Clay Waters

The New York Times sounded perturbed that the blue state of Washington was resisting a return to the old divisive days of “affirmative action.” An editor insisted on calling it “Unlikely resistance to a ballot measure in Washington State” in a text box, although it makes sense that Asian-Americans would resist affirmative action, having been successful as a group without such assistance. Reporter Mike Baker’s story was loaded in favor of the ballot measure to “allow concerted efforts to increase diversity,” which sounds distressingly vague.

President Trump’s dangerous Twitter. That was the paper’s overriding obsession in Sunday’s edition. The enormous story launched on the top half of the front page and jumped to a special 10-page section, “The Twitter Presidency.” The timing is apt, considering the paper is pressuring Twitter to be better than Facebook and actually squelch political messaging as the 2020 campaign nears. One reason why Trump’s tweets are under attack was this line, which appeared in print over a graphic of 5889 little rectangle shapes representing Trump tweets (an undeniable wise use of time, energy, and ink): “Since he became president, the most frequent targets of his ire have been Democrats, investigations and the news media.”

The New York Times, which dispenses unlabeled liberal reporting as slant every day, is keeping a wary eye on any conservative competition in the news business, eager to drop the “fake” label on their heads. Friday’s Business pages included the warning, “Americans Trust Local News. That Belief Is Being Exploited,” by Dartmouth College professor of government Brendan Nyhan. The URL includes the words “fake local news,” perhaps an artifact of a harsher previous headline. After noting misinformation distributed by the infamous Russian Internet Research Agency, Nyhan found “dubious outlets” on only one side of the political divide.

New York Times political writer Lisa Lerer made Tuesday’s edition with news of the resignation of the formerly rising Democratic Rep. Katie Hill of California after a bizarre sex scandal involving campaign and congressional staffers, fueled by explicit photos reported by a conservative website. The headline was loaded to show how disturbed the Times felt about the spectacle of a Democratic congresswoman forced out of office in such fashion: “Revenge Porn Reaches Washington.”

The New York Times has abruptly changed its tune on the “Deep State,” a name given to the entrenched bureaucracy supposedly determined to work via secret machinations and selective media leaks to bring down the Trump administration from within. As Trump and his Republican allies railed against the “Deep State,” the Times typically mocked the very idea as a phony conspiracy theory. The headline under a March 2017 analysis: "What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ That Doesn’t Exist.” But the Times has changed its tune in startling fashion. Now the Deep State is real, and it’s just wonderful.

Argentine-born Communist revolutionary and guerilla leader Che Guevara murdered and imprisoned thousands, supervised firing squads during revolutionary tribunals, founded forced labor camps, and dissolved free press in Cuba. Bizarrely, none of that made it into Tony Perrottet’s shallow, symbolic travelogue of Revolutionary Cuba that appears in the Smithsonian, the official journal of the federal-funded Smithsonian Institution. The writer palled around with Che’s son, bopping around the island to various shrines to the mass killer (and lousy father to boot).

Some nerve: New York Times anti-Brexit reporter Benjamin Mueller devoted 1,350 words Monday to going after his competitors on the Brexit-beat, accusing other media outlets of slanting the news in favor of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s quest to fulfill the 2916 vote to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union. As if the Times and Mueller himself hasn’t been notoriously, often hysterically, anti-Brexit in news coverage: “Pro-Brexit Press Frames Johnson as Defiant Hero.” The online headline deck: “For Pro-Brexit Press, Boris Johnson Is Already a Winner -- The right-wing newspapers that dominate in Britain shaped a narrative of events that could have not been more pleasing to the prime minister.”

The New York Times devoted three full pages of valuable Sunday Review real estate (the full front page and two full inside pages) to a left-wing, ageist, anti-Trump voter lament disguised as a call for the political empowerment of youth via a lowering of the voting age: “They’ve Got The Whole World In Their Hands.” “Old people have the money and the power. Young people have been left out. But for how long?” It’s written by Astra Taylor, a Puffin Foundation/Economic Hardship Reporting Project fellow. The online headline: “Out With the Old, In With the Young.” (AARP, call your office.)

The New York Times is again trying to police the boundaries of allowable debate, with a supposed controversy over a scheduled meeting at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort by a group reviled by the left for its documentation of the threat of radical Islam: “Mar-a-Lago Again Under Fire for Hosting Group That Promoted Islamophobia.” Reporter Mihir Zaveri used two discredited pressure groups to make his case against the Center for Security Policy: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic pressure group which the U.S. Senate has tied to terrorism, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the fundraising mill targeting gullible liberals.