In 2018, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger met privately with then-President Donald Trump, whom he “implored,” according to the Associated Press, “to reconsider his broad attacks on journalists, calling the president’s anti-press rhetoric ‘not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.'”
“I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press,” Sulzberger is quoted as saying.
So how well has the Times lived up to those lofty ideals? It hasn’t. It continues to publish half-truths and out-and-out lies that promote its far-left agenda. Sometimes the paper will brazenly neglect to issue a correction to a story one of its “journalists” has been forced to rewrite.
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The latest example of this occurred on Tuesday in the paper’s coverage of the tragic police-involved death of 16-year-old Makiyah Bryant, who was fatally shot by a police officer as she threatened another girl with a knife. The article references a tweet by civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump that itself erroneously claims that Bryant was “unarmed.” (Crump also incorrectly identified the girl’s age, according to family members.)
As we breathed a collective sigh of relief today, a community in Columbus felt the sting of another police shooting as @ColumbusPolice killed an unarmed 15yo Black girl named Makiyah Bryant. Another child lost! Another hashtag. ✊???#JusticeForMakiyahBryant https://t.co/9ssR5gfqm5
— Ben Crump (@AttorneyCrump) April 21, 2021
When the Times became aware of its error with respect to a critical point in the story, it added a sentence noting Crump’s incorrect characterization but failed to treat the change as a correction, as our friend Jeryl Bier noted:
There's no editor's note pointing out the change, but the @nytimes article now says "In the tweet, Mr. Crump incorrectly described her as “unarmed.”"https://t.co/pmNWhAFvSO https://t.co/SoQ3luQMUl pic.twitter.com/xQDlfqYoUt
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) April 21, 2021
The detail glossed over by the Times is pretty central to the narrative of whether the police used excessive force. It’s unprofessional and dishonest of the Times to give it short shrift.
