In leaked audio that was transcribed by the folks at Slate, Byron York explains in his new op-ed that the New York Times editor-in-chief told his staffers this week in a town hall that they are now transitioning their newsroom from covering Trump-Russia for the last two years to Trump-racism for the next two years:
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said recently that, after the Mueller report, the paper has to shift the focus of its coverage from the Trump-Russia affair to the president’s alleged racism.
“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well,” Baquet said. “Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”
Baquet made the remarks at an employee town hall Monday. A recording was leaked to Slate, which published a transcript Thursday.
The recording leaked to Slate wasn’t meant for public consumption.
But now we have it and Banquet’s remarks are nearly as blatant as that ridiculous anti-Trump headline change the other day, which by the way, is a big reason they are having this town hall.
But then came the Mueller report, with special counsel Robert Mueller failing to establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to fix the 2016 election. “The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet continued. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”
Baquet used the gentlest terms possible — “the story changed” — but the fact is, the conspiracy-coordination allegation the Times had devoted itself to pursuing turned out to be false. Beyond that, Democrats on Capitol Hill struggled to press an obstruction case against the president. The Trump-Russia hole came up dry.
Now, Baquet continued, “I think that we’ve got to change.” The Times must “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.”
“I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks?” Baquet said. “How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump?”
I bolded the last part myself. The NY Times has wasted the last two years on the phony Mueller probe, using it to try and destroy Trump. But since that failed they are now going full bore on trying to keep Trump from getting elected with these phony charges of racism from the Democrat Party.
And it was the absurd headline change that made the Times do some serious soul searching about all of this:
The town hall was spurred by angry reaction, both inside and outside the Times, to a headline that many on the Left faulted for being insufficiently anti-Trump. After the El Paso shootings, when the president denounced white supremacy, the Times published a page-one story with the heading, “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.”
“I think one of the reasons people have such a problem with a headline like this … is because they care so much,” one staffer said to Baquet. “And they depend on the New York Times. They are depending on us to keep kicking down the doors and getting through, because they need that right now. It’s a very scary time.”
It’s a very scary time? Seriously? How pathetic that this came from a staffer in the town hall, revealing just how biased these reporters really are against Trump.
Trump has had it right all along with regard to the New York Times being ‘fake news’ and this proves it. They are nothing more than a propaganda arm for the Democratic party. We saw how they ignored so much of Obama’s lies and scandals and we are now seeing how they seek to scandalize this president with racism in order to help defeat him in next year’s election. We are truly in dark times, as Levin suggested earlier today.