After Four-Year Nap, New York Times To Start ‘Fact-Checking’ The White House Again
The New York Times has decided to take its reporting in a new direction now that President Donald Trump is back in office.
“One way in which this administration is different from its predecessor is that President Trump himself is far more accessible to reporters than was President Joe Biden, who rarely took questions or did sit-down interviews,” The Times explains in a long article written by multiple reporters this week. It answers questions from readers about how The Times is reporting differently on the Trump administration.
Apparently, Trump-era reporting is such a departure from usual reporting that it requires an explanation: “Mr. Trump, of course, presents a different set of challenges, starting with the need to fact-check nearly everything he says.”
The implication is that the infamously truth-stretching Biden didn’t need fact-checking, but Trump does, so now The New York Times is going to start fact-checking, for real.
An old journalism adage says, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” It means every fact an outlet reports should be confirmed independently. They used to say this in newsrooms.
But The Times has a long history of not carefully fact checking when the target is an opponent of Democrats. It makes implications, hints, quotes unnamed sources, and sometimes uses bogus documents like the Steele dossier that prompted the debunked Trump-Russia scandal.
The Times did gently “fact check” Biden a few times, but staged its telling to make him look like a sweet old man of the people. In “Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel,” Michael D. Shear and Linda Qiu write, “For more than four decades, Mr. Biden has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience…But Mr. Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong, the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences.”
Isn’t that cute? Biden wasn’t lying; he was connecting with an audience.
Same article, two paragraphs later: “Former President Donald J. Trump lied constantly, not only about trivial details (like insisting it hadn’t rained during his inauguration when it clearly had) but also about consequential moments — misleading about the pandemic, perpetrating the ‘big lie’ that Mr. Biden stole the 2020 election…” The story ostensibly about Biden’s lying habit became a vehicle for more Trump-bashing, one of The New York Times’ favorite postures.
Based on this week’s explainer, the Times is eager to start “fact checking” again after a four-year hiatus while Democrats controlled the White House.
“Since the election we have brought on new reporters and editors who give us additional capability. They include an expanded corps of White House reporters and a new investigative team focused on how President Trump (and Elon Musk) are upending the federal government and driving policy in new directions,” the paper says.
Note the word choice, “upending.” It builds that subtle negative tone The Times loves to use on Trump. They paint Trump’s actions as if he is doing something wrong, when he is actually delivering on campaign promises most people voted for.
“This White House makes news almost constantly, seven days a week,” The Times complains. Most Americans want a working president. Biden mostly vacationed and gave other people’s money away. The Times says it has “enough reporters and editors to keep track of it all.”
The Times says its coverage of Trump will be different from that of his last term. This time the Times will have “the discipline not to treat everything he says and does as inherently newsworthy.” In other words, the Times will decide what you need to hear through its propaganda filter.
The reader questions in this article are a fascinating study of who reads the Gray Lady.
“Will The Times be censoring its work to avoid lawsuits and/or imprisonment of their journalists?” a reader asks. Last time we checked, it was the Biden Department of Justice that was unjustly throwing people in prison, and before that the Obama administration spying on journalists.
The brave New York Times is prepared, and assures this reader, “We will not be intimidated in this climate and will continue to do what our readers most rely on us for — report, without fear or favor.” There is another negative nugget: “this climate” implies Trump has brought about a sinister new climate change. Again, NYT, most Americans voted for this change. Check those facts.
Here are a few more unhinged Times reader questions.
“Do reporters have a plan if Trump changes press briefings to limit sharing info on what he’s doing? Are the Times folks picked to ask questions as much as other big papers that are Trump fans?”
“Please find a way to isolate Trump news to its own category or page so us subscribers don’t have to be exposed as much as he would like.”
“How do journalists handle death threats, and how often have they received them for specifically writing about Trump?”
It’s great that The Times says it is bringing back “fact checking,” but it would be more impressive if it would just report the truth, without the digs and hollow analysis. Maybe then its readers would not be so afraid.
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