Tag: nyt

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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Mrs. Alito and the Bad Flag

The New York Times apoplectic over basically nothing: “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display,” reads a New York Times headline from yesterday.

According to the Times, an upside-down American flag was flown at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house for a few days in January 2021—between the January 6 Capitol riot and President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The nation’s esteemed paper of record suggests this action indicates that Alito thinks the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

There is very little evidence available to make this case. People fly upside-down flags for all kinds of reasons; it typically signals “SOS” or a sense that the country is horribly off course. People have historically flown flags in this manner out of protest for the Vietnam War, out of protest for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, to contest election results (believing the election was stolen or that voter fraud was rampant), or—and don’t get the two confused—to signal displeasure with the election results.

Alito reports that his wife was the one who flew the flag in this manner and that it concerned a dispute with a neighbor who posted an anti-Trump sign in their yard, following the election, that used expletives. Mrs. Alito was reportedly angered by this, and flew her flag upside-down in response. It is very hard to tell what intentions were behind one single gesture, reportedly not even done by the justice himself, and no account from neighbors or friends of the Alito family has bolstered the idea that Mrs. Alito is a “Stop the Steal” type.

This reminds me of when media outlets and the Anti-Defamation League claimed the “OK” symbol was actually a white supremacist gesture. If you look hard enough, you can find disturbing symbols anywhere you look, but you must sometimes suspend logic and reason in order to do so. This does not seem like a situation where a sitting Supreme Court justice is supporting overthrowing election results; it looks like a situation where The New York Times is straining to make that the narrative.

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Cruelty of Language: Leaked NY Times Memo Reveals Anti-Palestinian Bias of US Media

The New York Times coverage of the Israeli carnage in Gaza, like that of other mainstream US media, is a disgrace to journalism.

This assertion should not surprise anyone. US media is driven neither by facts nor morality, but by agendas, calculating and power-hungry. The humanity of 120 thousand dead and wounded Palestinians because of the Israeli genocide in Gaza is simply not part of that agenda.

In a report – based on a leaked memo from the New York Times – the Intercept found out that the so-called US newspaper of record has been feeding its journalists with frequently updated ‘guidelines’ on what words to use, or not use, when describing the horrific Israeli mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip, starting on October 7.

In fact, most of the words used in the paragraph above would not be fit to print in the NYT, according to its ‘guidelines’.

Shockingly, internationally recognized terms and phrases such as ‘genocide’, ‘occupied territory’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and even ‘refugee camps’, were on the newspaper’s rejection list.

It gets even more cruel. “Words like ‘slaughter’, ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice,” according to the memo, leaked and verified by the Intercept and other independent media.

Though such language control is, according to the NYT, aimed at fairness for ‘all sides’, their application was almost entirely one-sided. For example, a previous Intercept report showed that the American newspaper had, between October 7 and November 14, mentioned the word ‘massacre’ 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

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LEAKED NYT GAZA MEMO TELLS JOURNALISTS TO AVOID WORDS “GENOCIDE,” “ETHNIC CLEANSING,” AND “OCCUPIED TERRITORY”

THE NEW YORK TIMES instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.”

While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.

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NYT’s Morning Newsletter Blames Everyone but Israel for Israeli Crimes

With over 17 million subscribers, the Morning, the New York Times’ flagship newsletter, is by far the most popular newsletter in the English-speaking world. (It has almost three times as many subscribers as the next most popular newsletter.)

Since October 7, as Israel has waged an unprecedented war on Palestinian children, journalists, hospitals and schools, the New York Times’ highly influential newsletter has bent over backwards to blame everyone but Israel for the carnage.

Waging a legitimate war

According to the Morning—led by head writer David Leonhardt—Israel’s war on Gaza is a targeted operation designed to eliminate Hamas. The Morning propagates this narrative despite well-documented declarations of collective punishment and even genocidal intent by high-ranking Israeli officials—a tendency that South Africa has forcefully documented in their case before the ICJ (UN, 12/29/23). Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s comments on October 12, 2023, are typical: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.”

This sentiment has been echoed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, multiple cabinet-level ministers and senior military officials. Speaking from a devastated northern Gaza, one top Israeli army official said (UN, 12/29/23): “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”

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NY Times Plays CIA Messenger — Turn Off The Lights, The Party Is Over

I apologize on not writing about the NY Times article by  Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, before now but my schedule did not give me the time I needed to do the subject justice. I was inundated with requests for a comment by several media outlets and did my best to accommodate those in radio and TV interviews.

The key thing you need to understand is that this article is a deliberate piece of misinformation that is intended to shape public and policymaking opinion in the United States. The following opening to the article, like all propaganda, is a mixture of fact and fantasy.

the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.

But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.

It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.

Yes, it is true that U.S. intelligence, along with NATO, supplied Ukraine with intelligence used to carry out missile strikes on Russian positions. Admitting this in the pages of the NY Times is reckless and dangerous. I am pretty sure the Russians already knew this but putting this on the record with U.S. intelligence sources is a casus belli for Russia. Can you imagine the reaction if Russian intelligence confirmed they provided intel to a group or country that attacked the U.S.? Do you think Washington would ignore that and not seek retribution? Of course not.

But the article starts with the big lie by claiming that the CIA relationship with Ukraine started in February 2022 and then piles on with these two whoppers:

Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Maidan and the ensuing events in February and March 2014 involved what I believe was a joint U.S./U.K. intelligence operation to remove Ukraine’s President Yanukovich and install a pro-Western government that would be used to attack Russia. The fact of the matter is that the CIA has been dealing with Ukrainian opponents of Russia since at least 1947.

The propaganda purpose of the article is revealed by the decision of the reporters to repeat the specious claims that Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and that Russia “meddled” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We have had a slew of revelations over the last two months, principally from Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, showing that it was the Clinton campaign with the help of the CIA and the FBI who meddled in the 2016 Presidential campaign in a failed effort to defeat Donald Trump. Entous and Schwirtz insert the bogus claim that Ukraine fingered the Russian officer responsible for “election interference.”

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The New York Times Implausibly Implicates Oklahoma’s Bathroom Law in the Death of a Nonbinary Student

Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old Oklahoma student who identified as nonbinary and preferred they/them pronouns, died on February 8, a day after a fight at Owasso High School. It is unclear whether the injuries that Nex suffered in the fight contributed to their death. But in a story published on Wednesday, The New York Times implicitly blames the altercation on an Oklahoma law that requires students to use restrooms that correspond with the sex “identified on the individual’s original birth certificate.” Details that the Times omitted cast doubt on that framing, which The Independent also pushed in a story headlined “Oklahoma Banned Trans Students From Bathrooms. Now a Bullied Student Is Dead After a Fight.”

Nex, whose given name was Dagny, was biologically female, and the fight happened in a girls’ bathroom, where Nex and another student reportedly were assaulted by “three older female students.” Although Nex apparently was bullied for identifying as nonbinary, it looks like the location of the fight was incidental.

That is not the impression left by the Times story. “Anti-Trans Policies Draw Scrutiny After 16-Year-Old’s Death in Oklahoma,” says the headline. The subhead adds that “the student, who did not identify as male or female, according to their family, died a day after an altercation in a school bathroom.” The story is illustrated by a photo of transgender rights activists during a 2023 demonstration at the Oklahoma Capitol. “Under state law,” the caption notes, “students must use the bathroom that aligns with their birth gender.”

Even though that is what Nex was doing at the time of the fight, the second paragraph again cites the law as if it explains the altercation: “Under an Oklahoma law passed in 2022, students must use the bathrooms that align with their birth gender.” The next paragraph notes that the fight happened “in a girls’ bathroom at Owasso High School” but does not acknowledge that Nex was complying with the bathroom law, perhaps because that would require acknowledging Nex’s “birth gender.” Although that information is clearly relevant in this context, the story does not mention it at all.

Reporters J. David Goodman and Edgar Sandoval return to the subject of state policy later in the story:

The death renewed scrutiny of anti-transgender laws passed in the state and rhetoric by Oklahoma officials, including the state superintendent for education, Ryan Walters, whose agency has been forceful in trying to bar what it calls “radical gender theory” in schools.

“It’s dangerous,” Mr. Walters said in a video made by the agency last year. “It puts our girls in jeopardy.”

The video highlighted a fight in a bathroom the previous year in which, according to a lawsuit, a female student was “severely” injured in a fight with a transgender student.

Advocates for nonbinary and transgender students said that the state’s policy on gender and bathrooms had led to more reports of confrontations in schools.

“That policy and the messaging around it has led to a lot more policing of bathrooms by students,” said Nicole McAfee, the executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, which advocates for transgender and gay rights. Students who do not present themselves as obviously male or female find themselves questioned by other students, they said. “There is a sense of, ‘do you belong in here?'”

The cause of Nex’s death remains unclear. The New York Post reports that Sue Benedict, Nex’s mother, said Nex fell and hit their head during the bathroom fight. The Post also quotes the mother of the other victim, who reported seeing the assailants “beating her head across the floor.” But according to a statement that the Owasso Police Department posted on Facebook yesterday, preliminary autopsy findings indicate that Nex “did not die as a result of trauma.” The statement adds that “toxicology results and other ancillary testing results” are still pending and “the official autopsy report will be available at a later date.”

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Elon Musk Is Right and The NY Times Is Wrong About Illegal Voting by Non-Citizens

In a recent trio of posts to X, Elon Musk wrote that (1) illegal immigrants “are not prevented from voting in federal elections,” (2) “you don’t need government issued ID to vote,” and (3) Democrats “are importing voters.”

To rebut those statements, The New York Times (NYT) published an article by Jim Rutenberg and Kate Conger claiming that Mr. Musk is “spreading election misinformation” about “illegal voting by noncitizens” and echoing a “conspiracy theory” spread by former President Donald Trump.

Although Mr. Musk’s words are imprecise, the gist of what he wrote is correct, and The NYT is categorically wrong.

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