On 9/11 Anniversary, The NYT Botched the Number of Victims Not Once But Twice
The New York Times is supposedly “the paper of record.” The paper of record. The paper everyone’s supposed to reference when looking back to see how news was covered on any given date.
The Gray Lady truly did manage to capture how news is reported in this day and age when, on Wednesday, the 18th anniversary of 9/11, the paper managed to botch a reference to the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks, not being technically untruthful but seeming to literally minimize the death toll.
And The Times did that not once but twice, on two different mediums.
Early Wednesday morning, Times writer James Barron opened his piece remembering those killed on 9/11 with the following line: “Once more, families will gather at ground zero, where more than two thousand people died on that bright September morning.”
Barron wasn’t factually incorrect. The number killed is indeed more than 2,000. It’s 2,753 in New York and 2,977 overall, not counting the hijackers — usually rounded up to 3,000.
The language used certainly seems intended to diminish the loss of life on that horrible day. (The article has been updated to say “nearly 3,000” were killed.)
That article wasn’t the only place The Times used the “more than 2,000” phrasing, either.
A tweet Wednesday morning included the line, “Today, families will once again gather and grieve at the site where more than 2000 people died.” (The tweet has since been deleted.)
https://twitter.com/AmandaPresto/status/1171795557150576641
Ignoring the fact that those people didn’t just die — they were murdered — we see again the same blase, careless, almost cold rhetoric that minimizes the bloodshed, effectively leaving out more than 750 victims of Islamism.
Elsewhere, The Western Journal has already noted the ham-handedness of The Times’ claim in the same tweet that “airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center.”
The point here isn’t that The New York Times is careless or that it’s tone-deaf.
The point is that The New York Times is doing exactly what many conservatives predicted so long ago.
The liberal paper has tried to shift the narrative from 9/11 being a brutal, jihadist attack to it being a function of mis-aimed airplanes and a certain number (who really cares exactly what it is, they might ask themselves) of people happening to die. Or in the words of Rep. Ilhan Omar, “Some people did something.”
The American left has never had the stomach to full-throatedly condemn the problems with radical Islam, nor has it ever had the inclination to sympathize with hurting Americans.
On some level, many leftists certainly believe America had 9/11 coming.
Leftists don’t understand what happened that day, and without understanding, they are completely incapable of coherently responding to the threat of Islamism, as we saw with then-President Barack Obama’s disastrous troop drawdowns that gave rise to the Islamic State group.
The New York Times’ shoddy treatment of 9/11 victims doesn’t indicate some new, novel thinking on the part of the left. It indicates very common leftist thinking that is very dangerous to our country because it minimizes and misunderstands 9/11.
Sadly, no one should be surprised.
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