New York Times Now Comes With Twice the Fakery

The New York Times has been garbage for a very long time. It was Joseph Stalin’s main Western apologist during his murderous reign. If you haven’t yet heard the name, look up Walter Duranty. (And if you didn’t learn about Stalin in school, that’s a pity — he espoused a philosophy of economics and tolerance not altogether unlike that espoused by some Democrats currently in Congress. He also murdered millions upon millions of people.)

In more recent times, the Times tried to destroy the very foundations of the United States with its despicable 1619 Project. That project alleges that America is really founded on slavery, not the principles and aspirations written down in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Those aspirations set about the death of slavery, albeit slowly, which the United States inherited from the rest of the world. Slavery had existed back into pre-history, long before Thomas Jefferson lived a genteel life at Monticello.

Journalists, not historians, wrote the atrocious 1619 Project. When historians fact-checked it, it fell apart, and the journalists who wrote it have not handled the fact-checking by actual historians well. The Times continues encouraging a pernicious trend of those who are supposed to write the first draft of history weighing in on actual history without the training or experience to do so properly.

The Times has kept that tinge of Stalinism since long past Stalin’s assumption of room temperature. Tech reporter (Tech reporter! Not editorial writer!) Kevin Roose is just the latest mild example. He’s tweeting that several stories leading the traffic stats on Facebook are “misinformation” — aka fake news.

Facebook is absolutely teeming with right-wing misinformation right now. These are all among the 10 most-engaged URLs on the platform over the last 24 hours (per @NewsWhip data) pic.twitter.com/WlTR10fRBE

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) November 10, 2020

The problem here is that all of the stories he cites are accurate.* He’s trying to get Facebook to throttle them, effectively airbrushing them out of Facebook users’ timelines.

Called out, Roose doubles down.

For the conservatives who are mad about this: yes, it is possible for a story to be factually accurate *and* for it to be part of a misinformation campaign aimed at undermining confidence in an election. https://t.co/Ag4brfJzO4

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) November 10, 2020

But what if the election was actually corrupted? Is that not a possibility, reporter who works at a paper that pushed the “Russia corrupted the 2016 election to help Trump” for year after year? Please show your work.

Remember Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” schtick in 2004? Kevin Roose has a new spin on that: accurate but fake.

The game he is playing is insidious. He’s trying to get stories he doesn’t like censored, and in the end, outlets of which he disapproves de-platformed.

That’s not journalism and he shouldn’t pretend it is. Neither should the New York Times.

This isn’t exactly news, but the New York Times isn’t really a news outlet anymore. It does actual news, sometimes, and it even gets things right every once in a while, but it’s much more engaged in its activism. It runs off people like Bari Weiss for the thoughtcrime of having her own thoughts. It turned into a hornet swarm for publishing majority opinions written by a sitting United States senator. These are not the actions of a newsroom.

Roose’s tweets, the 1619 Project, and much of what the Times prints on a daily basis are misinformation. It does activism by commission and by omission, by story selection, story avoidance, and outright spin.

Notice I’m not arguing for either Roose or the Times to be de-platformed, though. The Constitutional ideals they downplay still mean something.

*The Michigan software “glitch” turned out to be a user error, but elections officials were calling it a possible glitch at the time the story was reported.

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