“Former President Donald J Trump said late Friday that he agreed to debate Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept 4 in an event moderated by Fox News. If it happens, that would be the second presidential debate this election cycle and the first between Mr Trump and the new Democratic candidate,” the New York Times reported Saturday in the lede of an archived version of a story last updated at 2:09 AM EDT, headlined “Trump Agrees to a Fox News Debate With Harris on Sept 4.”
Then in the current version that says it was updated at 8:48 AM EDT on Saturday, the headline now says “Trump Proposes a Fox News Debate With Harris on Sept 4,” emphasis ours. There were no changes made to the lede, which still makes it sound like Harris and Fox News also agreed.
On one hand, the reporter, Simon Levien, must’ve been bleary-eyed and exhausted when he filed at freaking 2:09 in the morning on a Saturday (another page says it was first up at 12:57 AM). His LinkedIn says he’s based in the New York City area and is a “Politics Fellow” who started at the Times June after graduating from Harvard in 2022. Meaning he’s technically not even a “reporter” yet and we get why he would be stuck with a shit assignment like this one at an ungodly hour.
On the other hand, what the actual fuck? We’re not going to pretend to know what editorial decisions went into what’s still a complete piece of shit story and we’ll give the kid the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t the one making the worst calls here. Nor do we want to sink deeper into making the manifold failures of the mainstream media a staple of our “coverage.” It’s so trendy right now for left-leaning partisan sites like ours after the better part of a decade of constant shrieking from the MAGA media about the MSM’s “bias.” Now who the hell knows if this is an overcorrection in response to that (and what ever they do is never going to be enough) and/or a conscious effort to hedge their bets by avoiding antagonizing a potential second Trump autocracy or both.
It doesn’t actually matter what it is when the Times does not lead with Trump bitching out of the debate he had agreed to against Joe Biden, doesn’t anywhere mention that he falsely conjured up a “conflict of interest” with ABC News and George Stephanopoulos because he sued them for defamation a month before agreeing to the September 10th face-off with Biden, nor that he called Harris replacing Biden unconstitutional. They’re still mostly just treating him like a well-adjusted, regular politician and not a fucking coward with no business being in public life.
Zero credit to the Times for making it sound like Trump unilaterally gets to “agree” to terms he set without input from Harris or even Fox News and then changing it to say he “proposes” the terms.