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New York Times has its new Hillary's uranium-and-emails scandal [1]
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Date: 2023-01-26
So anyway, I am not just writing about The New York Times in a generic sense here. There is a specific piece to talk about, and it is headlined, naturally, "Biden’s Handling of Secret Documents Complicates the Case Against Trump." Next comes the summary: “The cases are markedly different in their particulars. But they are similar enough that as a practical matter, Democrats will have a hard time using the issue against former President Donald J. Trump.”
The facts are different … but!
Peter Backer’s opening paragraphs:
F.B.I. agents are rummaging through President Biden’s private home. Republicans are on the attack. Democrats are reluctant to defend him. Lawyers are being hired. Witnesses are being interviewed. The press secretary is being pelted with questions she cannot or will not answer. But amid the familiar soundtrack of scandal in Washington, the most significant cost to the president may be the opportunity cost: Even if nothing comes of the new special counsel investigation into his team’s mishandling of classified documents, politically it has effectively let former President Donald J. Trump off the hook for hoarding secret papers.
There’s a key word in that last sentence, kind of a little clue to the issue at hand: “hoarding.” Trump has defended his possession of those documents like a dragon guarding its hoard.
The thing is, we don’t need to go through this article line by line. The flaw is in the conception. And by the time you’ve read the headline and the first couple paragraphs, it doesn’t matter what facts or distinctions are introduced because the entire piece is framed around the idea that the situations are similar enough that the differences don’t matter.
But what mattered about Trump’s document hoard was always the still-unanswered question of what he was doing with it and why it mattered to him so much that he fought to keep it. It’s really not a difficult distinction—it’s just one that The New York Times and too many in the media seem to struggle with.
This is not a first for the Times. Let’s look back to 2015, when the Times partnered with Republican opposition researcher Peter Schweizer to release a steady stream of news from his factually challenged book, Clinton Cash. The newspaper worked hard to promote Schweizer’s allegations that Hillary Clinton had approved a deal with a Russian uranium-mining company because of speaking fees she’d gotten from players in the deal, for instance, while burying the relevant information that nine different agencies signed off on that deal and Clinton had not been the State Department official to approve it. And Schweizer’s allegations got much more play at the Times than the factual corrections that were required on his book. It was all predictable, too, since he was a partisan operative with a long record of errors and falsehoods.
That Times effort was launched around the same time as the paper’s “but her emails” obsession, which continued through the 2016 election. In 2022, the Times breathlessly promoted a “red wave” narrative to the point of downplaying its own polls showing good news for Democrats. In between, the Times extended almost endless benefit of the doubt to Donald Trump. These aren’t isolated examples, and this is all the result of decisions being made at the newspaper’s highest level about how to frame its coverage.
At this point it is clear: It is the editorial policy of The New York Times that Democrats always have a major problem. And if the facts do not support that notion, the Times will ensure that the optics do.
RELATED STORY:
Biden was sloppy with classified documents. That's not great, but it's nothing like what Trump did
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/26/2149255/-New-York-Times-editorial-policy-There-s-always-a-problem-for-Democrats-even-if-it-s-fake
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