One form of fake news is to claim something happened when it never did. Another form of fake news is to claim something did not happen when in fact it actually did - especially when said claim is designed to cast aspersions on someone else. And if you're the New York Times, you can take this to an even higher level: You can report something that appears to cast aspersions on someone you don't like (aka "a Republican"), and then, when it comes to light that this something is actually not true and that the person who made the claim now looks like a total # for having said it, you simply delete the reference and pretend you never reported it.
Such is the sophisticated complexity of fake news as perpetrated by our fine, vaunted media!
Rob told you yesterday about Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill making an # of herself by claiming - for the purpose of casting aspersions on Jeff Sessions - that she had never met with a Russian ambassador in her role as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. This was quickly contradicted by one of her own tweets from three years ago, as well as photographic evidence that she most certainly had engaged in such meetings.
So he either lied, or forgot (which she said was impossible to do when you're talking about meeting with an ambassador), or she just has no idea what her job is unless her handlers remind her. Whatever the reason, she looked pretty bad.
That made things difficult for the New York Times, which had reported earlier in the day that McCaskill had made the claim. Why? Because at the time there was no reason to doubt it and the Times thought it helped in its goal of making Sessions look bad. But when it became clear that McCaskill's claim was garbage, what, of what, should America's Newspaper of Record do? The clear and obvious journalistic practice would be to update the story and indicate McCaskill's claim had been disproven.
But this is the New York Times. It's not a real newspaper. It's the Democratic Party House Organ. So what did it do? It deleted the portion of the story that mentioned McCaskill's claim in the hope that no one would notice it had ever been there. How do we know this? Because there is a web site called NewsDiffs.com that chronicles such changes. Here is the link to the actual Times story, which by clicking you can see in its present form. Here is the NewsDiff link that shows you how and when the story was changed.
If a Republican had made such a claim and it turned out to be false, you know perfectly well that the Times would have run a front-page story headlined "So-And-So falsely claims to have never met with Russian ambassador."
You know it.
It would have dominated the news cycle for days, and the Republican in question would have been confronted by a horde of journalists on live television, forced to answer question after question about his damnable lie and what it says about the Trump administration and its dastardly disregard for what is true and right.
But when Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, pulls a stunt like this? The New York Times tries to quietly cover up the evidence by deleting its own reference to it in the hope that everyone will quickly forget it. This is why so few people trust the mainstream media, most of whom hold the Times up as a paragon of journalistic excellence and virtue. And this is why no one should trust them.
