. I wonder if, today, faced with a similar scoop, the Times would publish?