Here’s How the New York Times Produces Fake News

Despite Trump’s insistence on using it as a shorthand for “things I don’t like,” I have long maintained that fake news is an accurate term to use in a literal sense. Most cable news is presented as a journalistic endeavor, but their methods betray that term, making their product something that looks like news but decidedly is not. Fake news, if you will. While the big three mainstream newspapers of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are far better sources of information than anything you will find on a medium explicitly designed for entertainment, they also dabble in fake news too.

Using just one example I have written about here at new Splinter, the NYT and WSJ centered Benjamin Netanyahu’s lie as their headline when Israel killed seven World Central Kitchen workers earlier this year (Israel recently killed more World Central Kitchen workers over the Thanksgiving holiday too), even though both papers noted in the body of their report that the World Central Kitchen CEO disputed Netanyahu’s assertion that it was an accident and instead maintained that Israel knew exactly who they were shooting at.

After some online uproar where I and others reached out to them asking why they centered Netanyahu’s portrayal of the news and not the other source in the article who would also know details of how this situation unfolded, they quietly changed the headlines to something much less committal. It was, in essence, a tacit admission that they had spread fake news in service of Benjamin Netanyahu, something American media has dedicated a lot of time and effort to in the last year.

Today, the NYT published a story titled “Trump Wants to Shake Up Health Care. Many Americans Don’t Mind.” It is a classic in the mainstream media genre of saying everything while ultimately saying nothing of substance, all while elevating anecdotal evidence above actual data in service of a clear agenda to poke and prod their liberal readership. The article begins in my backyard in crunchy Boulder, Colorado, as farmers market shopper Colin O’Banion details how the pandemic turned him and his wife into first-time Trump voters. This is the sixth paragraph, which more-or-less functions as the article’s thesis statement.

Trust in scientists and medical experts has eroded since the pandemic, and voters galvanized by Mr. Kennedy’s pledge to “Make America Healthy Again” as head of the Department of Health and Human Services said that he had given voice to their frustrations with the whole system — from vaccines and Covid rules to hospitals and health insurance.

And here is the first sentence of the tenth paragraph.

According to public surveys by the Pew Research Center, nearly eight in 10 Americans still say they believe that scientists act in the public interest — a far higher level of trust than people give to politicians or the news media.

This is the New York Times again quietly admitting that the story they are selling is not quite true. Every good mainstream media article has a “to be sure” paragraph to virtue signal to the reader how amenable they are to (some) critiques of the angle they are presenting, but the order you write things in matters, and what you put in the beginning paragraphs has a lot to say about the context the following ones will come in. It would be one thing if the article wrestled with the contradiction it presented here, because then it would at least reflect America writ large right now, but it didn’t, it just glided right past this inconvenient fact to keep telling the same story it started out with.

The NYT claims “many Americans” are behind this shift away from trusting science and experts including “many who have voted Democratic in the past” whom they interviewed, but the Pew survey they cite in the story notes that “Democrats continue to express more confidence than Republicans in scientists.” This NYT article may make you think the Democrats have a sizeable problem with people defecting to the GOP over quack science, but according to Pew (emphasis mine), “Roughly nine-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (88%) express a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.”

This is important to note because the Times and others defend articles like this which cause an uproar as ways to inform their liberal audience about people they normally won’t come into contact with, which is a genuine service in journalism. However, they are not accurately portraying these people as representative of the broader movement they claim to report on, as the NYT clearly wants to establish a narrative of disaffected Democrats turning into Republicans over the pandemic when the data the NYT cites proves that it’s not that simple. While there is undoubtedly some kind of dynamic like that unfolding in a world where practically every demographic shifted from Democrat to Republican this election, the Pew study says that this phenomenon is still far more common to Republicans, not Democratic-leaning independents and certainly not “many Americans.” In fact, Pew found that “Republicans’ overall level of confidence in scientists is up 5 percentage points compared with a year ago,” which is a far more interesting development worth studying than any low-grade Twitter discourse the Times repeated in this article.

Near the very end of the story, which is usually where the best information is found in these kinds of articles, they quote Mollyann Brodie, executive director of KFF’s Public Opinion and Survey Research Program, who said “Obesity, better food, those things don’t come up” in polling about health care issues, and that the crystal clear top concern expressed by Americans is the immense cost of health care. If you are looking for what “many Americans” actually think, KFF has you covered as their study cited by the NYT found that “about four in ten voters across partisanship mention issues related to the cost of health care” when offering “in their own words what health care issue they most want to hear the candidates talk about.”

Contrast that finding to the kicker the Times used to end their article.

“People across the country are waking up from being told how to think and what to do,” she said, “especially about what we put in our bodies, what we breathe, and what’s in our water.”

So just to recap: the NYT wrote a headline saying “many Americans” are on board with Trump’s agenda to “shake up health care,” then shared a CBS poll indicating that a majority of Americans do not support his pick to lead his health care policies, and another Pew survey establishing that the people they are profiling as the “many” Americans max out at about twenty percent of the populace–all while ignoring the fact the study they cite says the dynamic is largely a Republican one as the Times tries to frame it as liberals moving right in opposition to science. How is this not fake news?