The New York Times blew it again last week with yet another example of fake news.
This time, its victim was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. The Trump administration, the Times averred in yet another attempt to embarrass the president, had authorized spending nearly $53,000 on motorized curtains for Haley’s apartment.
Unfortunately for the gung-ho, anti-Trump Times, the Obama administration authorized the purchase and the Times was left with a story that, in its main point that only an evil man such as Trump would spend $53,000 on curtains, was entirely false.
And so the Times was forced to append a humiliating correction at the top of its story.
The Story
The gist of the story, of course, was that rich-man Trump was permitting rich-lady Haley to spent more for curtains than many American earn annually. Even worse, Haley is so lazy she can’t even open and close them herself. They’re motorized! Typical rich Republicans. The poor starve, and Haley gets motorized curtains.
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After the story proved false, the Times quickly reworked it, appending this amusing italicized note up top:
An earlier version of this article and headline created an unfair impression about who was responsible for the purchase in question. While Nikki R. Haley is the current ambassador to the United Nations, the decision on leasing the ambassador’s residence and purchasing the curtains was made during the Obama administration, according to current and former officials. The article should not have focused on Ms. Haley, nor should a picture of her have been used. The article and headline have now been edited to reflect those concerns, and the picture has been removed.
The story reported that the State Department spent $52,701 for the curtains for the apartment’s bay windows.
Try as it might to lay the purchase at Trump’s doorstep, the Times failed:
The government leased the apartment, just blocks from the delegation’s offices, with an option to buy, according to Patrick Kennedy, the top management official at the State Department during the Obama administration. The full-floor penthouse, with handsome hardwood floors covering large open spaces stretching nearly 6,000 square feet, was listed at $58,000 a month….
A spokesman for Ms. Haley emphasized that plans to buy the mechanized curtains were made in 2016, during the Obama administration. Ms. Haley had no say in the purchase, he said.
Will the Times Ever Learn?
This isn’t, the course, the first time the nation’s newspaper on record has published blatantly fake news. Another victim of the Times’ penchant for going on an ideological tear was Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. In 2008 in a story about then-president candidate John McCain, the Times suggested that Iseman and McCain had an affair, and she used the affair improperly to benefit her work.
That story was false, too. Iseman sued the newspaper for $27 million. Rather than fight a losing battle, the Times settled with Iseman, but not for money. Instead, it published a joint statement with Iseman that, for all intents and purposes, gave Iseman what she wanted: a retraction. Of course, the statement didn’t say the story was wrong, only that it left the wrong impression. As well, a note to readers and a commentary from Iseman’s attorneys.
Another day, another blown story.
A few years before that, the Times had to fire a reporter named Jayson Blair, who manufactured stories about the war in Iraq. Blair was a plagiarist and incompetent when he interned for The Boston Globe, but the Times hired him anyway, the newspaper management admitted, because he is black.
Another of the famous lies of the Times, one carried out for some time, was a bit more serious than its fibs about curtains, sex affairs, or fiction about the Gulf War. This big lie Times editorialist Herbert Matthews told about Fidel Castro helped lead to that communist tyrant’s rise to power in Cuba. It also led to untold misery and murder for millions of Cubans and a major national security threat to the United States.
Matthew assured readers that Castro was not a communist, and permitted the mass murderer to peddle his propaganda in the Times with such preposterous claims as these: “You can be sure we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people,” and “Above all, we are fighting for democratic Cuba.”
National Review’s joke about the Times’s pro-Castro coverage featured the dictator in an advertisement for the Times’s classifieds: “I got my job through The New York Times.”
