http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/05/29/busted-yashar-ali-fabricates-quote-to-defend-false-report-from-new-york-times/so in case anyone followed that brief spat with the NYT and Trump the past couple days, looks like the evidence is out there now
NYT said
Quote
On Thursday, for example, a senior White House official told reporters that even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.
Trump then tweeted:
Quote
The Failing @nytimes quotes “a senior White House official,” who doesn’t exist, as saying “even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.” WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.
And today we got the actual audio and transcript from the official, who was identified as being a very real person, but not saying what the NYT claimed he said:
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The ball is in North Korea’s court right now. And there’s really not a lot of time — we’ve lost quite a bit of time that we would need in order to, I mean, there’s been an enormous amount of preparation that’s gone on over the past few months, at the White House, at State, and with other agencies and so forth. But there’s a certain amount of actual dialogue that needs to take place at the working level with your counterparts to ensure that the agenda is clear in the minds of those two leaders when they sit down to actually meet and talk and negotiate, and hopefully make a deal. And June 12 is in 10 minutes, and it’s going to be, you know… But the President has said that he has, someday, that he looks forward to meeting with Kim.
It was a pretty significant mischaracterization for the NYT to claim the official was saying its
impossible to hold the summit, which is both not a word he used and not the same thing he said either. For US foreign policy its a huge difference between saying that rescuing the summit is
difficult and saying its
impossible, because that has huge repercussions on our negotiations with the DPRK, and the NYT is probably influencing that to some extent. And Trump in his typical manner mirrored their inaccuracy with his own and reflexively called their source phony- which is only half true, insofar as the quote was a confabulation but the source wasn't.
Now after this little spat, I'd like to point out how this reflects on the use of anonymous sources by all the NYT/WaPo/CNN/etc: If the NYT can be so palpably misstating what a direct white house official related to them and we have on record in audio, how can you trust what they claim an anonymous source of unknown origin told them in an unknown context on any given story? Not just in terms of the purple-monkey-dishwasher effect or the veracity of their sources, but their misrepresentation willful or not is a huge deal.
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