New York Post Publishes Fake News. Must be a Day Ending in "Y".
“…Brother's heading that way now I guess
He just read something made his face turn blue
Well I got nothing against the press
They wouldn't print it if it wasn't true…” – Joe Jackson – “Sunday Papers”
If you know anything about the New York Post, it probably won’t come as a shock to find out that they recently published an article that wasn’t true. Not only was it not true, but they completely made it up out of whole cloth. A total work of fiction from beginning to end. The poster boy for fake news.
The article in question had to do with their favorite Biden Administration target, Vice President Kamala Harris.
You see, in 2019, Harris published a children’s book called “Superheroes Are Everywhere.” The book, by the way, is currently Number One on Amazon’s “Children’s Superhero Fiction” list.
Anyway, a copy of the book was spotted in one of the migrant children’s centers in California. A local photographer took a photo of it and it ran in the Long Beach newspaper.
So, naturally, The Post gets a hold of the photo and decides it’s the perfect opportunity to poke Vice President Harris in the eye, which it is often wont to do.
Under the headline, “Kamala isn’t at the southern border — but migrant kids are getting Veep’s book,” they concocted the story that the government bought up a ton of the Vice President’s book and were handing them out to migrant children – at taxpayer’s expense.
“Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t been to the border to address a crisis she was tasked to help fix — but a children’s book she wrote was waiting there in a facility for young migrants who are being welcomed into the country,” The Post breathlessly explained.
Of course, none of this was true. This was a single copy of Harris’s book, and it was donated during a book and toy drive for the migrant children.
The Post at first amended the story to acknowledge that there was indeed only one copy of the book at the shelter. They eventually took the story off their web site altogether. But since the Internet is forever, it wasn’t hard to find the original version of the story.
“The book was the centerpiece in a display set up atop a cot meant to show what would be available to the children,” noted the The Mercury News of San Jose, Calif. “The photograph also showed a backpack and a blanket, and, under the cot, two pairs of shoes.”
The city of Long Beach turned its convention center into a shelter capable of housing 1,000 unaccompanied migrant children from the southern border.
“Officials knew that wrangling that many children would be a tall order, so they launched a drive to fill a library with books for the children to read,” noted the The Los Angeles Times. “Someone donated Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2019 children’s book “Superheroes Are Everywhere. That book was laid on a cot last Thursday and a news service photographer, who declined to comment to The Times, took a photo of it.”
Naturally this story exploded in the conservative media and on social media, because journalism is dead and reporters don’t bother to check anything out anymore. They just regurgitate what they see on Twitter.
Now, if this is where the story ended it would be one thing. But stick around, because it gets better.
The New York Post published the story on April 23. On April 27, the reporter who wrote the story, Laura Italiano, came out on Twitter (sigh!) and claimed she was forced to write the story against her will.
She originally objected to being asked to fabricate the bullshit from whole cloth, she said, but did not push back hard enough and wrote it anyway. But, alas, the pressure was too much to take, so she quit. Four days after the story was published.
“The Kamala Harris story -- an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against -- was my breaking point,” Italiano tweeted.
Now, I call bullshit on this whole thing.
You work for the New York Post, I’m sure this is not the first time you were pressured to write something that was untrue in all the years you were there. There were probably lots of times. And it was OK then. But now, this is a bridge too far? If you really objected to writing this story you should have told your editor no and quit on the spot. Not four days after its publication.
You don’t get applause for not doing the right thing but saying that you really didn’t want to do it. You did it. You are not a hero. You’re a coward.
If you really felt so strongly that the story was wrong you would not have written it. But you obviously didn't really feel that strongly that it was wrong. You’re just looking for sympathy now because you find yourself out of a job. And it’s a good thing. Reporters with no backbone who can’t stand up for what they say they think is right don’t deserve to be reporters.
If you objected and refused to write the story would you have been fired? Probably. But that’s the chance you have to take. Is it really worth working for a publication that makes you write lies anyway?
As Keith Olbermann pointed out on Twitter, if Italiano refused to write the story, the paper would have gotten someone else to write it. It would have been published no matter what. And we would probably not know anything about this incident.
Keith thinks we should encourage and reward people who try to push back when they know something is wrong. And he’s correct. But not as it applies to this case.
If Italiano pushed back at all – as the said she did – it was a weak effort. And coming out and saying “Look at me, I did something noble” on Twitter, after the damage has already been done, is meaningless.
Coming out and saying what really happened would go a long way to gendering public sympathy. Explaining what you were asked to do and why you though it was wrong would be a good idea. Explaining why you did it anyway would also help. Illuminating what finally drove you to quit would help rebuild your reputation as a reputable reporter who spent 22 years at The New York Post.
But, please, for God’s sake, don’t do it on Twitter.