The New York Fucking Times Hits A New Low

"We didn't SAY Biden has Parkinson's. We just made sure you'd think it..."

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There comes a point where you have to stop believing certain things are accidental or unintentional. Sooner or later, you have to look at someone’s actions and understand them to be absolutely deliberate.

In the last couple of days, the press has been pushing a story about Joe Biden and Parkinson’s, a degenerative nerve disorder. Like, really pushing it. Like most bullshit stories, this one started on the far right. The press couldn’t resist because the lie fed into their anti-Biden hysteria so they picked it up and ran with it without bothering to vet the story at all.

The New York Times was, as always, just the fucking worst.

Here’s the problem with Peter Baker’s “reporting”: It’s fucking trash. How do we know? Well, someone did a little fact-checking.

That’s a great question! Why didn’t Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Fucking Times, crosscheck the public visitor’s log with Biden’s public schedule? He’s a big-time reporter for the most prestigious newspaper on the planet. He could have assigned an intern to do it. But he didn’t. Or he did and he didn’t like the answers he found:

Whoops. It’s the same for the rest of Dr. Cannard’s visits. Biden was not there. I’m not going to post screenshots because they’re probably a pain in the ass to see on your phone. Follow the link and you can see them more clearly yourself.

So what the fuck was Peter Baker, a professional journalist, thinking putting out a story this half-assed and sloppy?

Allow me to illuminate.

I’ve been writing since 2010. About four years into my unanticipated career as a writer, I came to see myself as a professional. Someone who does, in fact, write for a living, however meager that living might be. But once I understood that, I understood what I was doing was practicing a craft. I understood that, as a professional, what I wrote mattered. Not necessarily in the broader sense of “I’m important!”¹ but in the smaller sense of “I am conveying a message and every word has meaning.”

That meant I had to be extremely careful and aware of what I was writing at all times, even in tweets and DMs. I don’t have the luxury of being misunderstood. My job is to communicate ideas. If I fuck that up, I am bad at my job and I do not like being bad at my job.

This is a long-winded way of explaining that when you see this kind of stuff from Glenn Greenwald and the New York Times and Matt Taibbi and the Washington Post, it is not “an accident.” They didn’t “make a mistake” or “poorly phrase something.”

As much as I loathe Greenwald and Taibbi, they write on a much higher level than I do. They don’t “misphrase” things. If they were that sloppy, they wouldn’t be where they are.

The NYT and WaPo are multimillion-dollar organizations. They don’t have “whoopsies,” either. They have editors and multiple levels of people to go over stuff before it goes to print. Even with cutbacks, there are still layers of redundancy involved.

So when the press groupthinks a Parkinson’s story into existence that is disproven with a quick check of the White House visitor’s log that literally none of them did (or did and then decided to ignore), you can be confident that they were aware of what they were doing. This was not a mistake on their part. This was a conscious decision to mislead the public.

Peter Baker knew exactly what he was doing. He wasn’t saying Joe Biden has Parkinson’s. He was just “asking questions” and letting the public draw conclusions. Conclusions he wanted them to draw.

Just to be perfectly clear: Biden’s physician checked him in January and there were no traces of Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is not a fast disease. If Biden contracted it 10 seconds after his checkup in January, it would be years before it impeded his functioning. It’s a terrible disease but slow to get started. But the press didn’t give a shit about that. They had a lie to sell to the public and they sold it.

We are now witnessing Yellow Journalism of a kind that has not existed in almost a century. Even “But Her Emails” wasn’t this bad and that was the worst I had ever seen. The press is waging a propaganda war on democracy on behalf of Donald Trump and I really do not give a flying fuck what their motivation is. If you haven’t canceled your subscription yet, now would be a good time. A pox on all their houses.

There are 118 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.

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1. Even when my articles were getting hundreds of thousands of views, I always referred to myself as “mini-famous.” It’s important not to get high on your own supply or you end like, well, Peter Baker.