Hard to say. The Times recently got itself a lot of bad publicity for its massive exercise in nation shaming, aka the 1619 Project, wherein the Times nobly accepts the burden—the Gray Lady’s Burden, one might call it—of explaining to us yahoos just how benighted we are on the subject of race. But that was just for starters.
On Saturday the Times published a bizarre “news analysis” “Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not.”, actually a book excerpt by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly that did not “analyze” anything but instead provided new and shocking allegations about further bad-boy shenanigans by newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, drawn from their new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.
First of all—and, certainly, most grotesque of all—the Times first publicized the piece with the since-withdrawn Times Twitter tweet “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun,” the Times having apparently merged with “badboyzrus.com” while no one was looking.
The Times second puzzler was why such a white-hot story should have been tucked well inside the paper and given a headline that contained no suggestion of the blistering contents inside.
Thirdly, and most self-wounding of all, the story followed up the first allegation, that a Yale student named Deborah Ramirez claimed that Kavanaugh had waved his penis at her, with a second, similar allegation involving another female student, left unnamed, only to later amend the story to say that the unnamed student would not corroborate the story and refused to be interviewed, while several of her friends, who were interviewed, claimed she said she didn’t remember the incident.
How far out its way can a paper go to undermine its own credibility? Only the Times knows.
Afterwords
WashPost “news analyst” Margaret Sullivan, takes the Times apart for you here, noting, among other things, that she can’t get any of the people at the Times who are supposedly in charge of making sure that things like this never happen to comment. And the Times itself isn’t covering the story at all.
Update
Check out Post “media critic” Erik Wimple’s take for more tongue-clucking detail.
Update II
The Times runs an interview with James Dao, deputy editorial page editor for the Times, but forgets to ask him why the original version of the story omitted the fact that the woman allegedly involved in the second “incident” declined to be interviewed and “allegedly” had told others that she didn’t remember the incident.
