A former New York Times reporter says the liberal newspaper waited until after the presidential election to publish her exposé debunking t...
A former New York Times reporter says the liberal newspaper waited until after the presidential election to publish her exposé debunking the narrative that the August 2020 Black Lives Matter riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, did not harm the local community.
The three-day riots erupted in August 2020 after Kenosha police officers shot Jacob Blake, an armed black man who was resisting arrest following a domestic disturbance call made by his girlfriend.
Independent journalist Nellie Bowles said in a Thursday post on Bari Weiss’ Substack channel, Common Sense, that the Times held her story until after the election.
The move is yet another sign that despite their pretense to journalistic objectivity, the establishment media — especially The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and MSNBC — are merely purveyors of left-wing propaganda.
Bowles said she was sent to Kenosha last summer to report on the “mainstream liberal argument” that allowing BLM to destroy small businesses was an appropriate way to promote “racial justice” because the businesses could recoup the costs through insurance. She learned that this was false.
“Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild,” she wrote.
“When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots.”
While the corporate media dismissed the vandalism and arson as inconsequential property damage, Bowles was horrified to discover the ravaging impact the BLM riots had on the local community.
“It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered,” she wrote. “Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.”
After filing her piece, Bowles was stunned that the Times delayed publishing her exposé for more than two months.
“Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat,” she wrote.
“A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.”
Her article spotlighting the devastation of the riots eventually ran — six days after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election.
“Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran,” Bowles wrote. “Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority.
“The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore.”
She continued: “If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.”
Bowles’ chilling revelations offer further evidence that the establishment media are little more than leftist political operatives masquerading as “journalists.”
Essentially, the Times buried this story to promote then-candidate Biden. In so doing, it paved the way for the mass media defamation of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who has been relentlessly smeared as a “white supremacist vigilante” simply for defending himself during the Kenosha riots.
The Times’ action helped establish the left-wing narrative that Rittenhouse had “no reason” to be there because the riots weren’t as bad and violent as he claimed.
This is not the first time the newspaper has come under fire for political bias.
In 2019, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the Times, said the outlet became “unmistakably anti-Trump” in a bid to bolster profits.
Abramson made the observations in her book, “Merchants of Truth,” where she said the Times trashed then-President Donald Trump nonstop because he was a cash cow.
“Though [executive editor Dean] Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson wrote in her book, as excerpted by Fox News. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
Abramson — who was the paper’s executive editor from 2011 to 2014 — said the Times had a financial interest in constantly running negative Trump stories because they made money.
She pointed out that the Times enjoyed a massive “Trump bump” during his first six months in office, when its digital subscriptions surged to more than 2 million — an increase of 600,000 subscribers.
“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated,” she wrote.
Abramson’s comments mirror the observations of legendary journalist Ted Koppel — a liberal who blasted CNN and MSNBC for their nonstop negative coverage of Trump, saying their ratings would tank without Trump.
Koppel — a former ABC News anchor and winner of 25 Emmy Awards — said liberal outlets needed Trump because he was their holy grail for monster ratings.
“You can’t do without Donald Trump,” Koppel told CNN host Brian Stelter in 2018. “You would be lost without Donald Trump! CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump.”
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