Tag: nyt

NY Times Admits Polls May Be Underestimating Trump Again

The New York Times has suggested that polls in the run up to Tuesday’s election showing president Trump ahead of or level with Kamala Harris are likely to be underestimating Trump.

The Times’ Nate Cohen pointed out that the non response bias of their final polls was as bad as 2020, meaning that a trump supporters are less likely to engage in polling than Democrat supporters.

As commentator Collin Rugg notes, a highly dubious poll highlighted in the Des Moines Register is claiming that Harris has suddenly surged to a three point lead over Trump in Iowa.

The same poll had Trump up by 18 points over Biden in June. 

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NYT and Washington Post Push YouTube To Censor Election “Misinformation,” Lament Podcast Censorship Challenges

The New York Times, Media Matters for America, and The Washington Post are stepping up their pressure on YouTube to demonetize and censor election “misinformation,” particularly statements that the 2020 election was rigged or insecure.

As these organizations push for stricter speech suppression, questions are raised about the implications for open discourse on the platform and the legacy media and activist attempts to get it shut down.

In the past months, Media Matters undertook an extensive review of content from 30 prominent conservative YouTube channels, identifying 286 videos containing what they classified as election misinformation, which collectively garnered over 47 million views. This report, backed by verification from The New York Times, pointed out that YouTube profited from ads placed on many of these videos.

Highlighted in the Times article were figures such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, all of whom have voiced skepticism regarding the legitimacy of various aspects of the 2020 election process.

According to The New York Times, “Giuliani, the former New York mayor, posted more false electoral claims to YouTube than any other major commentator in the research group.”

Surprisingly, YouTube’s stance, as relayed by a spokeswoman, stresses the importance of open political discourse: “The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial, is an important value — especially in the midst of election season,” she stated, defending the platform’s approach to content management.

However, YouTube did still remove three of the videos that Media Matters flagged.

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Bret Stephens Says the US Must Attack Iran

High upon his perch atop the New York Times editorial page, Bret Stephens offers a full-throated call for the United States to launch a war of aggression against Iran.  This featured opinion piece in the “paper of record” is noteworthy because it reflects the detritus that’s currently swirling around the minds of U.S. foreign policy elites concerning a big war with Iran.

Mr. Stephens serves up so many glaring omissions in this op-ed that when you finish reading it your eyes will burn as if you had been staring at the sun.  He begins with a paragraph-long quotation from the late Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel assassinated on September 27th with over 80 two-thousand pound “bunker buster” bombs in the Dahiya Shia quarter of South Beirut.  He uses the quotation to strongly suggest that Nasrallah’s only real motive in fighting against the Israelis was to “kill all Jews.”  Stephens knows how to get a rise out of his readers.

By smearing Nasrallah as nothing more than an “antisemite” he purposely overlooks the reasons for Hezbollah’s existence in the first place.  There was no Hezbollah until after the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its military occupation of the country that lasted for eighteen years.  The IDF and their Lebanese proxies killed approximately 17,000 civilians.  Nasrallah was born in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon on August 31, 1960.  He was a young man during the years of Israeli occupation; and like many Lebanese, he wasn’t very keen on seeing a large piece of his country become another Gaza Strip or West Bank.  In 1985, a new resistance group bounded onto the scene as part of the ongoing struggle to push the Israelis out of Lebanon: Hezbollah, “The Party of God.”

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The Sins Of The Gray Lady (Or Why The Press Hates You)

Readers of the New York Times know the news may change, but the message is always the same in their paper of record. It will play up every Republican kerfuffle and downplay Democratic scandals while presenting the choice between the two parties as a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Now clad in rainbow colors, the Gray Lady will, in the name of inclusion, celebrate a wide range of heretofore marginal behaviors – homosexuality, polyamory and transgenderism – while sowing divisions by separating Americans into warring camps based on race, gender, and ethnicity.

The transformation of the Times, and much of American journalism, during the last decade from a traditional newspaper that largely reports the news into the daily call sheet for the “woke” revolution that seeks to undermine the traditional pillars of American society is now so complete that it may seem unremarkable. Both its defenders and critics know exactly what to expect when they open its pages. Such acceptance, or resignation, is dangerous because it normalizes the great sin of the New York Times: the betrayal of hitherto bedrock journalistic principles of fairness, objectivity and pluralism that made the Fourth Estate a pillar of American democracy during the 20th century.

The paper’s radical reinvention of itself into a results-oriented tool serving leftwing social change has happened quickly – the Times of 2010 bears little resemblance to the paper published today. But enough time has passed so that we can identify both the key incidents and the dynamic political, cultural and economic forces that have transformed America’s most influential newspaper, and thus the nation itself.

That story began to come into focus on August 7, 2016 – the day American journalism crossed the Rubicon. That’s when the New York Times published a front-page article arguing that Donald Trump was such an “abnormal” candidate that “normal standards” of reporting on him were henceforth “untenable.” From now on, the paper made clear, the news columns of the Times would be taking sides. “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous,” Jim Rutenberg wrote, “then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.”

The article never explained why the normal standards of objectivity were insufficient. If Trump were truly a danger to the Republic, wouldn’t an honest accounting of his behavior be enough to expose him?

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NY Times Calls Trump Would-Be Assassin Ryan Routh a ‘Crusader For Causes Large and Small’

The New York Times penned another glowing profile of Trump would-be assassin Ryan Routh, portraying him as a “crusader for causes large and small.”

Just two days after Routh was arrested on two gun charges after he had been waiting in the bushes of Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course with a scope-mounted rifle and GoPro camera, the New York Times published a flattering editorial of the 58-year-old mercenary.

From The Times:

How Mr. Routh, a peripatetic activist and building contractor with an extensive criminal record, came to possess a semiautomatic rifle, learn of Mr. Trump’s weekend whereabouts and wait for him on the edge of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., remains unknown.

But a review of public records and Mr. Routh’s writings, as well as interviews with people who knew him, suggest that he saw himself as an active and influential participant in momentous world events, while becoming estranged from at least some of his family and nearly destitute in the process.

Mr. Routh has been a serial crusader for causes large and small dating back to at least 1996, when he campaigned against graffiti in Greensboro, N.C., where he lived for decades. In July, he urged President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the social media platform X to visit the victims of the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., writing that “Trump will never do anything for them.”

“Show the world what compassion and humanity is all about,” Mr. Routh wrote on July 16.

In other social media posts, he tagged world leaders and celebrities like Elton John and Elon Musk, often providing his phone number and email as if expecting a response.

The paper described how Routh began recruiting for Ukraine after he was denied a place on the frontline due to his age and lack of experience.

“Mr. Routh had set up a website called ‘Fight for Ukraine,’ in which he explained how to travel there and join the Ukrainian army as a foreign fighter. For the better part of a year, his main focus was getting hundreds of Afghan soldiers, who had fled after their country’s government collapsed, to fight for Ukraine,” the Times wrote.

While The Times noted that some of his recruiting methods were illegal, the paper commended his tenacity.

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NY Times Turns On Kamala! Publishes NUMEROUS OpEds on ‘Weak,’ ‘Phony’ and ‘Ignorant’ Democrat Nominee

We didn’t expect this on our 2024 bingo card!

The Old Gray Lady turned on Kama-Kama-Kama Kama-chamelion.

Has The New York Times turned on Kamala, the nation’s most unpopular vice president?

It’s hard to imagine.  The Times on Friday posted a hit on Kamala Harris titled, “Joy is Not a Strategy.”

Then, on Monday, The NY Times published an op-ed titled, “Trump Can win on character,” something that must have made the leftist elites vomit in their mouths.

It didn’t take long for the happy boost from the fantasy convention to flatline.  On Monday night, former Biden spox Jen Psaki faced a harsh reality when Don Lemon told her that “no one” knows who Kamala Harris is in the swing states he visited last week.

Maybe that’s good news, though? The more people learn about Kamala, the less they like her.

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NYT Uncritically Reported Israel’s Version of Golan Bombing

As the US-backed genocide in Gaza continues, US media assist in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to widen the war, parroting the words of the aggressor. A consequential example of US press support for escalation was Western media’s coverage of the July 27 strike that killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field near the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Israel and the US immediately blamed the Iran-backed Lebanese organization Hezbollah for the strike—citing Israeli intelligence reports of an Iranian Falaq-1 missile being found at the soccer field (BBC, 7/28/24).

But, in a move that Hezbollah expert Amal Saad called “uncharacteristic” (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the group adamantly denied responsibility for the attack. Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, noted that targeting the Syrian Golan Heights—where many inhabitants are hostile towards Israel—would be “illogical” and “provocative” for Hezbollah. Further, if the organization had accidentally committed an attack, Saad pointed to a precedent of the group issuing a public apology in a case of misfire, with the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrullah, visiting families of victims.

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Biden Advisors Leak Damning Details Of Mental Decline To NY Times

The New York Times published an article Tuesday quoting sources within Biden’s own camp who revealed that his mental lapses are worsening and that they had to factor in naps to his debate prep because he was struggling to operate.

The article notes that insiders say Biden has appeared “confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations” over the past few months, and that he often has an expression of “blank-stared confusion.”

It adds that “in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.”

“The uncomfortable occurrences were not predictable, but seemed more likely when he was in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule,” the article continues.

The piece adds that during a Juneteenth event, where Biden appeared particularly out of it, “One person who sat close to the president said that he had a “dazed and confused” expression during much of the event.”

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A Law Professor’s Beef With a First Amendment ‘Spinning Out of Control’: Too Much Speech of the Wrong Sort

“The First Amendment is spinning out of control,” Columbia law professor Tim Wu warns in a New York Times essay. While Wu ostensibly objects to Supreme Court decisions that he thinks have interpreted freedom of speech too broadly, his complaint amounts to a rejection of the premise that the principle should be applied consistently, especially when it benefits speakers and messages he does not like.

The immediate provocation for Wu’s diatribe is yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions in two cases challenging Florida and Texas laws that aimed to restrict content moderation on social media. Although the justices remanded both cases for further consideration by the lower courts, Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion in Moody v. NetChoice made it clear that the “editorial discretion” protected by the First Amendment extends to the choices that social media platforms make in deciding which content to host and how to present it, even when those decisions are inconsistent, biased, or arguably unfair. And that discretion, she said, includes the use of algorithms that reflect such value judgments.

Although Wu has reservations about “the wisdom and questionable constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws,” he thinks “the breadth of the court’s reasoning should serve as a wake-up call.” He faults the justices for “blithely assuming” that “algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.” The ruling, Wu says, reflects a broader trend in which “liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly anything that can be called ‘speech,’ regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation.”

As Wu sees it, freedom of speech should hinge on the “value” of the ideas that people express. It is hard to imagine a broader license for government censorship.

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The New York Times Might Be Telling The Truth: US & Ukrainian Priorities Do Seem To Be Diverging

If the Biden Administration keeps capitulating to Zelensky, or at least does nothing to stop the Cuban-like crisis that he’s plotting by enticing Poland and/or France into conventionally intervening in Ukraine and setting into motion the worst-case scenario of forcing Russia to use tactical nukes in self-defense as a last resort, then World War III can’t be ruled out.

The New York Times reported on Monday that “In private, Mr. Biden’s advisers concede that American and Ukrainian priorities are diverging. At this point, Ukraine has nothing left to lose from escalating with Russia. Mr. Biden still does: Inside the White House, the obvious concern is that President Vladimir V. Putin will roll out battlefield nuclear weapons”. Despite this outlet’s history of putting a self-interested political spin on their reporting, they might actually be telling the naked truth this time.

Ukraine had earlier defied the US’ public demands not to strike Russian oil refineries, which the US was against due to fears that the consequent oil price spike could harm Biden’s re-election prospects while Ukraine saw this as a means of pressuring Congress to approve its long-delayed aid package at the time. Ukraine then attacked at least one of Russia’s early warning systems, which prompted an unnamed administration source to tell the Washington Post that the US was concerned by this latest escalation.

It was wondered at the time here whether Ukraine had gone rogue or if it had done this with American approval, but the latest New York Times report that was cited in the introduction suggests on the surface at least that this was yet another piece of evidence in support of those two’s divergent priorities. At the same time, those two outlets’ reports might just be disinformation planted by administration officials in an attempt to mislead Russia about the US’ intentions and plead plausible deniability in those attacks.

Nevertheless, the argument can be made that the US and Ukraine’s priorities have actually been diverging for some time even before those two high-profile examples, with the most compelling proof being the US’ continued reluctance to give Ukraine everything that it demands right away. Policymakers not only miscalculated that the sanctions would crush the Russian economy before last summer’s failed counteroffensive dealt Russia a strategic defeat, but they were also rightly worried about escalation risks.

They’re still worried about them too, to be sure, but they’ve also now engaged in “mission creep” brought about by Ukraine’s increasingly nasty public pressure campaigns across the world (led to a large extent by aggressive trolls and sympathetic “experts”) and changing battlefield conditions. This observation explains why the Biden Administration has thus far kept capitulating to all of Ukraine’s demands, albeit sometime after they were first made, not ever doing so right away.

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