The Right Coast

June 19, 2004
 
Excellent fisking of the NYT
By Tom Smith

The NYT coverage of the 9/11 commission report really has brought that paper to a new low. Somewhere after spin you get to outright falsification, and they've gotten there. This fisking at the realclearpolitics site is good.

What's amusing is how telling lies can hurt you if, one, the lies you tell can be refuted but, two, the people you are trying to help by lying either believe the lie or think it's irrefutable, and endorse it before they find out otherwise. John Kerry seems to have gotten himself into this pickle. Maybe Kerry and other important Democrats could get a special annotated version of the NYT, with bracketed comments, e.g., [This is false, but difficult to deny] or [we just made this up] or [someone would have to actually read the testimony to realize this is a lie]. That way, people would know what aspects of NYT "news" not to rely on.

In a way, it speaks well of the Times that they are lying so clumsily. It suggests they have not been in the business very long. They need to decide whether they are going to become a smoother organ of political propaganda, or try to go back to being a paper of record, quaint as that is. But now they're just a joke.