Steve Berman:
I’m no apologist for President Trump. But the New York Times has put itself, once again, in a horrible position in reporting an anonymously-sourced story about a meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer.
This isn’t the first time they Gray Lady has cried “Wolf!”
Just last week, the NYT and AP corrected their previous and widely-reported claim that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election in an attempt to help Donald Trump’s candidacy.
In February, the NYT claimed that phone records and “intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”
James Comey, under oath, directly refuted the NYT story. And the NYT reported on itself, without issuing a correction.
Answering a question about the Times article during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Comey said that “in the main, it was not true.”
Instead of engaging in self-examination, the very reporters who gathered the anonymously-sourced stories pressed to know exactly what was wrong with their initial report. Comey did not, and could not without violating the FBI’s security and his own disclosure agreements, answer that.
But “in the main, it was not true” doesn’t mean, “it’s true with some problems.” It means it’s false, with some elements of truth.
The NYT continues to report in this manner: That it’s got the story mostly true. Yet time after time, their reports end up as “nothing-burgers” or embarrassing falsehoods promulgated by people with a political agenda.
It would seem to emerge (as we all know) that the NYT itself has a political agenda. They want to take down President Trump. The main stream media’s echo chamber of the NYT, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC are hell-bent for leather to see Trump fall.
And the harder they try, the less credibility they have.
They keep crying “Wolf!” over and over when there’s no wolf there. In this latest report, what version of events should we believe? The hint may be in the small details. Today, the NYT, in a follow-up story to the original report, noted a correction.