“In just six days,” according to a study published in the Columbia Journalism Review, “the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”

Two years after the Times helped place Donald Trump in the White House by presenting the 2016 election as a referendum on Secretary’s Clinton’s IT practices, they’ve learned absolutely nothing.

That’s how the Times chose to cover the victims of a terrorist attack. On Friday, law enforcement arrested Cesar Sayoc, an outspoken Trump supporter who allegedly mailed pipe bombs to several prominent Democrats and other critics of the man in the White House. The conceit of the Times’ piece — which we intentionally are not linking to because the Times should not be rewarded with more pageviews — is that it lays out several quotes by Sayoc’s victims where they criticized Trump, as well as statements from Trump criticizing those victims.


The piece, by Times reporter Liz Robbins, begins with a victim-blaming paragraph which suggests that these victims are somehow responsible for the fact that Sayoc attempted to kill or injure them.

One called him a danger to the world. Another said he was drunk on power. A third even refuses to call him the president. This week, packages containing crude pipe bombs were sent to these critics of President Trump and several others.

The Times has since edited its headline slightly to read “They Were Sent Pipe Bombs. Here’s What Trump Said About Them — and What They Said About Trump.”

For the record, criticizing a head of state is an entirely normal activity in a democracy — there’s even a constitutional amendment which protects the right to do so in the United States! The use of violence to intimidate or coerce a political adversary, by contrast, is literally the definition of terrorism.