The New York Times On A Rampage

Everybody at the New York Times who feels entitled to speak about this will deny it, which means they are liars, which means you should treat them as such and their newspaper as a production by liars. 

For one thing, it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist.

Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication. Much of Big Journalism, for example, turned their noses up at insider documents offered to them about JD Vance during last year’s presidential campaign, in part because the source was Iranian hackers; in some cases, they wrote about the hack but not the documents.

The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.

A ranking Times editor, Patrick Healy, responded to criticism of the story in a thread on X, justifying it as part of the paper’s mission “to help readers better know and understand top candidates for major offices”.

Soledad O’Brien, the prominent media entrepreneur and journalist, called that explanation “a joke”. The publication of the Mamdani story is “an absolute embarrassment” for the Times, charged O’Brien, who herself is of mixed-race ancestry and identifies as Black.

Can't shame people who can't feel shame, can't correct people who think they are are infallible.