The national editor of The New York Times had defended the paper’s coverage, which included immediate finger-pointing to conservatives, Sarah Palin, Tea Partiers, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. As we know now, all of those accusations were without foundation. Here’s what NYT National Editor Rick Berke had to say about it:
“Our coverage early on was broad and touched everything from the possible shooter to the victims to the reaction to, yes, the political climate in Arizona. By our count, there were 49 stories in the paper the first six days after the tragedy, of which only 14 were political in nature. But it would be ridiculous for us to neglect that. After all, a politician was shot in the head while meeting with constituents. That same lawmaker had her office vandalized during an especially rancorous campaign. And after the shooting the sheriff called his state the capital of hatred and bigotry.”
But, as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey points out:
The failure of the Times on this story had nothing to do with self-publishing a factual error that they quickly corrected, but an editorial decision to focus on a meme that was known to be false long before the editors themselves hit the publish button.
And who is this Rick Berke? He’s the reporter, then known as Richard Berke, who fantasized in 2000 about the George W. Bush campaign using subliminal ads to accuse Democrats of being RATS. Here’s his crack reporting at the time:
Then, if the viewer watches very closely, something else happens. The word ”rats,” a fragment of the word ”bureaucrats,” pops up in one frame. And though the image lasts only one-thirtieth of a second, it is in huge white capital letters, larger than any other word on the commercial.
The advertisement then declares, ”The Gore prescription plan: bureaucrats decide.”
