The New York Times will be deploying 29 fact-checkers to CNN’s debate between President Biden and former President Trump on Thursday. You read that correctly. 29.
The fact-checkers will join an additional 31 reporters and editorial staff the Times will be using to cover the landmark debate, the paper revealed Monday.
The editorial resources they’ll be dedicating to keep the candidates honest is larger than an entire Major League Baseball roster.
Given that outsized number, one might assume it would be wise to split them up evenly, 15 for Trump, 14 for Biden, right?
But … c’mon folks. Do we really think all 29 of them will be impartial? Sure, maybe a few will call balls and strikes. But given the paper’s history with so-called fact-checks, I’m not gonna hold my breath.
In 2023, during the Fox News debate between Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom and Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the New York Times labeled a DeSantis claim as “false,” a claim it later had to walk back to “misleading.”
The Times cited DeSantis’ claim as follows: “Florida had a lower standardized Covid death rate than California did. … California had higher excess mortality than Florida.”
However, as a Check Your Fact analysis makes clear, the venerable arbiters of context at the Times left out a key piece of context themselves. They completely omitted DeSantis’ words surrounding the quote which cited a legitimate study for his information. (RELATED: Snopes Finally Corrects The Record On Notorious Trump Hoax — Seven Years Later)
“In fact, the Lancet just did a study. Florida had a lower standardized COVID death rate than California did, that’s a Lancet study,” was DeSantis’ full claim. The Grey Lady completely ignored the fact that he was citing a reputable publication for his figures.
After Check Your Fact issued its analysis, the Times updated its fact-check from ‘”false” to “misleading” and issued the following statement: “The figures to which Florida’s governor referred factored in the relative overall health of Florida and California, controlling for obesity, diabetes and other conditions that increased the risk of death from Covid. Under that scenario, which considered the overall poorer health of Florida’s population, the Covid death rate in Florida was lower than in California.”
Another egregious example of the Times’ blatantly biased fact-check was, again, a misguided attempt to correct DeSantis. During the 2023 GOP primary debates, DeSantis claimed “If you look at the threats that we face, terrorists have come in through our southern border.”
A cursory fact-finding mission would tell you this statement is objectively true. One phone call with a border agent who isn’t lying through their teeth would wrap up this fact-check with a nice little bow.
But the Times chose instead to mislead their own readers and label the claim false. “Since 1975, no one has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States that involved someone who came across the border illegally, according to Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank,” the Times’ Eileen Sullivan wrote.
But … where in DeSantis’ supposedly false statement did he say “people have been killed in a terrorist attack that involved someone who came across the border illegally”? Answer: he didn’t. The Times moved the goalposts entirely.
The idea that the Times can call a claim false, and then present a rationale that’s totally nonmaterial and completely irrelevant to their initial claim … it’s downright insulting to their readers. And, even though law enforcement arrested a number of high-profile ISIS affiliates who came across the border in June, the New York Times debunked claim is still alive and well on their website. (RELATED: Sen. Mike Lee Says One Of Biden’s Border Projects Makes It Super Easy To Let Terrorists Into America)
So, given the left-wing media’s copious refusal to deal in truth in recent years, I imagine we’ll see the Times scrutinize Trump’s most fluid and off-the-cuff statements to a litigious degree while Biden largely gets a pass. Why 29 of the New York Times elite truth squad needs to be on deck for that partisan hackery is anybody’s guess. But hell, if you’ve got the dough go crazy, right?
