You probably think the job of a reporter is to report news. How old-fashioned of you. That’s not it at all, certainly not at the New York Times.
A reporter’s mission is to find out what kind of story would help the Democrats at that moment in time, and then write it, even if the opposite article might be necessary another time. Preposterosity is no obstacle.
Right now, what would help the Democratic Party more than anything else? Obviously, taking out Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to prevent him from becoming the Republican nominee for president.
That's a tall order. DeSantis’s biggest causes are 70-30 popular and he’s actually enacting them -- on everything from immigration to crime, to trans-mania, to anti-white racism. Most famously, he made fools of the entire liberal brain trust over COVID.
This cannot stand. Times readers have been trained to hate DeSantis. They’re waiting for Newspaper of Record to land on their doorstep and confirm their prejudices.
So what's a liberal lackey to do?
Six liberal media takedown techniques are beautifully illustrated by Times reporters Sharon LaFraniere, Patricia Mazzei and Albert Sun, in a million-word, front-page article on July 23.
1) The Kamikaze Run
Hit a person on his strongest point. He’ll never expect it. If the target’s loyal, call him disloyal; if he’s honest, call him a liar; if he was right, say he was wrong. And if he performed brilliantly during a global pandemic when almost all other government officials blundered, write an article saying: HEY, GOV! YOUR COVID RESPONSE SUCKED.
2) The Shocker Headline
Use a scary headline belied by the facts presented in your article.
Actual NYT headline: “The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis’s Vaccine Turnabout ... a grim chapter he now leaves out of his rosy retelling of his pandemic response.”
3) Hide the Ball
Deep within the story, bury the central fact that blows apart your entire narrative. Most likely, the reader will never get that far.
NYT, paragraph 6,000: “Overall, [Florida’s] death rate during the pandemic, adjusted for age, ended up better than the national average.”
4) The Ant’s Eye View
Find a brief, aberrational moment or event that supports your phony premise.
NYT: “Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave ... With less than 7% of the nation’s population, Florida accounted for 14% of deaths between the start of July [2021] and the end of October.”
Hmmm, that’s four months out of a three-year-long pandemic. During that precious interval, Florida’s death rate was, in fact, higher than the national average -- as opposed to across the whole pandemic, when Florida’s death rate was lower than the national average.
5) “Huh. We Forgot That.”
Do not mention other, more likely, explanations for the aberration.
Like all airborne viruses, COVID hit southern states hardest in the summer (when people are crowded inside for the air conditioning) and northern states hardest in the winter (when people are crowded inside for the heat inside).
This was being reported everywhere at the time. Here, for example, is NPR in the fall of 2021: “We're certainly seeing [COVID conditions improve] throughout Florida, South Carolina, southern Texas in particular. ... [But as] the surge eases in the South, it could ramp up in the North, like last year.”
Just last week, the Times quoted a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist who said: “This is the fourth summer now that we see a [COVID] wave beginning around July, often starting in the South.”
Won’t well-informed Times readers know this? Absolutely not. For Times readers, history began this morning.
5) The Imaginary Causation
Ignore painfully obvious facts that ruin your bogus theory of causation.
Your thesis: COVID deaths soared in Florida during the Delta wave because Gov. Death-Santis did not encourage young people to get vaccinated.
Um, the Delta variant couldn’t be stopped by vaccination. Indeed, it was this precise variant that finally forced the CDC to admit that vaccination would not prevent infection or transmission.
After six months of Anthony Fauci, the CDC and the media hectoring us that the vaccine absolutely blocked infection and transmission of the virus, CNN reported in July 2021: “CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said new data had convinced her the Delta variant was ‘behaving uniquely’ ... [and] the evidence indicated that fully vaccinated people who have breakthrough infections involving Delta may be as likely to transmit virus to others as unvaccinated people are.”
6) The "What Isn't Like the Other" Statistic
Lard your article with statistics made meaningless by combining like and unalike things.
-- “Of the 23,000 Floridians who died [during the Delta wave], 9,000 were younger than 65.”
OK, but how many of those 9,000 were older than 60? The Times is slyly throwing 23-year-olds in the same group with 63-year-olds.
-- "Despite the governor’s insistence at the time that ‘our entire vulnerable population has basically been vaccinated,’ a vast majority of the 23,000 were either unvaccinated or had not yet completed the two-dose regimen.”
“Unvaccinated” is completely different from “got one shot,” i.e., “basically vaccinated.” For all we know, everybody who died from Delta in Florida had had at least one shot, contradicting the whole point of that statistic.
To use a professional journalist’s technique: This Is the Steep Cost of the Times' Descent Into Mindless Left-Wing Activism ... a grim chapter the paper leaves out of its history.
COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER
The Times’ coverage of the WNBA is top-notch, however.
This was priceless. As a former journalist (during 60s and 70s) it is the antithesis of my job description. My job was to tell the truth and leave my opinion out unless asked. What a concept by comparison!