New york times

Journalistic ethics 101 with Pogrebin and Kelly

In Cockburn’s grubby corner of the journalism world, New York Times writers Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly are at the center of a serious controversy. To promote their new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, the two journalists had an excerpt published in the Times featuring a new sexual assault allegation against Justice Kavanaugh. Unfortunately for Pogrebin and Kelly, the excerpt failed to mention that the alleged victim does not recall the assault. While the New York Times has been criticized for its journalistic malpractice, it seems only fair to hear about the new book from the authors themselves. On Wednesday night, Cockburn slinked into the prestigious National Press Club to see the two authors discuss their new book.

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A fresh assassination of Brett Kavanaugh’s character

I guess that The New York Times didn’t get the memo. Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court last fall. He is sitting there (officially, I mean) right now, as I write. Despite the most disgusting, ad hominem, evidence-free effort at character assassination of a Supreme Court nominee in history, the combined forces of The New York Times and other cesspool media organs like The New Yorker, bottom-feeding Senate Democrats, feminazis of various stripes, and other woke constituencies on the left, Kavanaugh made it.

brett kavanaugh

9/11 and the false sense of American security

Eighteen years ago, I was only a child. My first indication that something bad had happened on September 11, 2001 was that a birthday party my whole class had been slated to attend was canceled. Instead of heading to a celebration, I waited with the rest of my classmates for our parents to come and take us home. Except my mother didn’t take me home. We went straight to the supermarket. I remember watching, mouth agape, as my mother piled what seemed like hundreds of boxes of spaghetti, cases of water, and canned goods into the wagon. None of us knew what would come next, and she wanted to be prepared. That commitment to preparation came from fear. A fear that was rational and justified, and which grew out of a realistic sense that the sands had shifted. We were at war.

9/11

Bedbug Bret Stephens should stay on Twitter and quit the New York Times

Bedbugs are, according to the University of Kentucky, 'small, brownish, flattened insects that feed solely on the blood of animals.' The common bedbug has been known to bite 'warm-blooded animals, including dogs, cats, birds and rodents'. Now we can add 'professors who are mean to the bedbug on Twitter' to that list. An internal memo was circulated around the New York Times yesterday regarding a bed bug infestation. Upon the news breaking, an associate professor at George Washington University called Dave Karpf tweeted the following joke about NYT columnist Bret Stephens: https://twitter.com/davekarpf/status/1166094950024515584 Innocuous enough, right? WRONG. A few hours later, Karpf posted 'This afternoon, I tweeted a brief joke about a well-known NYT op-Ed columnist.

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The NYT and the triumph of narrative journalism

The Mueller report did not bring down Donald Trump. The president will not be impeached before the 2020 election, and it is clear – in spite of the hopes of the good men, women and nonbinary soldiers of the Resistance – that he is not a Russian superbot manufactured in a cutting-edge information warfare lab in the dark belly of the Kremlin. Trump is not the Manchurian president. An ominous question emerges for liberals: who is Donald Trump, if he is not Vladimir Putin’s dogsbody? What the hell are we going to do with him? Why is he still fouling up our government? The pack howls, but in the four years since Trump descended the golden escalator from the world of television entertainment to the world of political entertainment, they have yet to catch him.

dean baquet narrative

What woke journalists are calling ‘nonbinary fashion’ we used to just call ‘clothes’

When I was 13, I wore my dad’s clothes to school every day. Men’s overalls, stinky old t-shirts, a flannel shirt tied around my waist...sometimes Dr Martens, sometimes too-big combat boots. If I was feeling bold, I’d ignore my insecurities about my bony knees and skinny legs and wear a skirt and tights with my unisex boots. It was called 'grunge.' No one ever thought of it as 'gender bending': it was just what we wore. Apparently, those of us who came of age in the Nineties, smoking on the corner instead of going to class, our second-hand itchy wool sweaters soaking up the stench of rain and cigarettes, were revolutionaries. This week, the New York Times, one of the world’s most-respected sources of journalism (or so they'll tell you), published a story about 'nonbinary fashion.

nonbinary fashion

A letter to our subscribers, from the New York Times

Dear Valued Subscriber, For a mere $39.99 a month, about what you pay your Guatemalan nanny, you depend on us for thought-provoking personal reassurance, award-winning arrogance, hard-hitting sycophancy, and up-to-the-minute coverage of Orange Man – who is very, very bad. The New York Times remains the world’s most prestigious Viewpoint Validation Service because we understand the crippling emptiness permeating the wealthy liberal soul – we are that emptiness – and you entrust us to make you feel good, smart and worthy every day. While News and Opinion whisper watered-down postgrad nothings in your ear, Style and Dining guarantee you’ll be validated on the outside, as well as inside.

new york times

The NYT’s pound-foolish Brexit coverage

It seems The New York Times has decided to continue its bizarre crusade against Britain, which culminated in last year’s outlandish claim that the nation lives on a diet of mutton and oatmeal (although, given current reports that the government is considering buying up Welsh lamb in the event of a no-deal exit, this strange claim could turn out to have been an unwitting prediction). The latest pronouncement comes from the NYT’s European economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman. He writes: ‘The British pound has long possessed a mystique that transcends its marginal role in the global economy, conjuring memories of its dominance in the imperial age.

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Where is the outrage from the right over Ben Garrison’s White House invite?

The New York Times published an anti-Semitic cartoon depicting a blind Donald Trump being led by a canine Benjamin Netanyahu in its international edition earlier this year. Following near-universal condemnation, Trump seemed more concerned for himself than for the Jews. His tweet on the matter was typically puerile: 'The New York Times has apologized for the terrible Anti-Semitic Cartoon, but they haven’t apologized to me for this or all of the Fake and Corrupt news they print on a daily basis.

ben garrison anti-semitism

The death of political cartoons isn’t funny

The New York Times is dropping its political cartoons. Well, what a surprise! Making people laugh has never been easy. I’ve been supporting ex-wives and making a living from banging out cartoons since 1953, God help me. I started with selling drawings to the British music magazine, Melody Maker. They printed them and paid me two guineas a time, which was worth £2 and 2 shillings, or about $5.50. You could buy a house for five quid then, and you could afford to get married, God help me! There were lots of magazines and newspapers around then and I worked for most of them: Lilliput and Tatler are still going but jokeless. Punch’s editor Malcolm Muggeridge said that if I kept sending my work in I’d soon become a regular, (then, added ‘God help you!’).

michael heath political cartoons

Reports of the GOP’s death are greatly exaggerated

David Brooks, the center-right Cassandra of the New York Times, reckons that a GOP apocalypse is coming. The data predicted as much in 2016, when all the smart pollsters predicted a Clinton landslide, and I predicted as much when mourning the fact that Trump was the new Republican standard-bearer. But tinsel didn’t rain forth from Hillary’s near-anointing at the Jacob Javits Center. The end of the world is deferred, yet again. Trump is not conservative in the strict sense of the word; he’s a libertarian and a libertine. So you could plausibly argue that despite Trump’s victory, conservatism did not win in 2016. You could even argue that conservatism didn’t really compete at all in 2016, or, if it did, that it lost.

gop death

Spare me, Generation X: you’re not that special

A sprawling New York Times feature package this week showcases essays, photos, and snippets of nostalgia that all amount to the declaration ‘This Gen X Mess.’ One of the declarations in one of the essays is that ‘it’s easy to decide that Gen X is culturally irrelevant.’ Who actually thinks that? I was born in the mid-1980s and I’ve been sick of hearing Gen-X talk about itself and its place in history ever since I grew old enough to date men born in the Seventies without it being gross and creepy. To backtrack a bit, the events of my birth toss me squarely into the elder bracket of ‘millennials,’ you know, that overexposed generation of helicopter-parented, selfie-snapping, Adderall-addled ‘digital natives.

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The New York Times’s latest error of judgment: this anti-Semitic cartoon

Easter worshippers who opened Thursday’s copy of the International Edition of the New York Times were treated to a cartoon to warm the cockles of white supremacists, Islamists and lovers of ‘Edelweiss’ everywhere. The cartoon, apparently by a Portuguese artist named Antonio Antunes Moreira of Espresso, depicted a blind Donald Trump, resplendent in the kippah he wears at all times except when the cameras are near, being led by Benjamin Netanyahu in the form of a sausage dog, wearing the Star of David dog collar that all sausage dogs wear. Some people published something, and now all those over-sensitive Jews are blaming the entire New York Times for it. How thin-skinned they are.

anti-semitic cartoon tropes new york times

If Thomas Friedman bristles at Brexit, you know everything will be OK

If you want to know why American foreign policy has repeatedly failed to achieve its goals since the end of the Cold War, consider the wisdom of Thomas L. Friedman. His column at the New York Times is a weathervane of expense-account groupthink as it charges in the wrong direction.When American jobs were outsourced in the Nineties, Friedman cheered for globalization. When the George W. Bush administration pushed for invading Iraq, Friedman promoted the mad and dangerous idea that post-Saddam Iraq would become a liberal democracy. And you just knew that Obama’s Middle East policies were going to be a disaster when the Times boasted that the bumbling ringmaster had ‘sounded out’ Friedman as his chief clown.

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How do you cover a ‘national emergency’? Depends who’s president…

When Trump declared the border situation a national emergency, you couldn’t move for breathless headlines questioning the constitutionality of his order. But has the mainstream media always held this deep commitment to reporting on the limits of power of the nation’s chief executive? Trump is hardly the first president to make use of an executive order in order to circumvent Congress. Back in February, 2011, President Obama began contemplating strikes against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war.

barack obama national emergency

New York Times: Britain on verge of civil war, send more croissants

Cockburn is back in the Old Country this week, feeling Meghan Markle’s bump, smoking heroin with top soccer players, and making preparations for Brexit, because Britain will leave the EU at the end of March, unless the dimwit government of Theresa May devises some futile means of extending negotiations that everyone knows will go nowhere. He knew what to expect in London. When Cockburn got on the plane he read America’s best newspaper, the only truthful paper in this time of universal deceit. He also read the New York Times. The Times usually supports democracy in backward and violent states, but it hates Brexit. No news is too fake for the Times to print when it comes to Brexit.

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The deep blob

I reckon that editors at our former paper of record have been thinking wistfully of the Mikado’s song, in particular this bit about the fate of the billiard sharp who’s ‘made to dwell/ In a dungeon cell/ On a spot that’s always barred.’ And there he plays extravagant matches In fitless finger-stalls On a cloth untrue With a twisted cue And elliptical billiard balls!

deep blob

No, Mary Poppins Returns isn’t racist

No idea is too stupid to be entertained on the op-ed page of the New York Times. I was reminded of this truism last night when, changing the paper in the parrot’s cage, I read that the latest enjoyable vehicle for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s talents is not just a good 20 minutes too long, but also perniciously racist, if not sunk to its Victorian corsets in white nationalist propaganda. ‘Mary Poppins and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface’, wrote Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, professor of English and Contemporary Virtue at Linfield College, Oregon.

Donald Trump, the Kremlin and the ghost of Alger Hiss

Judging from the weekend’s ‘modern presidential’ tweets – always a decent metric of Donald Trump’s mood swings – the Special Counsel investigation into his Russian links is weighing heavily on our 45th president. And no wonder. New reports indicate that Donald J. Trump may be in a lot hotter water than his MAGA legions want to believe. According to the New York Times, the FBI in the opening months of Trump’s administration opened a counterintelligence investigation into the new president to assess whether he is a pawn of the Kremlin, wittingly or otherwise.

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anti-trump media government shutdown

The shutdown hurts the President. Still the anti-Trump media can’t keep off Russia

Government shutdown stories aren’t sexy, everyone can see that. Nevertheless, it is curious that the journalists who most loathe Trump are so willing to distract their audiences from a political crisis which polls show is hurting the President, in order to focus again on the exhausting Russia conspiracy, which isn’t. This weekend, we saw another flurry of noisy Trump-Russia scoops. These latest feel thinner than usual. Still, they dominated the airwaves and Twitter feeds of media VIPs. On Friday, the New York Times related that the FBI ‘became so concerned’ about Trump’s firing of FBI director James B. Comey that they began investigating whether the President was indeed working for Russia.