Under Siege, The New York Times and NYPD Are Acting in an Oddly Similar Manner (original) (raw)
The final week of February was a rough one for two of New York City’s most powerful institutions. Under siege, the New York Times and NYPD acted in an oddly similar manner.
In response to a well-sourced Intercept investigation of its deceptive reporting about Gaza, New York Times brass launched an internal inquiry aimed at rooting out the in-house sources that leaked damaging info to The Intercept.
After stories came out on Thursday night reporting that a top NYPD official had gotten essential facts wrong in an incendiary tweet, the department’s communications team spent nearly all of Friday crafting a response. New York’s finest maintained that essential facts — e.g. the correct county of a crime, the actual judge — are not as essential as the department’s larger aim of smearing “soft on crime” judges.
Both The Times and the NYPD have agreed that accuracy is not integral to their mission.
Both The Times and the NYPD thus agreed that accuracy is not integral to their mission. And neither entity seemed particularly interested in admitting any wrongdoing.
Perhaps it is hopelessly nostalgic to think The Times would place the utmost value on its credibility. After all, its news division seems less important — and certainly less lucrative — these days than Wordle and the recipes it serves up.
In any event, why should The Times change course in its Gaza coverage when they win awards for it? Even when confronted with The _Intercept_’s revelations that The Times ’Hamas rape story was viewed by many within the paper’s ranks as garbage, the Polk Awards declared that it “stands behind” its choice of The Times as winner of this year’s Best Foreign Reporting honor.
It may not come as a shock that John Darnton, one of the two lead managers of the Polk Awards, spent more than four decades at The Times, most prominently as a foreign correspondent. More surprising is that the other, Ralph Engelman, is co-author of a book championing whistleblowers.
One wonders what the late Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The Times, would have said about the entity’s current crusade against whistleblowers.
Members of WAWOG and PYM protested The Times on Thursday in the wake of recent revelations about a December article that investigated rape allegations against Hamas.
The NYPD’s most famous whistleblower, Frank Serpico, also worked closely with The Times, first exposing widespread corruption within the department in 1970, one year before the publication’s release of the Pentagon Papers.
Alas, those were very different times.
Over the past decade, there has been no shortage of stories regarding NYPD’s credibility issues. The Brooklyn DA even keeps a list of more than 50 cops that prosecutors will not call to the witness stand. The Times, however, has shown only minimal interest in the NYPD’s recent distortions. Last week’s fiasco with the erroneous judge info went unnoticed, as did the fact that the Manhattan DA exonerated a migrant that cops arrested for the notorious Times Square incident.
The Times scant attention to the NYPD’s recent antics may be less a stamp of approval than a reflection of the fact that its coverage of New York City issues has declined precipitously in the last few years. But it’s a good bet that the NYPD, abetted by the New York Post, will continue to run amok under the Adams administration. Whether The Times will serve as a watchdog or a lapdog remains to be seen.