As well as sometimes running stories normalizing Trump on an ongoing basis, the New York Times committed election-influencing journalistic malfeasance in late October and early November of 2016: multiple big headlines about the FBI re-investigating Hillary Clinton emails ran concurrently with a story claiming the FBI found no evidence of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign—a story we now know caused Christopher Steele to cut ties with the FBI out of fear it had flipped to the Trump/Russia side.
So what’s up with the New York Times?
Maybe it has something to do with this—an AP story you might recall from December 22, about a Russian hacking operation called “Fancy Bear,” which targeted 200 journalists worldwide, in some cases obtaining sensitive personal information. (Emphasis added:)
The Associated Press found that Lobkov was targeted by the hacking group known as Fancy Bear in March 2015, nine months before his messages were leaked. He was one of at least 200 journalists, publishers and bloggers targeted by the group as early as mid-2014 and as recently as a few months ago.
The AP identified journalists as the third-largest group on a hacking hit list obtained from cybersecurity firm Secureworks, after diplomatic personnel and U.S. Democrats. About 50 of the journalists worked at The New York Times. Another 50 were either foreign correspondents based in Moscow or Russian reporters like Lobkov who worked for independent news outlets. Others were prominent media figures in Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics or Washington.
For some reason, NYT was of such great interest to Putin’s hackers that a full quarter of the journalists they targeted worldwide worked there.
50 were targeted—how many were successfully hacked and how many are compromised and how has that influenced the paper’s political coverage? We do not know. The NYT will only acknowledge that its employees received the phishing emails, in late 2014.
The Times confirmed in a brief statement that its employees received the malicious messages, but the newspaper declined to comment further.
I think Special Counsel Mueller needs to investigate this, if he hasn’t already; it’s well within his mandate of learning how Putin influenced the election to favour Trump, and what American help he received. As should New York state’s AG Eric Schneiderman (HT to Ice Blue in the comments).
But the New York Times needs to do its own internal investigation, and some soul-searching as well. It needs to ask itself questions such as “How much do we value democracy in America?” and “Which side of history do we want to be on?”
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