The New York Times versus Ted Cruz
The New York Times versus Ted Cruz
The New York Times destroyed the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. It used incessant negative reporting. Now it’s going after Ted Cruz, knowing that he is likely the next Republican candidate unless Donald Trump runs again.
But even if Trump returns, the likelihood is that Cruz would be the VP and waltz to the Presidency in 2028. The Times looks as if it wants to nip this in the bud and it’s already positioned a reporter, Lisa Lerer, on the Cruz “beat” to dog him for the next four years or until he falls by the wayside.
This worked too well with Sanders. The Times assigned a pitbull reporter named Sydney Ember to report on Sanders and the 2020 campaign in a continuous negative light. Various other news outlets followed the Times’ lead and sunk the promising Bernie 2020 campaign.
Here are some clippings about this by Progressive commentator Katie Halper, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
It did not take much to derail the Sanders campaign. Similar actions were taken in 2016. Halper poiints out the following:
“The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up: it changed the headline (from ‘Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,’ to ‘Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories’ [then it] deleted a positive quote from a campaign adviser; and added two negative paragraphs.
“Even after the paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they ‘thought [the article] should say more about his realistic chances.’ In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’s viability and ability to govern, in other words.”
Cruz is another matter. As the various news outlets have coalesced along party lines, the New York Times has very few Republican readers affected by anti-Cruz coverage. Republicans do not read, or even believe, the New York Times.
Some of the coverage will leak into network TV and local TV coverage and have a negative impact there. But that won’t be enough to derail Cruz.
What they need is a good scandal besides the lame “Ted went to Cancun” nonsense. First of all, Cruz was not a mayor or governor telling people to mask up and shelter in place. He was also not responsible for anything going on in the state nor could he do anything about it. And in Texas, there were no travel restrictions whatsoever for the public-at-large. So he goes to Cancun and gets excoriated. For what?
His real failure as a leader was to skulk back as if he were guilty of some crime. He compounded this by his failure to defend himself in any meaningful way. A good thing to say would be, “I thought it best not to be in Texas where I’d be in the way of the relief efforts.” That would have worked and been believable if delivered with enough sincerity.
Of course, this “scandal” is so far in advance of 2024 that you must assume this is target practice for the mainstream media. Dissect his reactions to later exploit the habits. So far, he’s looking like a sitting duck inviting potshots.
And from the looks of the Lisa Lerer hit pieces, these are whoppers. First off you have the story conflating the Cancun trip with Governor Cuomo’s sexual harassment and nursing home scandals as a "moral equivalency." This has to be a journalistic low water mark for sleaze, that’s for sure.
And then you find a NYT article listed in the rundown written in Spanish! WTF? When has that been normal? You must assume that they did this to remind the Democrat-leaning Hispanics that Cruz is a douchebag and not a compadre. You can expect more of this nonsense in the months ahead.
There was a belief that Trump made it to the presidency because the woke and activist news media thought the campaign was not serious. There was also a firm belief that he had no chance. They did little to derail his campaign, unlike with Sanders..
Cruz, right now, is the guy to stop. They are not about to make the same mistake twice, the way they see it. -- jcd
March 22, 2021