Obama Prefers the Lie to the Truth

Posted by Erick Erickson on June 22, 2015 at 7:06 am

Barack Obama, giving an interview on the West Coast recently, said, "If you watch Fox News you inhabit a completely different world, with different facts than if you read (the) New York Times."

Obama's point was to suggest the New York Times gives you the truth and Fox News gives you something else purported to be factual.

Andrew Rosenthal used to be a reporter for the New York Times. On February 5, 1992, Rosenthal penned a front page article in the Times about George H. W. Bush looking at a supermarket checkout scanner at the National Grocers Association convention in Florida. In the article, Rosenthal wrote,

The look of wonder flickered across his face as he saw the item and price registered on the cash register screen. ”This is for checking out?” asked Mr. Bush. “I just took a tour through the exhibits here,” he told the grocers later. “Amazed by some of the technology.” Marlin Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, assured reporters that he had seen the President in a grocery store. A year or so ago. In Kennebunkport. Some grocery stores began using electornic scanners as early as 1976, and the devices have been in general use in American supermarkets for a decade.

Within a week, op-ed writers across the country had seized on that story to show just how out of touch George H. W. Bush was. There was just one problem. Rosenthal was not present at the event. There was only one pool reporter there who had not even mentioned, in the pool report, the expression on President Bush’s face. Most newspapers who had run the story based on Rosenthal’s “reporting” had to issue retractions. The New York Times was one of the few that didn’t. In fact, the Times stood by Rosenthal even though the reporter who had been present disputed Rosenthal’s story. Andrew Rosenthal is now the editorial page editor of The New York Times.

But a story like that would make Barack Obama feel comfortable that the facts were on his side.

It is worth going back to a story in 1992 to note that the New York Times has not only not changed, but has gotten worse. At the same time it was fabricating stories about George H. W. Bush, it at least defended abolition of the minimum wage as an economically sound idea. Today, it is incapable of nothing other than affirming the prejudices of people like Barack Obama.

In the George W. Bush administration, the New York Times was willfully messing up chronologies to make political points. The list goes on and on.

The New York Times continues to struggle and Fox News continues to dominate. Contrary to the myths of men like Obama, Fox News is not viewed solely by conservatives, but by a great and broad group of Americans who are tired of being lied to and sneered at by the competition — a competition from which Barack Obama himself learned to sneer.