In a Friday story about former CNN and NBC journalist Campbell Brown, who is now Facebook's "head of new partnerships," New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles claimed that one of the social-media giant's premium services has "been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming."
The "conspiracy" example Bowles cited: "Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families." That claim is widely known to be true. The Times issued a grudging and incomplete correction.
On March 6, The Jerusalem Post reported that the Palestinian Authority's 2018 budget raised the amount paid "to terrorists and their families" to just above $400 million, a 16 percent increase over the previous year. The PA has also hard-wired a requirement to make these payments into law:
PALESTINIANS INCREASE PAYMENTS TO TERRORISTS TO $403 MILLION
The Palestinian Authority paid terrorists and their families over $347 million in 2017.The Palestinian Authority increased its payments to terrorists and their families by nearly $56 million, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi Dichter (Likud) said overnight Monday, when a bill to discourage the practice passed a first reading.
Dichter pointed out that PA President Mahmoud Abbas authorized the 2018 PA budget on Sunday, and that there is a PA law that says 7% of each budget must go to paying terrorists, or to their families, if they’re killed in the act.
... Terrorists who have been sentenced to three to five years in Israeli prisons receive the average income of a Palestinian, about $580 per month. The families of those who committed more severe crimes and were involved in killing Israelis receive five times that each month for the rest of their lives.
Terrorists receive more from the PA if they are married, for each child they have, if they live in Jerusalem or if they’re an Israeli citizen.
Here's the correction the Times, appended to Bowles's 2,500-word online story on Monday (with no other indication that a correction had been made) and published in its April 24 print edition (h/t Powerline):
"That is not a conspiracy theory" is weaselly Times-speak for "It's true, but we won't directly admit it."
The correction also erased any mention of the outrageous amounts the Palestinian Authority has paid terrorists and their families.
As seen in the following comparison, the revised Times report incorporating its correction has not made it to CNBC, which still had the original version as of 6:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday:
Bowles's Times bio says that: "She has written for California Sunday, Recode, The Guardian, and the San Francisco Chronicle."
Bowles's LinkedIn profile indicates she graduated from Columbia University and was a Fulbright scholar.
All of this leads one to wonder how Bowles and her Times editors could possibly have considered PA payments to terrorists a "right-wing conspiracy" myth. There really must be a coastal elite bubble which certain truths cannot be allowed to penetrate.
Finally, one shouldn't ignore the Brown-Facebook story's ironic online headline:
Is Facebook’s Campbell Brown a Force to Be Reckoned With? Or Is She Fake News?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
