A brief flashback.
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Ben Rhodes gloated. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes, the White House’s “Obama whisperer”, was explaining how he had pulled the wool over the media’s eyes on the Iran Deal to a journalist.
No, really. Literally nothing.
Read these corrections and laugh, or weep if you’re one of the few human beings outside Manhattan to take the paper seriously.
The first is a Front Page correction that demonstrates conclusively that the New York Times has zero internal fact-checking despite claiming that it can “fact check” Republicans. (via Gary Weiss/Twitter.)
“An article on Monday about arms being sent to Ukraine from the United States and Europe misidentified the city that was overrun by Russian tanks in 1956. It was Budapest, not Prague.”
One person can always make errors, but we’re talking about a massive staff on a huge paper that can’t even be bothered to get a basic piece of history right before it ends up on the front page. Someone wrote this, one or more editors looked at this, and then they decided to run it because no one knows basic history at the paper anymore.
And then there’s this charming blend of ignorance and antisemitism.
“A subheading with an article on Sunday about a meeting between Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia referred imprecisely to Tel Aviv, implying that it was the seat of Israel’s government. Israel’s government is in Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv.”
Imprecisely. By that the Times means that it followed the old Soviet/Islamist pattern of describing Tel Aviv making decisions, the way we speak about Moscow or D.C., as a means of denying that Israel’s capital and government are in Jerusalem.
All of this is miserably pathetic.
Some things just can’t be corrected. The New York Times is one of them.
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