In what is obviously a continuation of the campaign to attack Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and possibly remove him from his post, New York Times has once again exposed its bias and confirmed its unreliability. In the latest salvo against Kavanaugh, the newspaper’s officials have been forced to correct their story for presenting only a charge against him and leaving out an important denial of what was charged.
The newspaper’s action led immediately to renewed calls that Kavanaugh be impeached and removed from the bench. Some of that urging came from hopefuls seeking the hotly contested Democrat nomination for president. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Julian Castro, for instance, jumped at the chance to have their names appear on renewed calls for impeachment proceedings.
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The deficiency for which the Times has been forced to correct the record appeared in a September 14 essay in its Opinion section. It had been adapted from a book written by two of its reporters, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly. Their soon-to-be-released book entitled The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation dwells on charges aimed at the beleaguered jurist. One cited an unverified claim involving Deborah Ramirez, a former Yale Law School classmate of Kavanaugh, that he had exposed himself before her at a Yale drinking party.
The Opinion piece sent out by the Times left out the extremely important point that does appear in the soon-to-be-available book. In their book’s comments about the supposed incident, Pogrebin and Kelly openly referred to Ramirez and the fact that she has no recollection of the supposed tawdry Kavanaugh conduct. The book states further that she “refused to discuss the incident” with them and added that “several of her friends said she does not recall it.”
In its September 14 essay, the Times deceitfully referred only to the charge and omitted mentioning the unwillingness of Ramirez to discuss both the supposed Kavanaugh attack and the non-confirming comments of friends about it. But the Times did repeat sordid details of the supposed attack, blackening the name and reputation of Judge Kavanaugh. The essay was then revised to include “the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not remember the episode.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made reference to last year’s attack on Kavanaugh’s reputation when he likened the current attempt to besmirch the judge as an example of “the far left’s willingness to seize on completely uncorroborated and unsubstantiated allegations.” Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel wrote, “the New York Times should be ashamed of this smear on Justice Kavanaugh.” Senator Chuck Grassley, who presided over the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in 2018 stated, “We never received an allegation against Kavanaugh like the one referenced in the [Times] report over the weekend.
President Trump took the opportunity by the Times to defend the man he selected for a place on the nation’s highest court: “He is an innocent man who has been treated horribly. Such lies about him. They want to scare him into turning Liberal. [He should] start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue. What’s happening to Justice Kavanaugh is a disgrace.”
National Review journalist John McCormack aptly summarized what many were thinking about the Times smear as “one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice that I can recall.” If the incident it helps to discredit the Times for many, the nation will have been well served.
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society.
