Five days after President Trump announced he would pull the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear agreement, the New York Times published an unflattering profile of Mark Dubowitz, one of the deal’s harshest critics.
Ironically enough, the man who rather famously opposed the Iran deal isn’t the one who comes away from this report looking bad.
The original version of the Times profile, titled, “He Was a Tireless Critic of the Iran Deal. Now He Insists He Wanted to Save It,” went beyond merely accusing Dubowitz of being a shameless flip-flopper.
It also engaged in that tired and ugly game of hinting Iran deal critics have “dual loyalties” when it reported incorrectly that Dubowitz’s think tank, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is “linked” to Israel’s Likud party.
The article claimed several additional things that are not true, forcing the Times to publish an impressively long list of corrections on May 16, which reads:
At least they got his name right.
Dubowitz himself tweeted this week after the paper issued its multi-part correction, “[The Times] corrects four material facts. Also, corrected my birthplace after original story posted. Appreciate efforts of senior editors to correct. Many other misleading elements remain.”
It’s probably worth noting that this massive screw up on the Times’ part comes not too long after it published a separate article claiming the Palestinian Authority’s “martyr” fund is a “far-right conspiracy.” Except that the fund is definitely real, and the PA definitely provides financial support to known and suspected anti-Israel terrorists and their families.
Times staffers brag often in the Trump era that their subscriptions numbers are better than they’ve been in years. Perhaps the paper should take some of that new Trump cash and invest it in fact-checkers.
(h/t Seth Mandel)
