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September 18, 2019

So who's the real reporter here, in NYT Kavanaugh flub?

By Monica Showalter

The New York Times has beclowned itself. Again.

Its claimed scoop about having a new witness who could prove that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was some kind of college pervert who stuck his privates into some unwilling college girl's hand, was a phony story if there ever was one because the woman in question could not remember the incident. That was a key detail spotted by the Federalist's Mollie Hemingway, who wrote a book about the matter, yet the story-changing detail just somehow got left off from the Times' raddled scoop. The two reporters reporters claimed they knew and one said she 'thinks' it was in the original story filing, but somehow their incompetent editor, James Dao, an editorial page guy (did he also hire Sarah Jeong?) took it out. Really? One of them also put out a bizarre and creepy Bulwer-Lytton level tweet, which they later deleted and then apologized for. Hemingway practices something called journalism. The Times seems to just digging its hole deeper. And to top it off, Instapundit has an excellent curation of all the ways they now claim to be victims. 

It all leaves the conclusion that the Times was one heck of a shoddy reporting outfit. And when that's your core competency, you've got to wonder about the paper.

Because this whole fiasco raises questions about who the real reporter here is, who's the one who actually carries the torch of authentic journalism, the kind the Times had been famous for.

These tweets, from another veteran newsman, Fox News's Brit Hume, are simply withering:

Hume said that if he had attempted to turn in a story like that in his own cub-reporter youth, his editor would have tossed it across the room.

"We're talking about a second-hand account from a witness that the authors did not speak to and who is not speaking... So right there you have a huge strike against you if you're trying to get this story into the old New York Times," he said.

"On top of that, you have the fact the woman herself is not talking... and she has told friends that she doesn't remember this."

"This is nowhere near publishable," he added.

Tim Carney, a biggie at the Washington Examiner, had these damning observations:

This one from a Trump campaign operative is worth noting, too:

The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway was able to find the problem in the story in an instant and shot it down like a markswoman.

The Times engaged in a series of flip flops, grotesque errors and finger pointing that only made it look like a trash news outfit with an undeserved influence.

According to Hemingway's latest Federalist piece:

Keep in mind the context. The authors spent a year desperately trying to dig up dirt on Kavanaugh and evidence in support of the claims made by his accusers. They failed on both counts, and at times admitted it, but in the epilogue they wrote that their “gut” told them to believe the accusers despite any evidence. They said the stories “ring true,” though they did not explain why they felt that way. It’s a stunning admission that emotions dominated facts for the reporters, which is also evidenced by their decision not to release an excerpt about Christine Blasey Ford’s star witness Leland Keyser telling them on the record that her friend’s story never made sense and didn’t add up. Keyser’s views were previously reported in detail in “Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court” (co-authored by this writer), but the new book has the first on-the-record quotes from Keyser saying why she found Ford’s story so difficult to believe.

The Federalist's co-founder, Sean Davis, has an excellent summary of the matter:

Yet somehow, it's the Times that wins all the Pulitzer prizes for the excellence in reporting, the Federalist of course has been shut out. That would be the same paper that won all those Pulitzer prizes for its collapsed Russia collusion narratives, which Tom Kuntz, an old Timesman editor from an earlier era, raised eyebrows about.

Is this a corrupt system, with a corrupt star paper, or what? When are these clowns going to drop the activism and start to practice journalism? You want that, you will have to go to the Federalist.

Image credit: HaxorJoe, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0

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