Earlier today, LU carried a report on the latest attempt to discredit Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As though the original ham-handed effort by Democrats to derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court didn’t cast them in a negative enough light, accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s attorney recently revealed that her client had had an ulterior motive in attempting to smear Kavanaugh. The whole smarmy ugly affair, it turns out, arose out of Blasey Ford’s concern that a Justice Kavanaugh might help overturn Roe v. Wade.
Seeming not to recall the heat it took for running with the original Kavanaugh allegations, the New York Times jumped into the fray again over the weekend, publishing an article asserting that a classmate of Kavanaugh witnessed him “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student” named Deborah Ramirez.
You’d think the Times would want to double-check a story this explosive before running with it a second time. Instead the day after the piece ran, the Times posted a “correction” noting that “the female student,” meaning Ramirez, “declined to be interviewed, and friends say she does not recall the incident.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Although Democratic lawmakers jumped the shark on this new story, you’d expect that the Washington Post, another journalistic leviathan, would want to cross all its t‘s and dot its i‘s before repeating the Times’s mistake. And you’d be wrong.
This morning, the Post ran an “told-you-so” op-ed by “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin titled “This is the Kavanaugh mess we feared.” Seemingly oblivious to the correction the Times had run the previous day, Rubin wrote:
In September 2018, I warned about the abbreviated FBI investigation into allegations that Brett M. Kavanaugh engaged in sexually aggressive behavior: “If Democrats retake one or both houses in November, they will be able to investigate, subpoena witnesses and conduct their own inquiry. The result will be a cloud over the Supreme Court and possible impeachment hearings … Kavanaugh has not cleared himself but rather undermined faith in the judicial system that presumes that facts matter.”
And sure enough, two New York Times reporters have found multiple witnesses to the allegations from Deborah Ramirez that Kavanaugh exposed himself during a dorm party at Yale.
It is clear that Rubin had no clue that Deborah Ramirez had recanted her story. Do “journalists” like Rubin and her editors at the Washington Post even care anymore about accuracy?
