NY Times and WaPo getting it wrong

Becket Adams:

It has been a rough couple of days for New York Times and Washington Post employees.

When they were not busy getting basic facts wrong, they were busy forcing a political narrative by misrepresenting news events.

The New York Times, for example, drew no small amount of ridicule Saturday after it forgot that Hillary Clinton shared the Democratic ticket in 2016 with Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. A since-corrected opinion article authored by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd originally contained the line, “It’s hard to fathom, but it has been 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket.”

It is one thing for this bit of historical illiteracy to escape Dowd’s lips, but where were her editors? How did everyone involved in the article’s publication forget that Clinton shared the ticked in 2016 with Kaine?

Elsewhere at the paper of record, cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth claimed this weekend that Russia’s disinformation campaign to “suppress black turnout” in 2016 "worked."

“Fewer Blacks turned out in 2016 than in 20 years,” she said in a since-deleted tweet.

The 2016 election saw some of the highest black turnout of any presidential election in the last 50-plus years. Since 1964, only five cycles saw higher numbers than in 2016: 1964, 1968, 2004, 2008, and 2012. Black turnout in 2016 was higher than in 2000, 1996, 1992, 1988, 1984, 1980, 1976, and 1972.

But other than that, great points about Russian disinformation!

Over at the Washington Post, national politics reporter Colby Itkowitz suggested falsely this weekend in a likewise deleted tweet that former President Barack Obama never circumvented Congress to enact by fiat his legislative agenda. Considering Itkowitz was in the news business during the years 2008 to 2016, when Obama famously tried to govern by "pen and phone," it is astonishing that she would assert such a falsehood.

And those were just the factual errors. This is to say nothing of the efforts by the New York Times and the Washington Post to gaslight readers into thinking that major news developments are not as serious or violent as they really are.

In covering New York City's deadly crime wave, for example, the New York Times published a news report early Monday that includes this line, “Overall, serious crime in New York City has not jumped this year, but murders and shootings have: The city is on pace to to [sic] surpass 800 shootings for the first time in three years.”

How does the New York Times define “serious crime” if not shootings and murders? Also, why is there an extra “to” in that sentence? Where are the New York Times’s editors? Speaking of which, the paper of record also published an opinion article this weekend that included the lines “this kind of thinking … is what destroyed Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen and is increasingly eating away at Israel” and “that is what happened to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq. And that is what is slowly happening to Israel and America.” Did the New York Times’s news division also purge all the copy editors?

Over at the Washington Post again, it published a grotesque, glossy photo essay, titled “Trump sent agents to quell unrest. But protest is what Portland does best,” praising the Portland rioters' riot-gear chic.

In the real world, Portland police dispersed a mob of roughly 200 rioters Sunday evening after agitators fired a motor firework at law enforcement officials, injuring two officers. There were other various “direct attacks on officers.” This was one day after rioters tried to set the same police union building on fire.

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The problem at these two publications is that too many of their staffers are sympathetic to the violent protests of Antifa and BLM.   That appears to cause them to not do any critical thinking about what is happening.  They share a hated of the President with these groups which causes them to overlook the facts inconsistent with their narrative.  They also seem to have a short-term memory problem when it comes to Obama's "pen and phone" abuse of power which was recently approved by the Supreme Court.