The NY Times and the Guy Hunting the GOP: Latest in a Long History of Fake News

June 15th, 2017 12:57 PM

The New York Times is simply a ridiculous publication.  And has been for decades.  It is hopelessly, blindly, willfully Leftist.  And has been for decades.  And to advance their Leftism, they have lied and lied again and again.  For decades.

Just yesterday, their Editors in toto wrote about the Bernie Sanders supporter who went Republican hunting in Alexandria, Virginia - firing more than fifty rifle shots at GOP Congressmen and staffers on a baseball diamond.  Included in that piece was the following:

“In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”

This is a lie.  A lie that was thoroughly disproven...in 2011. Loughner was not only insane - to the degree that he was at all political, he was a Leftist.  And the odds that this insane, apolitical idiot had actually seen Palin's website - were, conservatively, a trillion-to-one.

Nevertheless, here’s The Times SIX YEARS LATER - still telling the same lie.

Lying is a rich Times tradition.  And has won them a slew of awards.

In the 1930s, The Times’ Walter Duranty covered uber-murderous Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.  And by covered - we mean covered-up.  And won a 1932 Pulitzer Prize for it:

“From 1932 to 1933, a famine, known as Holodomor, killed as many as 10 million people in the former Soviet Union. The majority of those deaths were in Ukraine….During the Holodomor, Walter Duranty, then the New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief, wrote, ‘Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.’

“In December of 1933, Stalin praised this so-called journalist: ‘You have done a good job in your reporting the U.S.S.R., though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country.… I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.’”

Bizarrely, with this obnoxious history as a backdrop, The Times in February published a piece comparing President Donald Trump to…Stalin. 

One: No - just no.  This is simply stupid - and may incite things like…people hunting Republicans on baseball diamonds.  Certainly it is more inspiring of violence than a Palin website which almost no one on the planet had seen.  (Unless The Times’ readership is dramatically lower than I think it is.)

Two: How would The Times know what Stalin did?  Unless they relied on more than just their own reporting. 

Because The Times lies about the biggest of things - you know they lie about everything.  To wit:

Outcry Over EpiPen Prices Hasn’t Made Them Lower: “You might recall EpiPen as last year’s poster child for out-of-control drug prices….So I was surprised when my pharmacist informed me, months after those floggings and apologies had faded from the headlines, that I would still need to pay $609 for a box of two EpiPens.”

Before we delve deeply into EpiPen prices, let us analyze The Times’ surface inanity. 

People nigh always complain about the prices - of everything.  We always want more for less - because…human nature.  And we nigh always do said complaining - totally ignorant of the nine million market forces that collide to set these prices where they are. 

So it is not at all shocking to almost anyone (outside of The Times’ newsroom) that people complaining about prices - nigh never lowers prices.  Because complaints do not alter at all the nine million market forces colliding. 

This Times’ assault on the EpiPen was published under their “Adventures in Capitalism” header - a section they have dutifully dedicated to attacking capitalism. 

But as Reason Magazine points out - The Times’ ends up begrudgingly admitting that capitalism works.  And that their headline and opening paragraphs - are a lie:

“Twenty-six paragraphs later, way down toward the very end of the article, Duhigg discloses, ‘In fact, the company says that since it came under attack in August, nearly 90 percent of EpiPen buyers have paid less than $100 per box because of insurance, discounts or coupons.’  So it sure looks as if, contrary to the headline, the outcry over EpiPen prices has made them lower.”

Reason raises another very reasonable point:

“An interesting question that the Times totally avoids is why Duhigg's health insurance is such that he has to pay $609 instead of the less than $100 that I paid (out of pocket)…Duhigg’s column is 2,000 words long, but it somehow manages to avoid all of those questions.”

Reason here highlights the anti-human-nature third-party-payer health care system our government has warped into existence.  When we pay out-of-pocket - we care a great deal about the price.  When we only pay a $50 (or less) co-pay and insurance pays the rest - we do not.  (And we then complain about the high out-of-pocket price of insurance.)

Reason also places the price of the EpiPen - in very reasoned, reasonable perspective:

“(C)onsider that for $609, or, for about 90% of people, less than $100 out of pocket, the company is offering a year's worth of access to potentially life-saving medicine, in a reliable delivery system. Compare that to the pricing of The New York Times: $1,014 for a yearlong seven-day-a-week home delivery subscription to a newspaper that, rather than saving your life, might inflict life-shortening stress.”

Get that?  It costs less for a year’s worth of EpiPen - that saves your life -- than it costs for a year’s worth of The Times - that lies to you.

So despite Grey Lady headlines to the contrary, the EpiPen - is a titanic bargain. 

The ever-lying New York Times?  Not so much.