The New York Times has had a leftward bias for decades. But the bias has gotten much worse in recent years. It became insufferable when Trump entered the presidential race. Like so many elite institutions who pick their employees from today’s academic consensus mills, the Times saw no reason to treat Trump fairly. To respect his voters or their concerns. Or even to sort out legitimate skepticism about Donald Trump’s attitude toward Russia. You know, from elaborate and poorly-sourced crank conspiracy theories.

And now the Times has done the unforgivable. Rep. Steve Scalise still fights for his life, his family around his hospital bed. America still processes a terrorist attack against one of its three branches of government. And the Times let its bias goad it into lying. Not just lying, libeling.

The Weekly Standard Gets it Right

I can’t improve on Mark Hemingway’s synopsis in The Weekly Standard. So let me just quote him at some length. (Do go read his piece—a scrupulous autopsy of the Times’ credibility.) Hemingway writes:

Yesterday, following the news that a Republican congressmen was shot playing baseball, along with four others, in Virginia, the New York Times wrote what one conservative website is calling the “Worst Editorial In Human History.” Discussion of it has dominated social media, and even a number of notable liberal pundits are appalled.

Here’s the original masthead editorial from the Times:

Not all the details are known yet about what happened in Virginia, but a sickeningly familiar pattern is emerging in the assault: The sniper, James Hodgkinson, who was killed by Capitol Police officers, was surely deranged, and his derangement had found its fuel in politics. Mr. Hodgkinson was a Bernie Sanders supporter and campaign volunteer virulently opposed to President Trump. He posted many anti-Trump messages on social media, including one in March that said “Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.

After a firestorm of criticism, the Times released a brief, incomplete correction:

An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.

Hemingway unpacks that:

Just to recap, Sarah Palin and Tea Partiers were blamed widely for incitement in the media in the immediate aftermath of the Giffords shooting (quite notably in the pages of the Times), even though it was apparent on the day of the shooting that Jared Lee Loughner was paranoid schizophrenic who believed that grammar was a conspiracy to keep people from thinking correct thoughts, a man with no rational political beliefs.

Further, there’s absolutely no evidence that he ever saw the map circulated by Sarah Palin’s political action committee, and the idea that using cross hairs on a map to rhetorically “target” politicians for defeat counts as an incitement to violence is absurd. Politics, like everything else, is full of martial metaphors—”campaign” is a term borrowed from war.

Despite this, two years after the Giffords shooting and long after we knew all about Loughner’s motivations (or lack thereof), a news story in the Times noted that “many criticized Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential nominee, for using cross hairs on her Web site to identify Democrats like Ms. Giffords who she said should be defeated for re-election,” without noting there’s no link between Loughner and Palin.

Can You Get Fired for Libel Anymore?

Let’s review. The New York Times

distorted the truth about a vicious attack on a U.S. congresswoman.

Attributed real political views to a raving, bipartisan psychotic.

Blamed the attack on a conservative Christian U.S. politician.

It did so on zero evidence, out of clear partisan animus.

All to deflect attention from a murder attempt against a dozen Republican congressmen.

That meets the standard for libel in my book. I’ve read that Gov. Palin is considering a lawsuit, and I hope that she pursues it. The key criterion in court is that the story show “reckless indifference to the truth,” and evidence of malice. The Times managed to check both boxes.

Keep in mind that this is a paper which years back met charges of rampant bias by appointing an independent “Public Editor” to supervise its content. They just dismissed him as unnecessary. Oops.

Journalistic Malpractice

This is not just an instance of left-wing bias. It is a journalistic scandal. To see how profound it is, turn things around. Imagine if:

Some pro-lifer had shot at Supreme Court justices, shouting, “I want to kill all the pro-Roe judges!”

Then the next day Fox News tried to deflect the political fallout by citing the violence committed by some drooling meth-addict with a Hillary Clinton bumper sticker.

And it blamed Clinton for inciting him.

That’s how unhinged are the minds, cankered the souls, that produced that masthead editorial in the New York Times.

The New York Times should do more than publish some bland, incomplete retraction. It should fire every member of the editorial board who approved that toxic and cruel editorial. The Times should apologize to Governor Palin, and give her a weekly Op-Ed column for six months. It should then try to locate some fair-minded liberals. Writers with a deep respect for the truth and some emotional distance. Then appoint them instead to run its editorial page.

They will be hard to find. The “elite” schools that produce such writers have abandoned objectivity, fairness, free speech, and other Western values as products of the white male patriarchy. Scholars at such schools routinely denounce biology and even physics for failing to reflect their leftist agenda. (Follow New Real Peer Review for dozens of such instances.) Instead, students learn a deep-seated relativism toward facts, science, and morals. The only anchor that guides them is naked political aggression, the will to power. The opportunity to crush the morally loathsome, “deplorable” opponent. That’s the hiring pool for the New York Times and most other media.

And that’s how you end up printing libel in the nation’s “paper of record.” (For more from the author of “The New York Times Just Attempted Suicide” please click HERE)

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There’s an old saying that goes something like this:

“One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”

That would fit the NY Times editorial board.

In the United States, nearly one-third of adults, about 76 million people, are either “struggling to get by” or “just getting by,” according to the third annual survey of households by the Federal Reserve Board…

…Over all, the survey depicts an economy in which many Americans face daily hardship, while even the college educated — the presumed winners in the economy — still face big obstacles. The findings argue for continued low interest rates; for government policies and federal spending to help create good jobs at good pay; for affordable education that starts at preschool, thus fostering college-ready students; and for a safety net that can withstand today’s potent economic forces.

Oh really?

For the last 20+ years every hiccup in the economy has been met with “very low” interest rates. Rates have now been at emergency levels for a period of time approaching eight years.

It hasn’t worked to lift people out of that malaise, and the reason is obvious: The lower rates are the cheaperit is in “today’s terms” to borrow and those who can and do borrow first have “first mover” advantage.

Those entities are never those with fewer privileges and poorer net positions in life.

That means it’s never any of those who face said daily hardship that reap said advantage — it is instead those who exploit that segment of the population and they use it to screw everyone else!

Witness Uber, who is “leasing” cars to “drivers” at slavery-like conditions. How? Because “money is very cheap”, that’s how. How is it that Tesla, which makes cars nobody in the “struggling” class can afford, is in business with a loss-making enterprise? Same answer. How is it that college has gotten so expensive that you now can easily rack up $100,000 in debt to get a worthless degree and just three decades ago you could flip pizzas and pay cash to go to school? Same answer. How is it that the average new car loan is now six years and payments are often $500 or more, never mind the average new car sale topping $30,000? Same answer. Why has medical cost increasing at 7+% a year and now comprises 37% of the federal budget, doubling every 10 years for the last 2 decades — a trend that cannot continue for another 10 years as it will then consume more than the available cash ex interest payments? Same answer.

In 1920, faced with a massive over-capacity problem (fueled by speculative stupidity over the end of WWI, the return to civilian production and the boys coming home) and a crashing economy The Fed, then 7 years old raised interest rates into what was an incipient depression and the federal government balanced the budget.

The result? In 18 months the economy had fully recovered (as had employment) and we posted the highest rate of growth in industrial production ever recorded in American history.

The only reason that event is not called a Depression is that it was over almost before it began because instead of coddling those who were exploiting people in the most trouble and protecting those who had made foolish investment decisions with their capital surplus both the government and Fed instead pulled away the pacifier and allowed the markets and economy to do what it does when left alone — clear uneconomic decisions through bankruptcy and transfer of assets from those who did dumb things to those who do smart things.

There is no answer — ever — to be found in protecting idiocy, monopoly, exploitation and predatory behavior, all of which riddle our economic landscape today. The worst examples are found in exploiting those who have the least going on between their ears and thus the least ability to analyze and resist the siren call of “cheap money” — including young adults and those in the most-desperate of situations.

Thus the two biggest scams of today: College and medicine, along with all that surround both; the former has now generated over a trillion in debt that as a 25% delinquency rate (!!) and the latter routinely financially destroys any middle-class American who gets sick whether they have “insurance” or not, never mind being nearly one dollar in four that the federal government spends along with one dollar in five in the broader economy.

The NY Times editorial board either does know this and is in the back pocket of those doing the exploiting or they’re too stupid to survive.

Pick one, but don’t drink their grape Kool-Aid — it’s laced with cyanide. (For more from the author of “The New York Times Fails Logic Class, Chapter 46,080” please click HERE)

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