New York Times Smears Trump Cabinet Picks

Plus, how the UAE covers a rabbi’s murder by terrorist Jew-haters

The news section of the New York Times published a graphic on Saturday summing up Trump’s cabinet picks. The graphic tells more about the Times’ own biases than it does about the cabinet picks.

For example, the item about Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reports, “During Mr. Zeldin’s tenure in the House of Representatives, he voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times, according to a scorecard from the League of Conservation voters.”

That doesn’t do Zeldin’s environmental record justice. A November 12 Times news article reported, for example:

back on Long Island, environmental advocates gave the congressman relatively high marks on conservation issues that tend to be less partisan, including those affecting the hundreds of miles of coast, estuaries and waterways in his district.

Mr. Zeldin, for example, took a leading role in the effort to save Plum Island in the Long Island Sound from development. Mr. Trump himself once had designs of buying the 843-acre, federally owned island, where hundreds of bird and animal species make their homes, and building a golf course.

Mr. Zeldin was an original co-sponsor of a major bipartisan conservation bill Mr. Trump signed into law. And he fought to give the E.P.A. money that could be used to help restore the Long Island Sound.

Kevin Dowling, who served as Mr. Zeldin’s legislative director for nearly five years, said the congressman also fought Republican efforts to eliminate a federal program that uses revenue from offshore oil and gas leases to purchase land for conservation and public recreation, known as the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Those battles were not well-publicized, he said.

“On that and a lot of random amendments, there was always a huddle of northeastern Republicans who were just more environmentally minded,” Mr. Dowling said.

Most surprisingly to activists, Mr. Zeldin opposed a 2018 plan by Mr. Trump to open nearly all U.S. waters to oil and gas drilling.

That Times article quoted Adrienne Esposito, executive director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment, an environmental group in Farmingdale, N.Y.: “She said she had been skeptical he would come to their side. But activists outlined the economic devastation that a single oil spill could bring to Long Island. Two days later, she said, Mr. Zeldin announced he had introduced legislation that would ban drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.”

The graphic looks like, instead of setting out to write a fair-minded assessment of Trump’s picks, the Times is intentionally trying to make the choices look extreme, ridiculous, and unqualified. There are indeed some bad Trump choices, but by being so unremittingly negative, the Times erodes its own credibility, making readers doubt the newspaper’s accuracy. Why would anyone believe the Times about genuinely terrible Trump nominees when the newspaper seems to be cherrypicking evidence rather than impartially reporting the news?

The reporters and editors who produced the first Times article about Zeldin— Nicholas Fandos and Lisa Friedman—should be annoyed at the reporters and editors who produced the graphic. Fandos and Friedman hustled to give a fuller, nuanced account, and the graphics team—June Kim, Karen Yourish, and Jasmine C. Lee—reduced it to a caricature, ammunition for Trump-haters rather than information for curious open-minded readers.

That impression is reinforced by the same graphic’s treatment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to be secretary of health and human services. Kennedy, the Times whines, “has no medical or public health degree.” The current secretary of health and human services, Xavier Becerra, also has no medical or public health degree. The previous secretary, Alex Azar, also has no medical or public health degree. The HHS secretary in the Obama administration, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, also has no medical or public health degree. Burwell’s predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius, also has no medical or public health degree. The most famous secretary of health education and welfare, Joseph Califano Jr., also had no medical or public health degree but, like Kennedy, was trained as a lawyer. Bill Clinton’s secretary of HHS, Donna Shalala, also had no medical or public health degree. Neither did Tommy Thompson or Mike Leavitt, who had the job under George W. Bush.

Anyway, the job isn’t White House physician or surgeon general or even FDA or CDC director. I am not a big RFK Jr. fan, but for the Times to sum him up by focusing on his lack of an M.D. or M.P.H. is just a cheap shot. It makes it look like the paper is holding Trump nominees to standards it doesn’t impose on cabinet choices by other presidential administrations. 

“Moldovan man”: This morning brought the terrible news that a Chabad emissary in the United Arab Emirates, Rabbi Zvi Kogan, has been murdered by terrorists. As of this morning, rather than reporting the deadly terrorist attack on a rabbi who held Israeli and Moldovan citizenship, UAE news websites were out of date and downplaying the Israeli or Jewish angle. “UAE’s Foreign Ministry monitoring case of missing Moldovan man,” was the headline in the National. “UAE: Search ongoing for Moldovan citizen missing since Thursday,” said the Khaleej Times.

The Abraham Accords were a great accomplishment, and the UAE is better on these issues than lots of other places in the Arab and Muslim world, but we’ll know that people-to-people peace is really there when the press in countries such as the UAE is able to describe a terrorism victim as a rabbi, an Israeli, or a Jew, rather than euphemizing the situation as a “Moldovan man.”