A week can’t go by at this point without The New York Times stepping in it – and sending the message that they are no longer a newspaper at all but rather a highly partisan Democratic Party campaign handout.
The issue this time? The Joe Biden-Tara Reade saga, in which the ex-vice president and soon-to-be-presidential nominee of the Democrats stand credibly accused of sexually assaulting a then-staffer when he was a sitting U.S. Senator.
The Times, of course, infamously flooded the zone with its coverage of a far less credible accusation -dating from high school – against then-Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Among other things The Times headlined this in an editorial back there on September 18, 2018:
Sexual Abuse Isn’t Partisan
Yet the response usually is. Republican leaders can’t seem to take the problem seriously.
Among other things, the editorial said this:
“And while the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked for Dr. Blasey and Judge Kavanaugh’s testimony on the accusations, it has not committed to hold full hearings, with witnesses, or to ask for an F.B.I. the investigation, something Dr. Blasey on Tuesday insisted should occur before she appeared.”
And now? With the apparent Democratic presidential nominee accused by a former staffer – not in high school but from his time in the Senate? Now The Times says this:
“The Democratic National Committee should move to investigate the matter swiftly and thoroughly, with the full cooperation of the Biden campaign.”
Got it? If the accusation is made against Trump nominee Kavanaugh – then The Times says it is time “to ask for an F.B.I. investigation…”
But if the accused is Democrat Joe Biden? Then:
“The Democratic National Committee should move to investigate the matter swiftly and thoroughly, with the full cooperation of the Biden campaign.”
Or in other words, the FBI for thee, the DNC for me. The New York Times, to borrow from their own earlier editorial, just “can’t seem to take the problem seriously.”
To their vast credit, this was too much for a number of journalists out there. Headlined Fox News of the reaction:
Journalists mock NY Times’ call for ‘unbiased’ DNC panel to investigate Biden: ‘Is this satire?’
Tweeted Jonathan Swan of Axios: “Is this satire?”
Is this satire? “unbiased, apolitical panel, put together by the DNC” https://t.co/2ZnoBb6iEi
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) May 3, 2020
Washington Examiner chief political correspondent and Fox News contributor Byron York described this as “absolutely astonishing.”
Fox’s Britt Hume: “Beyond parody.”
Indeed.
The problem for The Times is that this incident is not a stand-alone. As noted here just in the last week alone the paper was called out by Sean Hannity for what I called its “egregiously – make that deliberately – untrue story that grossly misrepresented Hannity’s coverage of the pandemic.” Which was combined with this gobsmacking lengthy criticism of The Times from its one-time editor, an editor who had spent 28 years with the paper. That would be Tom Kuntz, and as I said, the essence of his scorching complaint was that “this is a paper that is now all about spreading a far-left ideology and hating a president – and that president’s supporters.”
Exactly. And here we are at the beginning of another week and there is fresh evidence from The Times itself courtesy of its editorial board. As mentioned, their view of investigations on allegations of sexual assault is this:
The Republican gets the FBI investigation.
The Democrat gets an investigation by his political pals on the DNC.
It would be parody and satire indeed.
But in fact, it is the hard reality of a once-great paper disgracing itself. Clueless to exactly how much it is allowing its leftist staffers to keep damaging whatever shred of the paper’s credibility it thinks it has left.
