Bad Times

The fallout is still coming down for the New York Times and their hit piece against Senator John McCain. Apparently, the Old Gray Lady has gotten too old and set in its leftist ways to be taken too seriously anymore.

Dr. Thomas Sowell has something to say about that in his most recent column:

The front page of the New York Times has increasingly become the home of editorials disguised as "news" stories. Too often it has become the home of hoaxes. Going back some years, it was the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been gang-raped by a bunch of white men. Just a couple of years ago, it was the Duke University "rape" hoax that they fell for. In between there were the various hoaxes of New York Times reporter Jason Blair, who was kept on and promoted until too many people found out what he had been doing and the paper had to let him go. Last month the New York Times created its own hoax with a long front page article about how war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were killing people back in the United States because of the stress they had gone through in combat. That hoax was shot down two days later by the New York Post, which showed that the murder rate among returning war veterans was only one-fifth the murder rate among civilians in the same age brackets.

And I'm proud to say that I was one of the New Media bloggers who helped to spread the debunkment of that story about the vets:

A Hidden Tax On New Cars, NY Times Lies About Veterans And Great Britain Is "Mostly Free"
84rules
January 17, 2008

You would think that after getting caught so many times that the Times would clean up it's act. They didn't:

Undaunted, the New York Times has come up with its latest front-page sensation, the claim that some anonymous people either suspected an affair between Senator John McCain and a female lobbyist or tried to forestall an affair. But apparently no one actually claimed that they knew there was an affair. This did not even rise to the level of "he said, she said." Instead it was anonymous sources reporting their suspicions. People who share the New York Times' political views are treated as "innocent until proven guilty." People with different views are condemned for "the appearance of impropriety," even if there is no hard evidence that they did anything wrong.

Which is why we don't trust the NYT at all.

And here is what makes me proud:

The rise of alternative media -- notably talk radio -- has limited how much the mainstream media can get away with. Dan Rather's fake memo about President Bush's National Guard service might have gone unchallenged, and affected an election, back in the old days when the media consisted largely of like-minded colleagues who would not embarrass one of their own. Bloggers and talk radio shot that one down. But it is doubtful if we have seen the last of the journalistic hoaxes. Not in an election year.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Bad Times
Dr. Thomas Sowell
GOPUSA.com
February 26, 2008

Some other really good columns about the New York Times' diminishing credibility can be accessed on-line here:

New York Times' Unsubstantiated Assault As A Boost To McCain
Paul Weyrich
TownHall.com
February 26, 2008

McCained
Rich Galen
TownHall.com
February 22, 2008