Finally, the Times says Cotton’s “assertion that police officers ‘bore the brunt’ of the violence [by rioters] is an overstatement that should have been challenged.”
If the Times is keen to avoid overstatement on its opinion page, what are we to make of legal columnist Linda Greenhouse’s assertion that a unanimous Supreme Court defeat for the Obama administration in a 2014 cases involving recess appointments was actually “a major victory for the president…by any objective view”? Or columnist Nicholas Kristof’s unsubstantiated 2015 claim that “some 100,000 minors are trafficked into the sex trade each year in America,” which echoed similarly dubious guesstimates? Or the 2019 op-ed piece in which former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and anti-smoking activist Matthew Myers averred that the e-cigarette flavors overwhelmingly preferred by adults are clearly designed for children, then falsely implied that vaping-related lung injuries were caused by products like Juul?
At the risk of making an unsubstantiated allegation and speaking hyperbolically with unnecessary harshness, I am going to suggest that the Times does not really care about its alleged “standards,” except when they help rationalize a decision it has already made for other reasons. More charitably, the paper’s editors are simply blind to violations of these rules when they are committed by writers whose conclusions they like.
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