The New York Times quietly corrected a pair of articles mentioning a Trump voter with buyer’s remorse after it was discovered he never actually cast a vote for the president.
Mark Graham, a resident of Erie County, Pa., was initially featured in a video created by America Bridge, a Democrat PAC. “I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because I thought he would make a change,” Graham says in the spot.
When questioned about whether Trump has delivered on that change, Graham replies, “Not for the good” because the president “plays favorites for people like himself. … He doesn’t understand life around here,” adding, “Voting for Donald Trump in 2020 would be like putting gasoline on a fire.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
One news organization happened to check Graham’s voting record and discovered he didn’t cast a ballot for Trump. In fact, he didn’t vote at all in 2016.
So the guy from Pennsylvania who said he voted for Trump and now regrets it..
didn’t actually vote for Trump.
Mark Graham, who Democrats are putting in campaign ads against the president..
DIDN'T EVEN VOTE in 2016!#FridayFeeling #FridayThoughts https://t.co/YIdSXvgcYB
— Cassandra (@CassyWearsHeels) December 27, 2019
New York Times Embarrassed
You’d expect Democrat PACs to run dishonest videos in an effort to drive their voter base to the polls. You might even expect the local media to fail in their due diligence to run a background check on people they feature in their stories.
But the New York Times? The New York freakin’ Times?
That’s exactly what happened — and not once but twice. The Times were so enamored of Graham’s purported change of heart that it ran two articles – one, an in-depth feature on the man, another that references him.
For both pieces, the Times issued one of its famous “corrections.”
“After this article was published,” the paper wrote, “local news media reported that Mark Graham, a voter featured in the American Bridge ad campaign and another article by The Times, did not vote in the 2016 election. The Times has confirmed those reports.”
Pro-tip: Maybe confirm his comments and what he claims to be prior to running multiple stories on him.
The NY Times just quietly issued a major correction to its "explosive" Manafort report.
This is a huge error that makes the "bombshell" story significantly less important.
Once again, the corporate media shows its low standards. pic.twitter.com/um2nSHuK07
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 9, 2019
A Pattern Emerges
We’d like to say this kind of thing by the New York Times is a rarity, but it isn’t. In December of 2016, the Times was forced to issue a correction on a column regarding the Electoral College. The paper claimed to have opposed the Electoral College consistently for 80 years, only to have a column from 2000 surface titled “The Case for the Electoral College.”
This past January, the Times had to issue a significant correction to a story that seemed to insinuate proven collusion between former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the Kremlin.
And perhaps most famously of late, the Times was forced to retract an editorial that blamed Sarah Palin for a mass shooting in Arizona in 2011, a conspiracy theory that was debunked almost immediately after the heinous act was carried out.
Palin sued the New York Times for defamation over the “fake news” reporting in 2017, and the case was revived recently after a decision in her favor.
Perhaps if the Times stopped concluding without any facts that all Republicans are bad, the paper could restore its image.
Until then, the only appropriate place for the New York Times is at the bottom of a garbage can.
Cross posted at the Mental Recession
