That is—all the news that fits The Narrative.
Yep, that the most recent searchable story in the New York Times related to “FD-1023.”
All The News That’s Fit To Print
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Tag Archives: New York Times
Some Unindicted Coconspirators React
Found on The Twitterz—
BTW, the timestamps on these tweets is in GMT.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
FIFY
THE Narrative Is As Changeable As THE Science
The New York Times is reporting that Hunter’s laptop isn’t Russian disinformation after all.
However, Twitter Safety was provided with the Narrative Change Notice in advance, and there is no indication that the NYT will be banned as the NYPost was in 2020.
Experts Recommend
The New York Times reports that experts recommend the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a “reality czar.”
The Gestapo, Stasi, and KGB were run by experts.
Meanwhile, in the New York Media …
Bari Weiss resigns from the New York Times, and Andrew Sullivan is leaving New York magazine.
Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
I suppose publishing like this eliminates the need to translate the press releases.
The Stupid. It Burns.
Donald Trump has done more to hobble Vladimir Putin’s ability to act on the world stage than any of his predecessors. For example, Trump’s favorable treatment of fracking has kept the prices of oil and natural gas down, devastating Russia’s income as an oil exporter and severely truncating Putin’s cash flow. It’s the Democrats who espouse policies which are more favorable to Russia’s interests.
So the New York Times ran this yesterday—
That “warning” was supposedly contained in an intelligence briefing. If our intelligence agencies really think that Vladimir Putin would act so stupidly against his own interests as to try to interfere in the 2020 election in Trump’s favor, then it’s time for a top-to-bottom review of what’s going on in Spookville. Trump’s appointment of Richard Grenell as acting Director of National Intelligence looks like a pretty good move.
Note to the Times: The Russian Collusion Hoax failed last year.
Truthiness
Only one of these organization admits to publishing fiction. 
One story has its basis in unverified claims. One story is a reasonable parody of what was actually said.
But one of the publications has a good crossword puzzle feature.
Don’t Know Much About History
On 11 September, 2001, two airplanes were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The airplanes did not take aim at the buildings. Evil men, backed up by teams of other evils men, piloted them into the targets. You’d think that a newspaper in New York City could keep those facts straight, but …
UPDATE—Tough, but fair …
UPDATE 2—Well, that didn’t last long, did it?
Don’t Know Much About History
The New York Times continues to misrepresent historical facts. Its recent tenth anniversary retrospective of the Tea Party movement is yet another example of woke revisionism. The Times portrays the Tea Party as raaaaacist, and David Harsanyi has a post over at The Federalist taking them to task for their shoddy reporting.
In the first draft of this piece, I joked that The New York Times might add a line about Tea Party “racism” before the day was over to placate the Twitter mob. They did it before I could even publish. But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s no evidence that a “good deal”—or any substantial deal, for that matter—of the Tea Party’s popularity was propelled by racism.
Read the whole thing.
The Easiest Way to Discredit …
… the New York Times is to quote the New York Times.
The NYT has a story up about a “loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House” that has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at prominent news organizations. The Times complains that
… using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.
Really? How?
Don’t Know Much About History
Erick Erickson has a post over at The Resurgent fact checking The New York Times‘ 1619 Project, a potentially worthwhile endeavor designed to educate Americans about slavery and the role it has played in the new world. However, the newspaper has turned the project over to a group of opinion writers who appear more interested in stoking and fueling racial grievances than truthfully exploring the nation’s history.
The essay Erickson fact checks begins by getting key details of 17th-century history wrong.
The Times has set about inserting race into everything and demanding we all see race in everything. 1619 is our “true founding.” No, actually, historically that is not true in any way shape or form.
In fact, the House of Burgesses convened in Jamestown, Virginia on July 30, 1619, before any African had set foot on the North American continent. The Mayflower pilgrims landed in New England in 1620, completely separated from those in Jamestown, with different goals, views, values, and priorities. It is also worth noting that white indentured servants outnumbered slaves and arrived before slaves. Quibble all you want with the distinctions, but in 1619 they were roughly treated the same — terribly on all counts.
To make it all about slavery is to ignore that there were already Europeans in North America before the first slave arrived and there were Europeans arriving in America in different locations quite apart from where slavery was. For a project that claims truth for itself, it is deeply untrue to truth and reality. The pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620 were not exactly a group of slave holders as they were setting up shop, forming modes of government, and adopting private property and capitalist meta-structures to avoid failures from collective farming.
In fact, in 1623, still well before slavery made it into pilgrim settlements, the Plymouth Plantation abandoned communal property rights in favor of private property rights and a system of free enterprise.
The Times‘ essay’s misrepresentation of history continues to the present era, falsely claiming, for example, that the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2010.
Americans, particularly white Americans, need to learn more about slavery in the United States. But doing so on the premise that the United States itself is flawed and illegitimate is not the way to do it. Sadly, that’s what so much of the Times’ coverage amounts to.
If the nation is founded on slavery and slavery is woven into the very fabric of our society, then our society is illegitimate. The only way to overcome it is to overturn it. That would take revolution. This is the path the New York Times goes down. Once it lights this fire, it will not be able to control it. But it wants to strike the match anyway.
Read the whole thing.
The New York Times and Defamation
Before I get started on this post, I should note that I have been personally sued for defamation seven times because of what I have written on this blog. I’ve won all of those cases because what I’d written was true. I believe there should be very few exceptions to the protection of truthful speech. I also believe that we all should be free to state our opinions. Knowing, malicious lies don’t deserve such protection.
Having said that, I’d like to take note of the fact that the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has reversed a trial court’s dismissal of Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against the New York Times. The dismissal was on procedural grounds, and John HInderaker has a good explanation of that at PowerLine. The Second Circuit also found Palin had stated her claim with sufficient plausibility that the case should proceed to the discovery phase.
Palin claims that a Times editorial contained a false statement connecting her to 2012 shooting of Gabby Gifford. Palin lawsuit notes the editor who wrote the allegedly defamatory piece is the brother of a politician who Gifford had endorsed and who was opposed by Palin. (In fact, Palin had endorsed the opponent.) The editor had testified that he didn’t know that the Times‘ previous reporting has shown no connection between Palin and the shooter. OTOH, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the editor might have a personal grudge against Palin because of her political opposition to his brother, and that led him to maliciously making a false statement in the editorial.
So Palin v. New York Times will proceed to discovery. This could be interesting.
On Economies of Scale
The last few years have been rough on the media business, and the past week has been a real doozy. The media have been crunched between bad economic news (more layoffs) and worse reporting (fake Cohen testimony, fake Vietnam Veteran, etc.). I posted this tweet yesterday as a response to a post by my podcasting partner Stacy McCain—
This morning, Charlie Martin has a post over at PJ Media that expands on the economic wisdom in Pablo’s reply.
Some years ago, I crunched numbers from the New York Time‘s 10K financial statements and found that a single copy of the Times cost them about $4 to print, ship, and sell. At the time the cover price was $1; to make a profit they had to sell more than $3 worth of advertising or something. (Now you know why they, and many other publishers, have turned into tour organizers and sell merchandise.)
A single column of the paper version of the Times costs between 1¢ and 10¢ to print; delivering a similar amount of advertising, with full-color graphics and even video, costs between one and ten million times less, and can be targeted to the guy who just googled for fly-fishing gear instead of everyone on the Upper West Side.
When your competition can deliver a better product for 0.000001 times as much, your business model has big problems.
When new technologies make a product obsolete, it’s time to look for a new business, and that new business will undoubtedly require a new business model. If the cost of entry into journalism is vastly reduced and there are vastly more people able to engage in reporting, then some of those new competitors will drive out some of the old players. That’s the free market at work as people vote democratically with their wallets. As Stacy notes in a post today,
Liberal journalists do not want to admit that their political bias may be a major reason for their industry’s decline, but when the money crunch hits, they insist that their work is valuable to “democracy.” But what did BuzzFeed do to attract hundreds of millions of dollars of investment capital? Quite simply, they figured out how to game the Facebook algorithm for cheap hits with clickbait, which might have been good for BuzzFeed’s traffic numbers but didn’t do anything in terms of creating an informed citizenry.
It seems to me that BuzzFeed’s core problem is that it can generate lots of clicks, but those clicks don’t generate successful advertising impressions. BuzzFeed’s cost per million views may be dirt cheap, but the cost per sale seen by the advertisers is too high. The site’s product does not attract serious, qualified eyeballs for its advertisers. One of the consequences of a free market is that our competitors are free to out-compete us.
So BuzzFeed is laying off 400 employees, 15 % of its staff. That means that they had close to 2,700 people on the payroll. Now, Stacy and I haven’t been able to lose millions of dollars a year of other peoples’ money, but our blogs have generated modest profits. The Other McCain operates with one full-time and two part-time bloggers. Hogewash! gets by with me part-time and the occasional assistance of members of the Vast Hogewash! Research Organization.
To paraphrase Instapundit: You’re gonna need a smaller blog.
UPDATE—This blog is a for-profit operation. While I don’t sell outside advertising, I do have a Tip Jar, I sell stuff via The Hogewash Store, and I have links to Amazon which earn a commission.
Math and Facts are Harder
I’m sure Paul Krugman thinks he made a morally justifiable argument in his recent NYT article supporting ¡Ocasio! She Guevara’s proposed higher tax rates, but he’s dead wrong on both the facts and his math. He wrote,
The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? … And it’s a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.
It’s a fact that World War II ended in 1945. You can look it up.
It’s also a fact that the top U. S. personal income tax rates were cut from 70 percent to 50 percent in 1964. Paul Krugman could have looked that up in the NYT’s archives.
1964 – 1945 = 19 and 19 < 35.
Also, the peak period of post WWII economic growth in America was after that tax cut, a fact that Krugman would have also found if he researched his paper's own archives.
Space prohibits a full discussion of the impact of the tax cut, but current data show that inflation-adjusted G.D.P. increased 5.8 percent in 1964 after a 4.4 percent rise in 1963. Growth improved to 6.5 percent in 1965 and 6.6 percent in 1966. These were the three best back-to-back years for economic growth in the postwar era, and economists generally credit the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut for much of it.
Sometimes Truth just refuses to fit The Narrative.
UPDATE—To be fair to Paul Krugman, the Kennedy/Johnson tax cut became law just before his 11th birthday, so he probably has no real memory of the economic conditions he was writing about.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
One of the points made in the defense of Brett Kavanaugh has been the fact that people who engage in the sort of conduct alleged against him are usually serial offenders, and no other women had stepped forward. Indeed, every other woman who knew Kavanaugh and who did step forward spoken in his favor, until the last minute. The New Yorker has now published a claim that Brett Kavauagh exposed himself to a girl while he was a student at Yale. This second story was also being worked by several of the usual suspects in the Main Stream Media, and none of them, including The New Yorker, have been able to been able to find a witness to confirm the story. In fact, the New York Times has reported that none the potential witnesses they have interviewed could corroborate the story. This tale appears to be even flimsier than the Ford accusation, but that has not prevented Senator Feinstein from asking that the Ford/Kavanaugh hearing finally scheduled for Thursday be postponed until this new claim can be investigated by the FBI.
And Michael Avenatti has come out from under his rock, saying he represents a woman with “credible information about Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge.”
It’s unfortunate, it’s hysterical, it’s panic stricken, but Democrats are proceeding as I have foreseen.
UPDATE—My podcasting partner Stacy McCain comments here.
Sarah Jeong, The New York Times, and Twitter
Alinsky’s Rule 4 state:
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
I’ve rather enjoyed the brouhaha over Sarah Jeong’s Twitter history and her hiring by the NYT. As noted by other commenters, the Times knew about her tweets when they hired her, and they brought on board anyway. Indeed, it appears that her tweets were not considered a bug but a feature. So if she’s a racist, one can assume that she’s the good kind of racist of which the NYT approves.
UPDATE—This is from a 2016 piece about the alt-right.
True bigotry is often excused as nothing more than crude humor or nihilistic trolling … To them, it’s humor. To everyone else, it’s hate.
Stormy [Political] Weather
Over at PowerLine, John Hinderacker has a piece up examining the Democratic Party’s New York Times‘ coverage of Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels. After noting that the NYT has not shown any previous interest in the pre-public-life dalliances of such presidents as John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, he notes
And for the Times to accuse our president of “sexual perversion,” on the basis of absolutely zero evidence, is a low blow even by the standards of the Democratic Party press. (On a positive note, it is good to see that the Times thinks there still is such a thing as sexual perversion. That seems like an old-fashioned notion in today’s era of “let a thousand gender identities bloom.”)
The left-wing press is working overtime today to make the 12-year-old Stormy Daniels story into news. Why? … The Democratic Party is trying to distract voters from [Trump’s] accomplishments with irrelevant stories about a former porn star.
Read the whole thing.
Breaking: NYT Discovers Than a Reduced Percentage of Zero is Zero
In a piece about the proposed tax cuts, the New York Times notes that
[t]he plan would not benefit lower-income households that do not pay federal income taxes.
(H/T, Steve Hayward at PowerLine).
Well, duh.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
The NYT has an article up titled The Most Successful Democrat Since F.D.R. It’s about Barack Obama.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Jim Rutenberg, the “Mediator” at the New York Times, has an opinion piece up expressing concern over the challenge of reporting objectively on Donald Trump.
It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.
Walter Duranty was unavailable for comment. Read the whole thing.
Punching Back Twice As Hard
This seems an appropriate response to the WaPo cartoon featuring the Cruz children as dancing monkeys—
Reddit, Rewrite, and The New York Times
Twitchy is having fun with the New York Times revision of its coverage of the Ellen Pao debacle at Reddit.
Winstion Smith was unavailable for comment.
Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows
Politico reports that Fox News and the New York Times have both cut exclusive deals for early access to the anti-Hillary research to be published in Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich by Peter Schweizer. The book is due out on 5 May and can be pre-ordered here.