This is wonderful in so, so many ways

The headline went up on the Times website around 3:30 pm yesterday as a follow-up to this story, and, if I had seen it, be assured that I would have posted on it then. I would have seen it too, if I hung out on Twitter/”X” all day, which is apparently what amazing numbers of supposedly busy people do.

For the social media mobs were all over the Times for the headline. On “X,” the editor of the satirical Babylon Bee, Kyle Mann, wrote, “I’d like to offer whoever wrote this headline at the New York Times a job at @TheBabylonBee.” Mollie Hemingway, the editor of The Federalist, wrote, “A beyond parody headline from propaganda outlet New York Times.” “Fact-checkers fact-check claim that fact-checkers are the problem. Real headline from the NY Times,” civil liberties attorney Laura Powell noted. “How can anyone produce satire when the legacy media has become so ridiculous?”

To be fair, the headline might have been intentionally ironic and thus surprisingly clever for the paper, but if that was the idea, the Times didn’t have the integrity or courage to stick with it. The headline as constructed above was not in evidence in today’s print edition, and had been changed on the Times website without comment—“stealth edited,” in other words. The internet, however, is forever.

Ethics Observations:

1. As the NYT apparently didn’t compose the headline to call attention to the absurdity of the story, then this is more evidence that bias makes Times editors stupid. So locked-in to loyalty to the Axis are they that that the editors didn’t realize their effort to defend the censorious and progressive social justice warrior hacks at Snopes and PolitiFact would make the paper look like the “advocacy journalism” propaganda rag that it has become.

How blind would an editor, or anyone at the Times, have to be not to immediately react, “Oh come on! We can’t print that!” after taking one look at the headline? Very blind. This is incompetence, straight up.

2. What the headline states isn’t news. “Fired Employees Think Their Firing Was Unfair And That They Weren’t At Fault”? That’s a “dog bites man” story if I ever saw one. The original headline reveals what the motive behind the story really is: an Axis mainstay defending a valuable tool of its partisan warfare against conservatives and Republicans, the slanted factchecks.

3. The argument in the article was stated up-front in the original version of the story:

That’s like a lawyer saying that it’s not her fault that her clients followed her bad advice!  Ethics foul: avoiding responsibility and accountability for a job done badly, aka “passing the buck.”  Yes, we know: the factcheckers weren’t actually running Facebook, Instagram and Threads, but the people who were running it relied on their “expert” and partisan advice. Their advice was biased, not objective, and not really factchecking much of the time, but partisan advocacy as well as an attempt to discredit those they disagreed with. Their double standards were palpable.

4. That the New York Times would let a headline like that see the light of day reinforces a conclusion I reached about professional journalists long ago. They simply are not as smart as they think they are, with occasional exceptions. This means, in turn, that they are not sufficiently intelligent or wise to engage in the mission they think journalists should embrace: deciding what the public should think and manipulating the flow of information so they do.