The New York Times was so triggered by former President Donald Trump’s recent trolling of Vice President Kamala Harris’ employment record that it committed a major logical fallacy when attempting to fact-check him.
Trump made a high-profile appearance at a McDonald’s in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania to work the fryers, on Oct. 20 and The Times couldn’t handle it. The newspaper fired off a bevy of whiny news items complaining about Trump casting doubt on Harris’ claim that she formerly worked for fast-food giant. “Kamala Harris and McDonald’s: A College Job, and a Trump Attack” and “Trump, Slinging Fries and Smearing Harris, Takes Turn Behind a McDonald’s Counter,” were just two of the headlines that led the propaganda-laced stories. Both stories tried to idiotically put the burden of proof on Trump, suggesting he must prove that Harris never worked at McDonald’s instead of expecting Harris to prove her own claims that she did.
The Times apparently suffered from an extreme lack of self-awareness when drafting their stories. The authors railed against Trump’s alleged “pattern of accusing Vice President Kamala Harris without evidence of lying about a summer job working at McDonald’s.”
But what evidence did The Times utilize to retort Trump? None.
The Times’ supposed fact-checks boiled down to this: The Harris campaign and a friend of hers says she did work at Mcdonald's, so Trump is wrong. This is what is called a “Burden of Proof Fallacy” and as LogicalFallacies.org notes, such a nutty line of argument is typically used “in an attempt to avoid having to provide evidence for their own position.”
The Times’s antics are even more humorous in light of the authors involved: Times San Francisco Bureau Chief Heather Knight and Times political correspondents Nicholas Nehamas and Michael Gold.
Knight, who co-authored one of the anti-Trump stories with Nehamas, pontificates in her bio that she believes “strongly in the old journalism adage of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” In this case Harris would appear to be the “afflicted” she’s determined to comfort.
Nehamas touts his record as an “investigative reporter” in his bio, but apparently couldn’t be bothered to investigate and provide any evidence of whether Harris actually worked at McDonald’s before claiming Trump’s skepticism was false.
Gold also engages in self-aggrandizement by boasting how he works to “fairly and accurately represent the issues and people I cover,” which is undercut by the clear fallacy he was willing to commit just to get a dig in at Trump.
Even leftist outlets like Snopes asserted that Harris’ claim of working at the fast food giant was “unproven,” and Newsweek admitted that the “Harris camp has not provided any evidence that the ice president did in fact work at the Golden Arches.” But somehow, in Knight and Nehamas’s view, it is Trump’s responsibility to prove a negative for Harris’s own unproven claim. “Mr. Trump’s latest allegation also appears to be false,” cried the authors.
Knight and Nehamas even went so far as to editorialize about Trump’s skepticism, calling it “insidious.” which takes the article far outside news territory and straight into op-ed-style bellyaching:
Whether a presidential candidate actually flipped burgers as a college student is a far less serious allegation, of course. But Mr. Trump’s seeding of doubts about Ms. Harris’s story, while insidious and outside the lines of traditional fair play in politics, advances his goal of portraying Ms. Harris as a fraud.
In the other story, Gold sang a similar, sour-noted tune: “Mr. Trump, known for wildly speculating about the backgrounds of his political opponents without proof, repeated the claim as he addressed reporters from a drive-through window in Feasterville-Trevose, Pa.” Riddle me this: How can Trump be blamed for speculating about a claim the Harris campaign has provided no evidence to date to corroborate?
But when viewed in light of The Times’s recent, objectivity-wrecking endorsement of Harris as “the only patriotic choice for president,” it makes sense why it would do everything in its power to not properly investigate her and shield her from having to actually defend her record.
“All the news that’s fit to print?” Don’t make us laugh.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 1 (800) 698-4637 and hold it accountable for acting as a mouthpiece for the Harris campaign.
