New York Times Tech Columnist Farhad Manjoo Lies: I 'Unplugged from Twitter' (He Didn't)

March 13th, 2018 10:40 AM

The New York Times and their allies in the “reality-based press” have serious problems with their own versions of reality. Look no further than Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo, who typed a column declaring that people would gain much more sanity from consuming their news from the print media and not the Internet. “ I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers,” he wrote.

But he lied. He did not unplug from Twitter in the slightest. Dan Mitchell at the Columbia Journalism Review notes this, and then tries to insist the columnist was not lying:

Manjoo remained a daily, active Twitter user throughout the two months he claims to have gone cold turkey, tweeting many hundreds of times, perhaps more than 1,000. In an email interview on Thursday, he stuck to his story, essentially arguing that the gist of what he wrote remains true, despite the tweets throughout his self-imposed hiatus.

It seems likely that Manjoo isn’t lying, and that he really believes he had unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don’t belie the point of his column.

So, CJR lays out that Manjoo tweeted “nearly every day during the 58 days of the experiment. During the first two weeks of February, he tweeted, on average, more than 15 times a day.” But somehow it wasn’t a lie that he “unplugged from Twitter.”

Then CJR added this amazing nugget: “A Times spokesperson said the paper doesn’t view his assertion as a falsehood, and won’t be issuing a correction.”

No one found PolitiFact/PunditFact to evaluate the liberal media....as usual.