The New Yorker Doesn’t Care About Facts When They’re Making Crap Up About Trump

by Paul D. Thacker

Perhaps no period in modern journalism has exposed major structural problems in the media as the Trump era. Since Trump careened into American politics in 2016, reporters have thrown story after story trying to ensnare Trump with Russia’s Putin. Many of these stories never held up to honest inquiry.

As investigative journalist Jeff Gerth examined in scrupulous detail—a 24,000 word, three part series, in the Columba Journalism Review to be exact—top American journalists misled the public while claiming to cover Trump fairly, dispassionately, and—most important—accurately.

Gerth notes that some of these reporters went on to win awards for their failed Trump stories. You likely haven’t read Gerth’s series in Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and that’s for good cause. Many journalists who wrote misleading stories on Trump refused to speak with Gerth, likely because they’d be hard pressed to defend dubious articles that led to coveted journalism prizes and promotions.

When Gerth’s series hit last year, I noticed that media industry embarrassment over biased, faulty Trump coverage carried over onto social media where reporters studiously ignored CJR’s investigation, in obvious hopes that you or any of their readers wouldn’t see it.

Yet, embarrassing and inaccurate coverage of Trump continues. Now the prime example is a fact-addled report on the Trump/Harris election debate by the New Yorker, a liberal magazine famed for its excellent fact checking—an alledged skill it apparently doesn’t apply when covering Trump.

Before diving into this, let me make something clear.

I don’t really care that much about elections nor that much about election reporting. And I rarely watch political debates. Election reporting is often dubious because it relies on journalist access to campaign official whose duties are to spin the press. And I’m not sure election reporting matters much, because people are going to vote the way they are going to vote. In the case of Trump’s 2016 victory, voters actually ignored the media that CJR caught spitting nonsense at the former reality TV star.

So when I woke up the day after the Trump/Harris debate, I just wanted a couple quick reads from different source to see what happened. It’s a simple ask, and I didn’t need reporting spin and nonsense confusing me.

As part of my morning routine, I just need to know what the hell happened the day before, get a cup of good coffee from my local café and come home to start work. The politics of the café owner and the internet company that provides home’s wifi don’t concern me.

I just need the journalism, coffee, and wifi to get my day going. But no.

The morning after the debate, I checked several different news sites about the debate, reading the top of the stories and suspecting that Kamala Harris had gotten the better of Trump. Of course, debate coverage is basically opinion disguised as news, but you can still get a feel for what happened by cross referencing different outlets and piecing reports together. But when I started searching news on X, I landed on the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser with completely nutty journalism.

“Trump made history last night for sure,” Glasser posted on X. “Who will ever forget him ranting on stage about immigrants eating people’s dogs? Or insisting that the Vice President ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in jail’?”

I had zero clue about what was going on with the “immigrants eating people’s dogs” thingy. I’d seen some videos floating around X with people appearing at a city council meeting, angry about immigrants. But the story was too hard to follow, turned into a partisan shit fest, and I kind of just didn’t care enough to figure out what was going on.

But the second point Glasser made about transgender care was factually inaccurate. The day before the debate, CNN had dropped a crazy report, uncovering a Kamala Harris  campaign pledge to support “taxpayer-funded gender care and transition surgeries for detained immigrants.

So I posted a screenshot of CNN’s TV segment to point out that Glasser has no clue what she was talking about and was gaslighting people.

 
What CNN uncovered was some really out-there campaign promises Kamala Harris had made to the ACLU made back in 2019. They even had a copy of the form Harris had signed. So why the hell is the New Yorker disputing something so clearly documented?

 
The Free Beacon website picked up the story, reporting that Glasser should be aware of CNN’s reporting, because she appears on the network as an expert commentator, even as she ignored CNN’s own reporting. And it’s not exactly an obscure outlet—indeed, it’s certainly better known to the public than The New Yorker.

Yet, here’s what Glasser wrote in her story that appeared at the top of the New Yorker’s website.

 
Maybe she should correct that to say, “No one knows, except anyone who’s heard of CNN”? Or maybe, “No one knows, especially people LIKE ME, SUSAN GLASSER!!! who appear on CNN”?

But it gets worse, as The Free Beacon caught Glasser spinning her own election error:

Pressed by a Trump campaign official who asked the New Yorker to correct the record, Glasser said she stood by the “view expressed in the column that this was a memorable line and also one that would be hard as heck for someone in the audience to understand what the former president meant by it.” She maintained that she was not fact-checking the president’s statements but rather “questioning the political advisability of bringing up these things in a national debate.”

That same official noted that Time magazine had corrected a piece that included the same error as Glasser’s.

So after she got caught falsely charging Trump with a fake statement, Glasser pivots, alleging personal concern about the “political advisability” of Trump making a statement that someone else might think is fake?

Glasser’s attempt to dodge the obvious—she screwed up!—is only heightened by Time’s response. Here’s their correction.

 
The reporter for the Free Beacon later posted on X that the New Yorker was doubling down on their error, “In a subsequent exchange, Glasser’s editor said the New Yorker does not ‘see a need to issue a correction.’” Glasser’s false passage in her story about Trump remains uncorrected to this day.

The New Yorker may ignore reality, but people on X began hopping all over Glasser’s reporting that ignored reporting. One journalist noted that Elon Musk’s X provides community notes that are better at fact checking than The New Yorker.

 
And Glenn Greenwald razzed Glasser for blatant partisan coverage, as she had also downplayed President Biden’s obvious cognitive issues last July. As I previously reported, Glasser wasn’t the only reporter to lie about Biden’s obvious decline.

But doesn’t Glasser’s recent pattern of misleading reporting emphasize that the The New Yorker might have a problem reporting facts accurately when those facts don’t line up with Democratic Party preferences?

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