The New York Times ran an eye-catching correction online late Sunday night.
“An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hands of a female student at a drunken dorm party,” the correction begins.
At this point in the correction, any person who had followed the accusations against Kavanaugh, and the media coverage of them, knew where this was going.
“The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.”
It’s almost hard to believe. The Times published an article on the front page of its Sunday review section accusing a man of possible sexual assault, yet omitted the fact — known to the reporters — that the alleged victim had no recollection of the incident.
Anyone who read the Sunday Times in print was thus thoroughly misinformed by the paper. Anyone who read the story online in the first 24 hours after publication similarly was misled. The Monday print edition didn’t even carry a correction.
Thus misled, dozens of Democratic lawmakers called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment. The Times’ news story on those impeachment calls once again included the accusation, but without mention of the alleged victim’s denial. It was an amazing self-reinforcing news cycle of political propaganda fueled by misinformation.
There’s another detail on this Sunday Times piece. Max Stier, the named accuser in an assault reportedly denied by its alleged victim, is a partisan Democratic operative and attorney who worked opposite Kavanaugh and Ken Starr on the defense team of Bill Clinton, who had lied about his extramarital affair with an intern half his age.
How did the Times reporters describe Stier? “Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington.” Incredible.
The Times’ news reporters had filed, in effect, a prosecutor’s brief that omitted known exculpatory evidence. The exclusion of known exculpatory evidence (such as a victim’s denial) is considered to be misconduct when a prosecutor does it. But prosecutors have an agenda by design. It’s far worse when supposedly objective reporters do it. What’s clear is that the Times’ aim here was not to inform the reader. So we are left to speculate on what these journalists and their editors are up to.
The most innocent explanation for their misconduct is that the authors and their editors are greedy and hope to sex up thin allegations so that they can sell books. Normally, this explanation would be enough, but it fits too neatly into a pattern that extends way beyond the desire to make a tidy six- or even seven-figure sum on a book.
The Times in 2018 assigned an opinion writer, openly and stridently opposed to Kavanaugh’s nomination, to write a news story about him — on which she did a pretty lousy job. NBC published multiple totally uncorroborated, and later debunked, stories accusing Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
When none of the other witnesses could confirm any details of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh, and as her story kept shifting, the media provided an assist for the Democrats’ backup plan: to claim that Kavanaugh had perjured himself. They served this cause by misrepresenting, quite flagrantly, what Kavanaugh had actually testified about — never having blacked out from drinking. Outlet after outlet led readers to believe that Kavanaugh had denied being drunk, which he in fact had not done.
News outlets always make errors. But throughout the 2018 Kavanaugh fight, and in the renewed scuffle sparked by the Times this week, the errors and the lapses in journalistic standards by the networks and the Times always, without fail, seem to lean in one agenda-driven direction.
Given this pattern of misinformation to undermine Kavanaugh, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that NBC, the New York Times, and other outlets wanted to defeat Kavanaugh, and that having failed to do so, they now want to continue inflicting as much pain upon him as possible.
Every conservative who feels that the press is out to punish conservatives has found confirmation in the Kavanaugh ordeal. And it happened all over again on Saturday night. It is no defense that the Times corrected its error after Mollie Hemingway, co-author of Justice on Trial, spent much of the weekend shaming the Times for its journalists’ professional misconduct.
When it all comes down to it, this entire saga is about the right to kill babies in the womb, just as Blasey Ford’s attorney told the same journalists behind this report. When Roe v. Wade next comes before the court, the Times, most of the media, and all of the Democrats will use the repeatedly debunked and never-even-slightly-corroborated accusations against Kavanaugh to argue that any ruling undermining Roe is “discredited” or illegitimate because of the charges.
This helps explain behavior on the Left, including at the Times. In the eyes of honest observers, though, it’s not Justice Kavanaugh who has been discredited. It is his ruthless and heavily biased prosecutors in the press.
