With Last-Minute Pseudo-Scandal New York Times Joins Trump’s Side In War On Truth

“The actual election scandal is the fact that the President of the United States is waging a whole of government effort against free and fair elections.” — Jamelle Bouie, NYT Columnist

If you make a mountain out of a molehill, that’s bad journalism. But if you obscure a whole mountain range or two in the process, that’s not just bad journalism. It’s anti-journalism.

Because the purpose of journalism is to make the world legible to the public, so that the people can make informed decisions about how to shape their shared future. Doing the opposite—making the world illegible, is anti-journalism. Fascist demagogues like Trump try to make the world illegible, so that people have to depend on them to make sense of anything and everything that happens. When news outlets do anti-journalism, they only help make themselves irrelevant.

And that’s exactly what the New York Times did in the last week of this year’s elections. They broke a last-minute pre-election story that superficially seemed to confirm Trump’s relentless lying that America’s elections are rigged, and that Democrats are responsible. But key elements of the story were misleading at best, if not downright false, as the Times itself quickly admitted in a first-day followup. Despite that admission the Times relentlessly continued to produce and promote a flood of other followups—more than a dozen stories and podcasts in just the first three days.

The Times’s pseudo-scandal allegedly involved “operatives aligned with Mary Peltola,” the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Alaska. They allegedly spent months in a “ballot-stacking” effort, recruiting a candidate with the same name as the incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, as well as “other Alaskans the team sought to recruit as spoilers.” And the story’s crucial claim was that this could subvert the election:

“if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state’s unusual, four-person ballot.”

Sounds scary, right? If you’re alarmed, then the Times’s anti-journalism has done its job. Because it’s the virtual opposite of the truth. Later that same day, in its evening newsletter, the Times took the bogey-man costume off. It admitted that ballot staking was a common practice, rather than a scandal, and that it was useful for Trump in furthering his attacks on our democracy:

“Ballot-stacking tactics are common and generally considered legal. But President Trump repeatedly cried foul after our story was published, calling for Peltola to be removed from the ballot.”

Unlike ballot-stacking, removing Peltola from the ballot is anything but “common and generally considered legal” tactic. He might not get his way, but what he wants shows that Trump and the Democrats are playing by very different playbooks. Yet, the Times’ pseudo-scandal story tried to paint them as similar, a classic example of anti-journalism.

There was also another problem the Times failed to acknowledge—that the ballot-stacking would have virtually no impact with Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system. As the Times itself acknowledged in a later story, “Any voter confused by the existence of two Dan Sullivans could simply rank both candidates.”

Finally, the lack of impact from any confusion in this case stands in sharp contrast with what Trump has been trying to do for most of his second term in office—if not longer. In fact, a lawsuit Trump’s DOJ had already brought at his command tried to stop the state’s election officials from certifying the results of the race if GOP Senator Dan S. Sullivan narrowly lost to Peltola. In rejecting this unprecedented suit, and what it sought to do, Judge Sharon Gleason wrote, “Clearly, if this Court were to order that certain ballots will be segregated and subject to a future and as yet unspecified investigation by law enforcement, it would likely result in voter ‘confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.’” This is exactly the sort of result that the Times’ original story pretended would come from the actions of “operatives aligned with Mary Peltola,” Just to be clear, Gleason added, “Such late-breaking changes to the election rules are strongly disfavored.”

It’s worth noting that Alaska’s Supreme Court had already heard a state court case challenging the second Dan Sullivan, and ruled in favor of keeping him on the ballot—another basic fact the Times ignored. That happened on June 29. There was no good reason for the Trump administration to wait for the last minute to bring its case in federal court and ask for such late-breaking changes. They were not doing it to win their case in a court of law, but to use their last-minute loss as one more piece of fuel to feed Trump’s supporters’ sense of grievance—the same sense of grievance that led to the January 6 insurrection.

This has been Trump’s method all along. Bring countless lawsuits fighting his enemies—almost all of them utterly without merit—and then use every court case loss to make his supporters ever angrier, ever more willing to destroy those who stand in their way. Threats against judges, lawmakers, and the press are all part of the playbook Trump is following, a playbook used by dozens of other authoritarian leaders all across the world.

That is what is going on with this election, and it could well result in even more violence than we saw after the 2020 election. Good journalism would make this clear—the shape of the mountain range and everything in it. But what the Times is doing is the opposite. They aren’t making Trump’s attack on democracy legible, they’re making it illegible by making a big deal out of not-even-mini-scandal to make it seem that Democrats are no different than him. And in doing so, the Times perpetuates its false self-image of moral superiority, standing in aloof judgment of both sides who are equally squalid, equally corrupt, equally deserving of the Times’s imperious contempt.

There was enough reader push-back that the Times felt necessary to defend itself. In explaining its publication so close to the election, the Times said they “published the story as soon as we had it nailed down,” and that “once the story was nailed down, not publishing would have been a more overt act of putting our fingers on the scale of this election.”

This explanation is laughable coming from a paper whose leading journalists covering Donald Trump have recently published a book, Regime Change, that was chock full of unflattering stories that weren’t published as soon as they were nailed down. In fact, holding back those stories is precisely what made the book salable. And it was hardly the first time. Indeed it’s become a tradition. Journalists at both the Times and the Washington Post have routinely not reported stories when they would have mattered most in order to sell more books later. It’s a practice that’s become a scandal of its own, in fact.

But that’s for holding back stories that actually mattered. Not stories that made mountains out of molehills, that confused the public just days before an election, and that gave a would-be dictator ammunition to further attack our democracy on the eve of an election that could finally constrain him.