The First Time the New York Times Slipped Explosive Lies into an Editorial

    According to the New York Post, “a civil war has erupted inside the New York Times over Nicholas Kristof’s explosive column alleging widespread sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israeli prison guards.” Staffers at the Times are questioning the charges, particularly the allegation that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians. This kind of sloppy, uncorroborated stuff “would have ever cleared the paper’s newsroom standards, according to Puck News.”

    One Times journalist was quoted as saying, “I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section.”

    This isn’t the first time the Times has launched a missile strike from the safety of the non-news section. In 2019, the Times revealed a fresh allegation of sexual misconduct by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh while he was a student at Yale University. A piece by reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly in the Sunday Review section – not the dissection – alleged that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to another student while at a party at Yale in the 1980s. 

    There was only one problem. Pogrebin and Kelly omitted a key piece of information — the fact that the alleged victim of the incident said she didn’t remember it.

    After the lie was exposed, the editors of the Times added a note: “The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.”

    There was more. The Times article was part of the promotion by Kelly and Pogrebin of their 2019 book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh. In that book, it was revealed that a woman named Leland Keyser was threatened if she did not back the story of her childhood friend Christine Blasey Ford, who claimed that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. A onetime friend of Christine Blasey Ford, Keyser came to question Ford’s account that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school house party. “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could be spread about me if I didn’t comply,” Keyser is quoted as saying.

    In other words, extortion.

    It’s still astounding: Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin slipped a fake story into an editorial featuring a woman who says she had no recollection of what they were alleging while simultaneously burying an explosive and verified news item about the extortion and witness tampering that were going on during the Kavanaugh nomination. 

    Even Vanity Fair couldn’t believe it, writing the following:

Why did the Kavanaugh excerpt end up in the Review? People familiar with how things went down told me that Kelly and Pogrebin initially pitched their scoop to the news side, but the top editors ultimately felt that there wasn’t enough juice to warrant a story there, let alone a big page-one treatment (the type many lefties would have been salivating for). Instead, Pogrebin and Kelly were told that they could pitch the Review, which is entirely independent of the News department. I asked for clarification as to what about the story wasn’t News-pages-worthy, but the Times declined to comment, as did Kelly and Pogrebin. (A Times spokesperson did, however, point out that “it’s not unusual for Opinion or Sunday Review pieces to break news.”) 

The allegation in the report triggered demands — led by a half-dozen Democratic presidential candidates, including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg — for Kavanaugh to be impeached. But the Times article left out a key detail that is included in the book: that the woman at the party in the new allegation never spoke to the authors and, according to several of her friends, didn’t recall the event ever happening.

“Obviously, it was an oversight,” said Kelly. “We corrected it as soon as we could, added the information in. There’s an editor’s note explaining that we regret this. It’s unfortunate, and just speaking for Robin and myself, there’s no attempt to conceal information from our readers.”

    Readers of Hot Air know my involvement with the Kavanaugh battle, and have noted, and even criticized, me for writing about it so much. Yet the point was not only to tell the truth about what happened – and maybe sell a few books – but to establish a pattern of behavior from the Stasi media and implant the names of the malefactors in the media into the minds of Americans. It is to get justice. The promise I make to readers is that I will only bring that nightmare up if I am advancing the ball by revealing some fact that will make the people who launched the hit against me and Kavanaugh pay. The names Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin should be as well known as Woodward and Bernstein. The fact that New York Times reporter David Enrich apologized to me and said he and his colleagues have been “agonizing” over their abysmal Kavanaugh coverage should be used to shame them and make sure this never happens to another person. It’s about actually making an attempt to change these awful people and the corrupt institutions they work for. I’ve been sober for over three decades. I believe in miracles.

    They may even get to the point where the media lets me tell my story on NPR – and they stop spiking profiles that make me – and other conservatives – look human.

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