The New York Times lies (again)

In a story appearing in the Thursday 28 April 2016 edition headlined "Victor in Mayoral Primary Is Ready to 'Get Baltimore Working',” reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes that the apparent winner in the hotly contested Democratic primary for mayor, State Senate Majority Leader Catherine E. Pugh, “stared down Geraldo Rivera, the Fox News anchor, and berated him on national television for ‘inciting people’,” during the devastating 2015 Baltimore riots. Ms. Stolberg concludes that it was the defining moment for Senator Pugh’s successful primary campaign.

It is a total fiction.

As the videotape Fox News has provided the New York Times makes clear, Senator Pugh and I were united in trying to report honestly and professionally about the chaos in West Baltimore a year ago following the tragic death in police custody of Freddy Gray. We spent hours together during the urban turmoil and violence, the senator making several appearances on camera.

As the tape shows, Senator Pugh’s disquiet was directed at the trouble-makers who were contributing to the mayhem, not at this reporter. Indeed it was my interview with Senator Pugh that the demonstrators, the most vocal of whom was later arrested, were attempting to disrupt.

In 2005 another Times reporter wrote a similarly fictional account of my coverage of Hurricane Katrina. That discredited story alleged that I pushed rescue workers out of the way so that I would be seen on camera rescuing elderly victims of the storm.

There is a pattern. New Orleans was a fabrication the newspaper was forced to correct. So is Baltimore.

Because the NYT wants it to be true doesn’t make it true. Your hatred of Fox News and me clouds your judgment and distorts your reporting.