Former NY Times Reporter Says Paper Held Damaging Kenosha Riots Article Until After 2020 Election
“Whatever the reason for holding the [Kenosha] piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore”
The mainstream media were unquestionably biased about the August 2020 officer-involved shooting of Jacob Blake, the Kenosha riots that followed, and the story of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people in self-defense, killing two of them after he went to a Kenosha Black Lives Matter protest to protect a car dealership from rioters as well as to render medical assistance if needed.
It’s just nuts how much misinformation is out there about what happened in Kenosha, and much of it has come not just from Democrats and the Biden White House directly but also from the MSM – something even some liberals have admitted in recent weeks after they watched the trial and learned the actual facts of Rittenhouse’s case.
Related to all of this is a tidbit of information former New York Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles wrote in a recent newsletter regarding a November 2020 story about how the Kenosha riots devastated communities of color.
Before I get to what she wrote last week about her former employer, I wanted to note her background, which is interesting as it relates to her Kenosha story. Bowles admitted earlier this month that when she started at the paper in 2017 that she was a raging liberal with an agenda to push, but said somewhere along the way she woke up and started pushing back, which was not appreciated by her colleagues.
Last month, apparently she and the paper parted ways, something she indicated was liberating to her.
On the Kenosha piece, Bowles noted Thursday that an article she had written on the devastating aftermath of the Kenosha riots was held until after the 2020 election:
A note on Kenosha in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial: Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild.
When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.
Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat.
Now it could be that the piece was just bad. I’ve sent in bad ones before, and I’ll do it again. A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.
There were a variety of reasons given—space, timing, tweaks here or there.
Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”
If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.
Though she says she doesn’t know for sure why they prevented the story from publishing until after the election, the insinuation was very clear: It’s not the kind of story that would have endeared people to then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Remember, Biden had already suggested Rittenhouse was a white supremacist and murderer at that point, so it wouldn’t have done his campaign any good to have a story out that showed the type of people (rioters) Biden was in essence defending.
In other words, we have yet another example here of more media manipulation of the Kenosha riots and the Kyle Rittenhouse case not just to their advantage, but to the advantage of a candidate for higher office.
I should note that this isn’t the first time the paper has manipulated their coverage of a hot-button topic in order to help a Democrat. In fact, they admitted as much in April 2020 after their biased coverage of the Tara Reade rape allegation against Biden raised eyebrows.
In response to an interview NYT media reporter Ben Smith did with executive editor Dean Baquet, the question was brought up about why the paper chose to delete a line from their original report which stated that “the Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.”
Baquet point-blank told Smith it was because the line made the Biden campaign uncomfortable.
“I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And that’s not what the sentence was intended to say,” Baquet said.
The New York Times. Full-blown Democrat apologists ’til the bitter end.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Democrats Propaganda Ministry just doing its part
Minitru.
Enemy of the people.
It’s disgusting but not surprising to anyone who has been paying any attention at all. The MSM has gone all-in on being propaganda organizations for the Democrat party. There is no longer even the pretense of objectivity; it’s all leftist indoctrination, all the time.
Up theirs. In my world Trump is still the President and Bob Wills is still the King.
Aaaah-hah!
That she was surprised Pravda on the Hudson would do this illustrates how out of touch with reality she was. And may still be.
Here’s a truism not to forget: most people never see the evil in bias until the evil affects them personally.
Glenn Greenwald. Donald McNeil. Bret Weinstein. J. K. Rowling. This guy.
There’s an old saying that some people learn from the misfortunes of others; some people learn only from their own; and some people never learn. What the saying doesn’t touch on is what portions of humanity typically fall in which class.
People are too rarely convinced by reason. But pain — specifically, pain from their own affinity group (not their opponents — important!) convinces vast numbers.
I know, because I’ve been there.
This is why it’s not accelerationist to root for the Democrats to keep digging their hole as deep as possible. It may damage the country, but it will redeem more people.
If only redemption and acquired wisdom were congenital.
“There’s an old saying that some people learn from the misfortunes of others; some people learn only from their own; and some people never learn. What the saying doesn’t touch on is what portions of humanity typically fall in which class.”
That because there are not enough people who fall into the first two categories to be quantifiable.
The NYT has a sorry historical record of whitewashing Communism and Nazism ignoring the Holocaust and being anti Zionist and again the right of Israel to defend itself
Ms Bowles is shocked! SHOCKED! To find that she was working for a corrupt, subversive rag.
She grew up enough to start reexamining long held beliefs with a critical eye. Good for her. Maybe she will become a Trump supporter?
Don’t be silly. She will just blame Trump and conservatives for allowing the NYT to be so brazen because their “bad behavior” made the left behave so badly in response.
I pay no attention to any US Corporate Sponsored Media of any kind, or PBS etc. I do my own research on all issues identified and especially issues omitted by the ‘drive bys’.
I used to enjoy PBS, but their coverage of issues has become so bad that I end up changing the station, usually within minutes. Now, PBS is just another propaganda outlet.
Like many other people, the more the push propaganda, the further I move to the right.
Standard Dhimmi-crat media propaganda suppression — you can’t publish any articles which paint the Dhimmi-crats’ goose-stepping, brownshirted domestic terrorist thugs in the “Anti-fa” and “Black Lives Matter” cadres in a negative light, nor can you publish any articles which show the devastation wrought on businesses, people and communities “of color,” by those same groups. It’s simply not allowed.
I have some long time friends who have drifted farther left over the years (not seeking out news from other perspectives, just bought into the MSM is all I can guess because they were always otherwise intelligent people), anyway, even they are finally calling for a return of the Fairness Doctrine. The MSM is out of control and needs to be brought to heel.
Been there, done that.
“The media is nothing but government propaganda. We need government regulation to rebalance it.”
A handmade tale with “benefits”. All’s fair in lust and abortion. Now what?
It’s just nuts how much misinformation is out there about what happened in Kenosha, and much of it has come not just from Democrats and the Biden White House directly but also from the MSM – something even some liberals have admitted in recent weeks after they watched the trial and learned the actual facts of Rittenhouse’s case.
Very few are admitting it. Look on Facebook and see the ‘performing arts’ people posting raw hatred for the Court and its decision after due process.
And come to think of it, now that FB has been censoring so-called ‘misinformation’ for months – WHERE’S THEIR BANISHING OF MSNBC, CNN, PBC, NPR etc etc, whose misinformation has totally convinced those performing arts true believers that Rittenhouse took an illegal gun across state lines to go hunting for ‘peaceful protesters’? It was they who attacked him for putting out their oh-so-peaceful fires, he spent his active moments thereafter running AWAY from them, being bashed by them and kicked by them and nearly shot by them, only defending himself when directly under attack.