The New York Times was pressured this week into updating its 10-year retrospective on the Tea Party to include an aside about the grassroots political movement’s allegedly racist roots. This marks the second time this month that the newspaper has, under outside pressure, amended the content of its news coverage to appease an online rage-mob.

On Aug. 28, the Times published a report by national politics reporter Jeremy W. Peters titled, “The Tea Party Didn’t Get What It Wanted, but It Did Unleash the Politics of Anger.”

The subhead read, “Ten years after a summer of rage over spending, trillion-dollar deficits are back.”

It is true. One of the declared motives of the defunct Tea Party movement that was to reduce government spending, now seems as though it is a hazy, half-remembered memory for the Republicans and conservatives who control the White House and the Senate. This political about-face is certainly worthy of investigation. In fact, the Right’s seeming abandonment of this once-paramount issue was the chief focus of Peters’ article, as it appeared originally on the Times’ website. His report was not a defense of the Tea Party. It was not an attack on the Tea Party. The story reported merely that Republicans were swept into power in 2010 and 2014 with promises to reduce spending, and now they barely even talk about it anymore. There were no asides in Peters' report about racism, hate speech, xenophobia or the like.

But his disciplined focus did not sit well with many politicos, journalists, and media pundits, who apparently feed on seeing right-wing activists and conservatives accused daily of racism and bigotry.

“How do you write a 10 years later piece on the Tea Party and not mention — not once, not even in passing — the fact that it was essentially a hysterical grassroots tantrum about the fact that a black guy was president?” asked the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery, claiming the story amounted to journalistic “malpractice.”

Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith complained elsewhere that the retrospective makes “not a single, solitary reference to race or racism” nor the supposed fact that “a good deal of it involved opposing President Obama because he was black.”

“A fundamental flaw in this analysis is there is no mention of race and how much racism drove the Tea Party movement,” said ABC News’ Matthew Dowd. “You can’t talk about the rage politics and leave out race.”

Even the Times’ own Paul Krugman got in on the game, implicitly accusing Peters of being bad at his job while claiming also that the newspaper failed in its mission to accuse the Tea Party of racism.

“Are we still pretending that the Tea Party was about small government and concern about budget deficits?” he asked on social media. “It was always, from the beginning, about racial anger; opposition to big government only to the extent that it helps Those People.”

A brief reminder: Krugman is the same individual who slandered former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in 2011 by accusing her of inspiring the Tucson, Ariz., mass shooting. This erroneous claim, which is backed by nothing, was repeated later in 2017 by the Times editorial board, for which Palin is now suing the newspaper. You will excuse me if I go on ignoring Krugman’s “analyses” of that which inspires anything, let alone entire political movements.

Unfortunately, the Times’ editors did not similarly write off the criticisms aimed at Peters’ report. The paper has since amended his article so that it now includes accusations of racism and xenophobia.

We have updated this story assessing the policy failures of the Tea Party movement 10 years after its rise to include context about attacks on President Barack Obama and racist displays at some Tea Party rallies. https://t.co/r4k0qZCQlH — NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) August 28, 2019

The updated article now contains the following edits [emphasis added]:

One significant limitation to the Tea Party is the contradiction in its DNA: It was a mass uprising based on notions of small-government libertarianism that are popular with think tanks but not so popular with most Americans. And as Mr. Obama’s allies saw the movement, its outrage over the debt and deficit had another purpose: giving cover and a voice to those who wanted to attack the first black president — people who in some cases showed up at rallies waving signs with racist caricatures and references.

Needless to say, at the time, Tea Partiers and a lot of other people, as the election results suggest, saw this as a disingenuous and partisan attempt to deflect criticism of a presidency which, regardless of color, was not living up to the expectations of all those 2008 Obama voters.

This is the second time this month that the Times has caved to a mob.

Earlier, after President Trump addressed two separate mass shootings events that took place over the same weekend, the Times ran a headline for its print edition that read: "TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM." Democrats and their allies in the press screamed at the newspaper until it agreed to change the headline to: “ASSAILING HATE BUT NOT GUNS."

Surely I am not the only one who sees a problem with the most prestigious and powerful newspaper in the United States allowing itself to be coerced twice over the course of three weeks into amending its coverage to appease the screaming left-wing masses.

The Times is not so brave as its publisher would have you to believe.