The Patriot Post® · The New York Times Misinforms Us Again

“Facebook is absolutely teeming with right-wing misinformation right now,” sneers New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose. “These are all among the 10 most-engaged URLs on the platform over the last 24 hours.”

Accompanying Roose’s tweet is a helpful table showing Exhibits A, B, C, and D of this right-wing misinformation campaign: a hoax about a northern Michigan congressman who went from loser to winner when election officials fixed a “glitch” that had switched thousands of votes from him to his Democrat opponent; a yarn about the Michigan state legislature holding an emergency session to investigate voting irregularities; a fiction about Attorney General William Barr authorizing the Department of Justice to look into reports of voting irregularities; and a final fable about Georgia Senators Perdue and Loeffler calling for their secretary of state to resign due to the Peach State’s poor handling of the election.

Notice anything odd about that farrago of falsehoods?

Oh.

Power Line’s John Hinderaker noticed the same thing. “Yes, that’s right: every one of these Facebook posts links to a news story that is indisputably true. A Republican in Michigan did go from loser to winner after a ‘technical glitch’ was fixed. Attorney General William Barr did authorize the Department of Justice to investigate voting irregularities. Michigan’s legislature did hold an emergency session. And Senators Perdue and Loeffler did call on Georgia’s Secretary of State to resign.”

Two of the stories, in fact — this one and this one — were actually reported on by the Times itself.

But other than that, Roose’s smear checks out. In any case, he explains, even if “some of the most viral stories aren’t strictly false … they are feeding a stolen election narrative that is going to be hard to dial back.”

This goes to the larger question of why, with its reputation for honesty and decency having long since been pinched off into the toilet, The Times would have someone so shockingly incompetent on its payroll.

Ben Shapiro has the answer: “These stories are not false, of course. But Kevin Roose’s actual job — like so many of our tech activists — is not to spot misinformation. It is to badger social media giants into censoring conservative outlets. … Facebook and Twitter and Google are happy to comply, not because they actually think the stories are false, but because their woke staffers believe they ought to be Left-wing outlets full time.”

The mainstream media’s post-election coverage of fraud has been of a piece with its pre-election coverage of the Biden Crime Family: Nothing to see here, folks; move along.

Sure, it’s easy to get swept up in some of the more outlandish and unverified claims of voter fraud out there. As our Mark Alexander notes, “That’s exactly what Joe Biden and his Leftmedia propagandists want. If there’s a lot of fake fraud news being propagated, it greatly undermines the legitimacy of genuine voter fraud — first and foremost the bulk-mail ballots.”

The Times, though, would have us believe that there’s no fraud out there. In fact, that’s exactly what one of its ridiculous headlines claimed on Tuesday. To the contrary, there is evidence of voter fraud out there. Lots of it, and in various forms. Sworn affidavits, for example, are evidence, and the president’s team already has hundreds of them from battleground states across the country. Despite what the Times would have us believe about “misinformation.”

As Hinderaker summed things up, “I have been saying for a while that the principal job of journalists these days is to block Americans from receiving information that they are better off (in the opinion of the Left) not knowing. Journalists don’t so much report the news as cover it up. This is an excellent example of that sick phenomenon.”