Authored by former Congressional investigator Paul Thacker,
I walked you through a couple examples of fact-challenged essays in the New York Times opinion page last month, but Wow! Two more incidents jumped to my attention soon after. I’m gonna march through these as well, to further impress upon readers of the need to be skeptical about what you read, especially if it’s in the New York Times.
The first example is columnist Paul Krugman, the Princeton professor of economics who spent an entire year dismissing inflation, even though inflation was so terrible it likely explains why Trump won the presidential election. The second exemplar of Times silliness is columnist Zeynep Tufekci who fabricated science to support “masks work” dogma throughout the pandemic, and is now spitting out alternative facts about Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health.
Krugman won a Nobel Prize in 2008, but his fame rests on his decades-long tenure as celebrated truth teller columnist for the Times. However, truths told by Krugman are not always true. For the past year, running up into the election, Krugman has spun a fairy tale about the U.S. economy, professing in column after column that inflation is low. Krugman told these lies likely because these fibs bolstered the Democratic Party while they were locked in a tight race with Trump.
Krugman has long shown a partisan streak, once making the delusional claim that Trump was under the control of Putin.
But it seems politics has so deranged Krugman’s thinking that this Nobel Prize winner in economics will even write stupid things about economics.
Before diving into Krugman’s economic nonsense, take a look this chart from the Congressional Budget Office which notes that inflation reached incredibly high levels during the Biden administration. Then ask yourself, “How could Krugman ignore these numbers?”
Well, he did.
Krugman started off 2024 proclaiming that “inflation isn’t nearly as bad as it feels” and continued to dismiss economic numbers right up through the election.
Nonetheless, when media reported the actual inflation numbers, Krugman dismissed them as “partisan media” on May 3rd.
He deployed the “partisan” claim again, four days later on May 7 because why not? Whenever the fact don’t fit, just mumble “partisan.”
By June Krugman had become so delusional about inflation that he floated the silly argument that high inflation was a “false alarm” and the real concern was recession. “So it’s time to stop obsessing about inflation, which increasingly looks like yesterday’s problem,” Krugman wrote, “and start worrying about the possibility of a recession as the economy’s strength finally begins to erode under the strain of high interest rates.”
When Trump pledged to “end inflation” last July, Krugman then spun up a fantasy tale in one of his columns:
So Americans do know that inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — is way down. What is true is that we had a burst of inflation in 2021-22, which has left the level of prices considerably higher than it was a few years ago. A dollar doesn’t buy as much as it used to. On the other hand, American workers are taking home more dollars: Recent years have seen a surge in wages as well as in prices.
Krugman followed up this baloney by cherry picking federal numbers to find one inflation report that fit his politics which he lauded as beautiful.
"We've beaten inflation,” Krugman told Yahoo Finance in early August. “I mean when you take out sort of lagged effects of housing, most measures are pretty much at the Fed's 2% target or at most a fraction of a percentage point above it."
Krugman’s crusade to dismiss inflation and high prices harming average Americans continued a few days later in this column praising Biden and alleging Kamala Harris was more trusted than Trump on the economy.
But days before the election Krugman pivoted to warn that victory over inflation could be “squandered” if Donald Trump wins the presidency. This sudden twist, from downplaying inflation numbers during the Biden administration to projecting alarm over imaginary Trump inflation, pretty much reveals that campaign politics were driving Krugman’s columns.
And then came the election, and guess what? The New York Times admitted that voters chose Trump because of inflation and high prices under Biden. But after confessing this, the Times ignored over a year of bullshit columns by Krugman denying that very inflation, and then allowed Krugman to double down on complaints about Trump.
I’m serious, this is exactly what the New York Times did. Read it for yourself.
In fact, Biden inflation was so bad, explained Johns Hopkins political economist David A. Steinberg, that high costs killed Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and helped propel Trump into the White House.
As is clear to anyone not blinded by political zealotry, inflation was really bad during the Biden administration. So bad that people voted for a Republican, despite a year-long campaign by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman to deny economic reality in the pages of America’s most powerful newspaper.
Why the editors at the Times let Krugman get away with publishing this nonsense, I have no clue, but it’s rather obvious that accuracy is not important at the Times. Let’s take a look at the second example of lies splattered across the pages of the Times: columnist Zeynep Tufekci.
Readers might remember Tufekci from her defamatory attack on the Cochrane mask review and lead author Tom Jefferson. After Cochrane published their latest mask review that found little evidence mask work to stop viruses in 2023, Tufekci went on the attack, alleging the evidence falls in the opposite direction: masks work.
Granted, Tufekci’s advanced degrees are in film studies, not public health or medicine. But hey, New York Times. Who needs actual science when you can dash out an essay?
Tufekci’s “masks work” column was not only rife with false scientific conclusions, she even lied about what people she interviewed told her. In one example, Tufekci claimed Michael Brown, one of Cochrane’s editors, did not support the Cochrane mask review when he had told her the complete opposite.
“I didn’t agree with her,” Michael Brown told me of his interactions with Tufekci, “the way she then spun it: masks work.”
It’s not that Tufekci doesn’t understand science; she doesn’t understand journalism ethics nor how to read and write accurately. And Tufekci pulled the same gambit in a November essay defaming Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee to run the NIH.
In her column disparaging Bhattacharya, Tufekci made several false assertions, alleging for example that Bhattacharya had estimated COVID would only kill 20,000 to 40,000 Americans (he had actually written that up to 2 million might die). Tufekci also falsely asserted that a study by Bhattacharya grossly overestimated the number of Americans who had been sickened by the virus and recovered. (In fact, this study was published in a top journal and was replicated by other studies).
Tufekci’s article was so riddled with mistakes that several scientists with real degrees in science sent a letter to the New York Times pointing out the errors and demanding that the Times abide by basic rules of journalism and issue a correction.
But instead of correcting the errors the New York Times doubled down on their false assertions, making clear to readers that they have a political agenda to attack science and researchers they don’t like.
But wait. It gets worse.
After scientists sent the Times the letter noting Tufekci’s numerous errors, Tufekci hopped on X to attack Bhattacharya once again. In several posts, Tufekci argued that the real problem was not her blatant scientific mistakes, nor her defamatory attack on Bhattacharya.
The real problem is that Bhattacharya is not “humble” and is part of a “personality cult.”
This is what passes for journalism at the New York Times. I ask myself every day why I continue paying for a subscription to this mess of a paper. What do you think?
Subscribe to The Disinformation Chronicle here...
Authored by former Congressional investigator Paul Thacker,
I walked you through a couple examples of fact-challenged essays in the New York Times opinion page last month, but Wow! Two more incidents jumped to my attention soon after. I’m gonna march through these as well, to further impress upon readers of the need to be skeptical about what you read, especially if it’s in the New York Times.
The first example is columnist Paul Krugman, the Princeton professor of economics who spent an entire year dismissing inflation, even though inflation was so terrible it likely explains why Trump won the presidential election. The second exemplar of Times silliness is columnist Zeynep Tufekci who fabricated science to support “masks work” dogma throughout the pandemic, and is now spitting out alternative facts about Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health.
Krugman won a Nobel Prize in 2008, but his fame rests on his decades-long tenure as celebrated truth teller columnist for the Times. However, truths told by Krugman are not always true. For the past year, running up into the election, Krugman has spun a fairy tale about the U.S. economy, professing in column after column that inflation is low. Krugman told these lies likely because these fibs bolstered the Democratic Party while they were locked in a tight race with Trump.
Krugman has long shown a partisan streak, once making the delusional claim that Trump was under the control of Putin.
But it seems politics has so deranged Krugman’s thinking that this Nobel Prize winner in economics will even write stupid things about economics.
Before diving into Krugman’s economic nonsense, take a look this chart from the Congressional Budget Office which notes that inflation reached incredibly high levels during the Biden administration. Then ask yourself, “How could Krugman ignore these numbers?”
Well, he did.
Krugman started off 2024 proclaiming that “inflation isn’t nearly as bad as it feels” and continued to dismiss economic numbers right up through the election.
Nonetheless, when media reported the actual inflation numbers, Krugman dismissed them as “partisan media” on May 3rd.
He deployed the “partisan” claim again, four days later on May 7 because why not? Whenever the fact don’t fit, just mumble “partisan.”
By June Krugman had become so delusional about inflation that he floated the silly argument that high inflation was a “false alarm” and the real concern was recession. “So it’s time to stop obsessing about inflation, which increasingly looks like yesterday’s problem,” Krugman wrote, “and start worrying about the possibility of a recession as the economy’s strength finally begins to erode under the strain of high interest rates.”
When Trump pledged to “end inflation” last July, Krugman then spun up a fantasy tale in one of his columns:
So Americans do know that inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — is way down. What is true is that we had a burst of inflation in 2021-22, which has left the level of prices considerably higher than it was a few years ago. A dollar doesn’t buy as much as it used to. On the other hand, American workers are taking home more dollars: Recent years have seen a surge in wages as well as in prices.
Krugman followed up this baloney by cherry picking federal numbers to find one inflation report that fit his politics which he lauded as beautiful.
“We’ve beaten inflation,” Krugman told Yahoo Finance in early August. “I mean when you take out sort of lagged effects of housing, most measures are pretty much at the Fed’s 2% target or at most a fraction of a percentage point above it.”
Krugman’s crusade to dismiss inflation and high prices harming average Americans continued a few days later in this column praising Biden and alleging Kamala Harris was more trusted than Trump on the economy.
But days before the election Krugman pivoted to warn that victory over inflation could be “squandered” if Donald Trump wins the presidency. This sudden twist, from downplaying inflation numbers during the Biden administration to projecting alarm over imaginary Trump inflation, pretty much reveals that campaign politics were driving Krugman’s columns.
And then came the election, and guess what? The New York Times admitted that voters chose Trump because of inflation and high prices under Biden. But after confessing this, the Times ignored over a year of bullshit columns by Krugman denying that very inflation, and then allowed Krugman to double down on complaints about Trump.
I’m serious, this is exactly what the New York Times did. Read it for yourself.
In fact, Biden inflation was so bad, explained Johns Hopkins political economist David A. Steinberg, that high costs killed Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and helped propel Trump into the White House.
As is clear to anyone not blinded by political zealotry, inflation was really bad during the Biden administration. So bad that people voted for a Republican, despite a year-long campaign by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman to deny economic reality in the pages of America’s most powerful newspaper.
Why the editors at the Times let Krugman get away with publishing this nonsense, I have no clue, but it’s rather obvious that accuracy is not important at the Times. Let’s take a look at the second example of lies splattered across the pages of the Times: columnist Zeynep Tufekci.
Readers might remember Tufekci from her defamatory attack on the Cochrane mask review and lead author Tom Jefferson. After Cochrane published their latest mask review that found little evidence mask work to stop viruses in 2023, Tufekci went on the attack, alleging the evidence falls in the opposite direction: masks work.
Granted, Tufekci’s advanced degrees are in film studies, not public health or medicine. But hey, New York Times. Who needs actual science when you can dash out an essay?
Tufekci’s “masks work” column was not only rife with false scientific conclusions, she even lied about what people she interviewed told her. In one example, Tufekci claimed Michael Brown, one of Cochrane’s editors, did not support the Cochrane mask review when he had told her the complete opposite.
“I didn’t agree with her,” Michael Brown told me of his interactions with Tufekci, “the way she then spun it: masks work.”
It’s not that Tufekci doesn’t understand science; she doesn’t understand journalism ethics nor how to read and write accurately. And Tufekci pulled the same gambit in a November essay defaming Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee to run the NIH.
In her column disparaging Bhattacharya, Tufekci made several false assertions, alleging for example that Bhattacharya had estimated COVID would only kill 20,000 to 40,000 Americans (he had actually written that up to 2 million might die). Tufekci also falsely asserted that a study by Bhattacharya grossly overestimated the number of Americans who had been sickened by the virus and recovered. (In fact, this study was published in a top journal and was replicated by other studies).
Tufekci’s article was so riddled with mistakes that several scientists with real degrees in science sent a letter to the New York Times pointing out the errors and demanding that the Times abide by basic rules of journalism and issue a correction.
But instead of correcting the errors the New York Times doubled down on their false assertions, making clear to readers that they have a political agenda to attack science and researchers they don’t like.
But wait. It gets worse.
After scientists sent the Times the letter noting Tufekci’s numerous errors, Tufekci hopped on X to attack Bhattacharya once again. In several posts, Tufekci argued that the real problem was not her blatant scientific mistakes, nor her defamatory attack on Bhattacharya.
The real problem is that Bhattacharya is not “humble” and is part of a “personality cult.”
This is what passes for journalism at the New York Times. I ask myself every day why I continue paying for a subscription to this mess of a paper. What do you think?
Subscribe to The Disinformation Chronicle here…
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