Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
Using this as evidence of New York Times consistent approach of favoring politics and agendas over actual journalism.
Highlights
id758122290
New York Times’ decision to feature repurposed excerpts from Peter Schweizer’s 2015 diatribe on the foundation work of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Clinton Cash, in the run-up to the 2016 campaign. On its merits, that editorial choice was indefensible: Schweizer’s book was produced by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a group mounting character-based attacks on Democratic federal nominees that Schweizer cofounded with Steve Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News. Production and distribution costs for the book were underwritten by the UK-based Mercer Foundation, which funneled $1.7 million—more than the group’s total annual budget—through the GAI. The book was flagged for serial errors and misstatements shortly after its publication, prompting a batch of hurried corrections from the publisher.
id758122312
Such is the craven and counter-journalistic logic of managerial fealty to right-wing charges of media bias: In the Clinton Cash episode, the clear diktat from the Times politburo was to embrace harebrained and unproven charges of self-dealing within the Clinton Foundation as a pre-election sweetener for the right. Times reporters could appease recalcitrant flacks from any Republican presidential hopeful’s campaign by reminding them of the yeoman’s work the paper had done in bringing Peter Schweizer’s indictment of the Clintons to such prominence.
id758122583
the same “paper of record” that went out of its way to treat Schweizer’s shoddy partisan hackwork as an urgent major political story now wanly reports that the leaked Vance dossier, “like many such vetting documents…contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump.” The slightest critical scrutiny gives the lie to such callow been-there-done-that posturing: If it is indeed the case that the Trump campaign’s file on Vance reprises previously reported accounts of Vance’s earlier career as a Never Trump Republican, that actually makes the deliberations surrounding his elevation to the veep spot more, not less, newsworthy. What, exactly, were Trump and his inner circle thinking when they tapped Vance as Trump’s running mate in the face of more than 270 pages of adverse intra-campaign analysis? The New York Times, Politico, and The Washington Post have apparently all decided that it’s their solemn civic mandate to ensure that we’ll never know.