New York Times Misleads Kids About Trump and Guns

Plus, The Editors Rule of Byline Inflation

One of the services we provide here at The Editors is editing the newspapers after they are published. Today we offer four examples of suboptimal pre-publication editing, two from the New York Times and two from the Wall Street Journal.

Sunday’s print New York Times included a kids section. The Times doesn’t publish it online as part of its website. It’s bad enough when the Times misleads grownups about the news. It’s particularly pernicious, though, when the Times misleads children, because youngsters may lack the independent thinking and research skills to prevent themselves from being duped.

The Times kids section yesterday provided side-by-side summaries of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The Trump part says, “He doesn’t want to put limits on who can buy guns or what kind of guns they can buy.”

That’s inaccurate. First off, unless the Times reporter is a mind-reader, she has no way to know for sure what Trump wants. One can surmise with some confidence that Trump wants to get re-elected. The alternative appears to be either winding up in prison or hoping that Biden or Harris will graciously provide clemency on the federal charges and somehow convince Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis to drop the state and local charges. Beyond that, it seems safer to stick to what Trump says and what he has done. 

NPR, not exactly a pro-Trump source, reports that in 2017 President Trump ordered a gun restriction that the Supreme Court later ruled exceeded his authority. Here is the NPR report:

The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the Trump-era federal ban on bump stocks, declaring that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority when it banned the devices. The vote was 6-3, with the court’s three liberals in angry dissent.

President Trump ordered the ban in 2017 after a single gunman at a Las Vegas concert used multiple guns modified by bump stock devices to kill 60 people and injure 400—all in the space of 11 minutes. The subsequent ATF regulation banned bump stocks on grounds that they transform legal semi-automatic weapons into illegal machine guns. But on Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down the law.

It’s misleading for the Times to tell kids that Trump “doesn’t want to put limits on who can buy guns or what kind of guns they can buy,” without including the context that, last time he was president, Trump reacted to a mass shooting by going so far in limiting guns that the Supreme Court said he had overstepped.

The section on Harris and guns isn’t great either. When the issue has come up during the campaign, Harris typically tends to mention that she is a gun owner. The Times kids section leaves that fact out, too.

The kids section is a product of the Times Magazine, which also produced, for Sunday’s paper, an article headlined in print “The MAGA Moguls,” about Trump and Vance’s backing from technology entrepreneurs and investors. That piece carries three bylines (including that of Jonathan Mahler, who’s a former colleague of mine and and a straight shooter) and is an example of The Editors Rule of Byline Inflation, which is that the reliability of any news article is inversely proportional to the number of reporters who have a byline on it. The article includes this paragraph:

The new donor class had made their bet, though in the end it was a pretty modest one, given their collective wealth. As of the end of September, Sacks and his wife had given a total of $550,000 to Trump’s election effort, less than the price of a couple of tickets to Sacks’s own fund-raiser back in June. Musk had given $75 million to America PAC, a huge sum for anyone else, but not so much for a man now worth roughly $250 billion. “The hilarious aspect is that they are feeding Trump crumbs,” says Michael Moritz, a veteran Silicon Valley V.C. and one of the earliest investors in the company that would become PayPal. “It’s a fantastic return on investment.” 

It’s misleading for the Times to describe Moritz merely as “veteran Silicon Valley V.C. and one of the earliest investors in the company that would become PayPal.” Federal Election records show Moritz has given $7.8 million this cycle to anti-Trump groups such as the AB Pac and the Lincoln Project. The guy the Times is quoting disparaging Trump’s tech donors is a big anti-Trump donor, yet the Times doesn’t tell readers that. And the federally disclosed figures may not account for the full sums deployed; donors such as Bill Gates are channeling $50-million-sized sums to support Harris without any required public disclosure.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has been magnificent in support of Israel in the war, has two suboptimal news headlines.

“Israeli Accusation Imperils Beirut Hospital” is the headline over one article. The Journal might consider publishing a correction: what’s really imperiling the hospital is not the Israeli accusation but the Iran-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah’s decision to burrow under the hospital with a bunker used for command and control and as a vault to store cash. The other headline reads, “Israel Steps Up Fight in Gaza’s North, Where War Began.” Huh, I thought the “war began” in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in places such as Nir Oz, Kfar Aza, Be’eri, and Re’im, when Hamas invaded and attacked sites such as the Nova music festival. The Journal article, which carries three bylines, describes it as “the war in Gaza,” overlooking that the war has also taken place in Israel, with Hamas and its allies not only invading Israel but also shooting missiles at Israeli targets. 

Democracy-promotion forum: Here’s the set of ten essays responding to the prompt beginning: “What are the most promising, concrete, specific steps America can take over the next few years to promote freedom, democracy, and rule of law in other countries?” I am hoping to sum up and offer some concluding thoughts soon, and also to soon make them easily available on a single page, but in the meantime, in case you missed them or are interested in reading them all at once:

“Don’t Lose Any Countries” Is Elliott Abrams’s Advice, by Elliott Abrams

Counter Communist China in the U.S. and at the U.N., Ellen Bork Recommends, by Ellen Bork

Help Ukraine and Israel Prevail, Says Carl Gershman, by Carl Gershman

Resist Redefining “Democracy” as Elite Preferences, Kontorovich Says, by Eugene Kontorovich

Spend More on Defense and Less on Everything Else, Mandelbaum Warns, by Michael Mandelbaum

More Building, Less Lecturing, Mansour Recommends, by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Tell the World the Truth About Iran, Says Richard Perle, by Richard Perle

Let Argentina, Israel, Italy, Taiwan and Others Lead, Daniel Pipes Says, by Daniel Pipes

Free Trade for Free Nations, Scheinmann Suggests, by Gabriel Scheinmann

Encourage the Iranians to Liberate Themselves, Wurmser Says, by David Wurmser

Thank you: Unlike the Harris presidential campaign we are not backed with $50 million from Bill Gates. We are a reader-supported publication that doesn’t yet have the resources to suffer from The Editors Rule of Byline Inflation. If you can afford the $8 a month or $80 a year, please sign up today as a paying reader.