Author and former New Yorker columnist Kurt Andersen scored a viral anti-Trump hit this weekend by fabricating a quote and attributing it to the New York Times.
Andersen tweeted this weekend to his more than 68,000 followers: “@NYTimes: ‘Officials presented the president with options. The Pentagon tacked on the choice of targeting [Qassem Soleimani] mainly to make other options seem reasonable. They didn’t think he would take it. When Mr. Trump chose the option, military officials, flabbergasted, were alarmed.’”
@NYTimes:“Officials presented the president with options. The Pentagon tacked on thechoice of targeting Suleimani mainly to make other options seem reasonable.They didn’t think he would take it. When Mr. Trump chose the option, militaryofficials, flabbergasted, were alarmed.”
— Kurt Andersen(@KBAndersen) January5, 2020
Note the use of the colon and the quotation marks. To anyone with a basic understanding of the English language, Andersen’s tweet is clear: The Times reported those exact words in that exact order. Andersen is just quoting an article he read. Except he is not.
Andersen’s tweet, which is still live and has been shared by nearly 10,000 social media users, is a mishmash of sentences plucked selectively from a Times article and Frankensteined into something more hideous than its original form.
The part of Andersen’s tweet where it says “officials presented the president with options,” for example, comes from a passage that actually reads:
The options included strikes on Iranian ships or missile facilities or against Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq. The Pentagon also tacked on the choice of targeting General Suleimani, mainly to make other options seem reasonable.
Of the options presented to the president, he chose “strikes against militia groups,” according to the Times. It was not until later, during the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, that the president opted to escalate and go after Soleimani directly. The part of Andersen’s tweet where it says “they didn’t think he would take it,” does indeed refer to the option of killing Soleimani. It also refers to the period before the attacks on U.S. soil. It also comes from an entirely separate section of the Times report.
Lastly, the part where Andersen refers to U.S. officials being “alarmed” comes from a section of the report where it states specifically that officials were “alarmed” by the “prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on American troops in the region.”
In other words, Andersen lied. He selected his favorite parts, his favorite individual words within the Times article, stitched them together into an especially ugly and misleading quilt, and then presented his handiwork on social media for retweets and likes.
Amazingly, even after a Twitter user, Neontaster, discredited Andersen’s “quote,” the former New Yorker editor defended his viral fabrication.
“The 280-character condensation of the article to its astonishing gist is entirely accurate,” Andersen said.
This professional author, one who used to work for the New Yorker, knows exactly how quotation marks work. He even knows what an ellipsis is. Andersen’s choice to forgo the writing tools readily available at his fingertips was intentional. He can pretend he does not understand how punctuation works, but no one is stupid enough to buy that.
And even without the misleading punctuation, his summary would not be accurate. The options were not presented to Trump as he implied they were. Officials were not “alarmed” about what he said they were alarmed by. Events did not take place in the order he implied.
For an industry whose members constantly complain about the spread of disinformation, self-policing among journalists is exceedingly thin. There are no articles in Poynter, Nieman Labs, or the New York Times warning of the abundance of falsehoods attributable to members of the press. No CNN reporters or Daily Beast contributors are cautioning their followers to be wary of viral posts produced by members of their own industry.
Those concerns are reserved exclusively for the real threat to the republic: the satirical Babylon Bee.
