The New York Times, having taking loads of online hits over its not-a-parody nytimes.com news flash Friday morning about the 17 traffic tickets earned by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette over an 18-year period, doubled down, by reprinting the controversal blog post in Saturday's print edition, under the headline: "Plenty of Notice for Rubios on the Road."
Although the article is weirdly absent from Saturday's online "Today's Paper" section, it's substantially the same as the Friday morning post by Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder. Under a photo of Rubio and his wife Jeanette, a caption reads: "Senator Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette. They have received 17 driving citations since 1997."
That would be 13 for Rubio's wife Jeanette, four for Marco Rubio himself. Four driving citations over an 18-year-period may sound like a fairly clean record, but it's apparently cause for concern at the partisan Times.
And the Times may have even had some help on its "scoop." Citing the Washington Free Beacon, Newsbusters' Tim Graham added: "The Times report appeared very shortly after all these citations were pulled by American Bridge PAC, a very pro-Hillary super PAC that’s getting fingerprints on several media hit pieces on Republican presidential candidates."
Not even the paper's overwhelmingly Democratic Facebook fans were on board for this Rubio scandalette: They seemed to find their intelligence insulted.
The Times was also much mocked online for adding the citations earned by Rubio's wife Jeanette, who is not Marco Rubio and is not running for president. Mollie Hemingway uncovered some amusing tweets, like this from John Ekdahl: "Taken together, Marco Rubio and Napoleon conquered most of Europe."
Seemingly every election cycle, the Times embarrasses itself with a partisan pro-Dem hit job that backfires in its face. Here are three:
1) In June 2006 the Times crippled a successful terrorist surveillance program to get back at President Bush. The Times' notorious tag team of intelligence reporters, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, again revealed the details of the program, known as SWIFT, while ignoring the concerns and personal pleas for secrecyfrom the White House. (Lichtblau and Risen had previously handled the Times' slightly more justified 2005 NSA "domestic spying" scoop.) This one, "Bank Data Sifted In Secret By U.S. To Block Terror," involved international bank transfers by the bank consortium SWIFT, and its exposure may well have sabotaged the successful spy program.
The irresponsible banking spy scoop backfired on the paper, causing both a public relation nightmare and raising plausible legal concerns for both the leakers and the journalists they leaked to.
Even the paper's then-Public Editor, Barney Calame, recanted his previous support, convinced by "clever" conservative critics: "My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: the Times article and headline had both emphasized that a 'secret' program was being exposed."
2) In February 2008, soon after Sen. John McCain claimed the Republican nomination for president, the Times revealed a supposed bombshell story it had been sitting on for two months. A Times investigative team assembled a 3,000-word front-page piece on McCain and his relationship with a telecommunications lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. The paper unloaded the story on the February 21, 2008 front-page – where it promptly fizzled out among conservatives and liberals alike, who dismissed the story as a strained mix of sex innuendo and old news (The Keating Five?). Some of the anonymous innuendo:
Early in Senator John McCain's first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client's corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself - instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
....
Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
The paper relied on two anonymous former staffers who admit "they had become disillusioned with the senator."
Response to the "expose" from both left and right was overwhelmingly negative. The paper didn't seem eager to put up a fight, while even the network news broadcasts questioned the paper's journalistic standards, and the issue briefly united conservatives and the moderate McCain against a common foe: The New York Times.
3) Another pro-Obama hit piece that backfired owas political reporter Michael Barbaro's strange June 2012 expose, on the front of the paper's Home section (?) on how Mitt Romney's snobby liberal neighbors didn't want him around.
Barbaro devoted a staggering 1,800-word investigation to the fact that Romney's liberal neighbors in La Jolla, Calif., didn't approve of his presence or his politics: "The Candidate Next Door." The text box: "On a cul-de-sac in La Jolla, residents are not happy about their new neighbor's renovation plans – or his entourage."
A liberal gay couple trying to organize an Obama fundraiser earned not one but two photos: "THE OPPOSITION – Mr. Romney's neighbors, Randy Clark right, and his partner, Tom Maddox, object to the expansion – and to the candidate's stance on same-sex marriage."
The couple got another photo and caption on the jump page with their political opposition to Romney masked as neighborhood concern: "CONCERNED: Randy Clark, right and Tom Maddox are among those who say they want to protect the tight-knit neighborhood." (From Republicans, apparently.)
Somehow Barbaro made his neighbors' liberal intolerance Romney's problem.
But many of the residents of this exclusive tract in La Jolla say they are rankled by what they see from their decks and patios as the Romneys’ blindness to their impact on the neighborhood. And personal politics is fueling their frustration as much as anything else, several days of interviews with about a dozen residents suggest.
It turns out that Mr. Romney -- who has likened President Obama’s policies to socialism, called for cutting back on federal funding to PBS and wants to outlaw same-sex marriage -- has moved into a neighborhood that evokes “Modern Family” far more than “All in the Family.” (There are six gay households within a three-block radius of his house, neighbors said.)
Ken Shepherd at NewsBusters found that even an MSNBC panel of liberal journalists thought the Times has gone too far. Even The Nation contributor literally called bull on the story: "'Can I call bull on this?' Nation magazine contributor Ari Melber asked. 'What they've done here is taken a campaign reporter who covers the campaign with a really thin, silly story, and then put it in the home section.'"
