All of Twitter had some fun on Friday at the New York Times’s expense, with the hashtag #RubioCrimeSpree reaching the top non-promoted trend at over 37K tweets last time I checked. The backstory, of course, was that Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder at the New York Times ran a supposed scoop, digging up major dirt on Republican Presidential contender Marco Rubio: that he has accumulated four, that’s right, FOUR, traffic tickets in twenty years. Plus, his wife had a whole bunch, too!
Obviously — well, to any normal person — traffic tickets aren’t news. There is an important story here, though. It’s just not about Rubio. According to the Washington Free Beacon, Miami-Dade County doesn’t only keep records of traffic violations, it keeps records of who checked the records. In this case, the New York Times reporters whose bylines were on the Rubio story did not check the records. Instead, it was a firm called American Bridge, which the Free Beacon calls a “Democratic Oppo Firm.” American Bridge describes itself on its own website as “a progressive research and communications organization committed to holding Republicans accountable for their words and actions and helping you ascertain when Republican candidates are pretending to be something they’re not.”
While the Times denied the Free Beacon report, we’ve seen before the willingness of that paper to accept without question the work of left-wing NGO’s. As long as those groups represent the “correct” point of view, the Times is usually happy to help advance their agenda. In February I noted that columnist Nicholas Kristof regurgitated, apparently without fact-checking, claims made by the holocaust-denier-employing NGO B’Tselem. In March I noted that he did the same with European and NIF-funded Gisha in Gaza. More recently, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren tweeted this picture of “Shirley Temper,” calling her a “young Palestinian soccer player.” Not only did Rudoren omit an explanation of the ongoing nature of the Nabi Saleh PR stunts of which “Shirley” has been a part for years, she also did not explain how she came to be in possession of the photo. Did she get it from the International Solidarity Movement, the group which appears to have taken these photos of the same young woman on the same day, and which was connected to Rachel Corrie?
The article on Rubio’s tickets was likely one more example of the way that the New York Times accepts, with complete credulity, information from left wing NGO’s. In this case, it certainly seems, despite the denial, that Rappeport and Eder went ahead and printed material supplied to them by a “progressive” group without even considering whether or not it was actually newsworthy, making their publication the laughing stock of Twitter. The New York Times is allowing itself to be turned into a partisan clearing house for left wing propaganda.
