“We strongly protest the exclusion of the New York Times and the other news organizations,” Times editor Dean Baquet said in a statement last Friday after his publication was excluded from a White House briefing.
“Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”
While innocent liberals everywhere were rallying to the Times' defense, many of those who have dealt with the Times up close could only snicker at phrases like “free media access” and “transparent government.”
One skeptic is investigative reporter James Sanders.
Twenty years ago he and his wife Elizabeth were arrested by the FBI on conspiracy charges for his efforts to get at the truth behind the destruction of TWA Flight 800.This was the plane destroyed off the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 people on board.
Not unexpectedly, the Times editors turned their back on Sanders during his legal ordeal.
Their First Amendment concerns did not and do not extend far beyond their own newsroom.
“Times is struggling to prove it is the source of legitimate news,” Sanders texted me on Friday.
No Trump fan, he added, “As they say in the White House, ‘Nyet.’”
If one had to pick a day when the Times lost all credibility with Sanders and other independent journalists, it would be September 21,1996.
On that day, the Times’ Matthew Purdy told of how the St. Louis police used the TWA 800 plane to train a bomb-sniffing dog six weeks before the crash.
The trainer placed explosives throughout the plane and encouraged the dog to find them.
One law enforcement official told Purdy the explosives were kept in tightly wrapped packages but conceded, “Testing can leave traces behind.”
The following day, September 22, the Times published what would prove to be the investigation’s obituary..."
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