Patrick LaForge, an editor with the New York Times New York Times editor, deleted a tweet on Thursday where he told The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway to “go watch Fox” after Hemingway and fellow Federalist editor Mary Katharine Ham criticized the Times’ hit-piece on Gov. Rick Perry, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Energy:
https://twitter.com/Heminator/status/822120943162101760
It looks like LaForge deleted the snarky response after Hemingway called the tweet “one of the worst comebacks I’ve ever read”:
This may be one of the worst comebacks I've ever read. Particularly coming from a NYT editor. https://t.co/iNtNuxDtNB
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) January 19, 2017
Hemingway had earlier bashed the Times’ reporting on Perry, calling their piece alleging that the nominee to head the DOE had no idea what the DOE really did as “the very definition of fake news”:
That NYT hit on Perry was the very definition of fake news. Many political reporters spread it. https://t.co/udJUXr79fs
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) January 19, 2017
Keep in mind it’s not just righty media folks who bashed the Times’ single-source nonsense. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:
@MattMackowiak either they have source(s) they're not naming (which happens) or it's *way* oversold based on the quotes
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 19, 2017
Daily Show writer Daniel Radosh:
Hell of a lede in that New York Times Rick Perry Story! When are they going to run the article that actually goes along with it?
— Daniel Radosh (@danielradosh) January 19, 2017
And the single-source the article, former transition official Michael McKenna, told The Daily Caller that the Times misquoted him:
McKenna, though, told TheDC that the “headline” and lede of the story “don’t really reflect what I said.” He added that “of course” Perry understood the role of the Department of Energy when he was offered the job. Two-thirds of the DOE’s budget is devoted to maintaining the nation’s nuclear stockpiles. The nation’s primary site for the assembly and disassembly of nuclear weapons is located in Amarillo, Texas, a state Perry was governor of for 15 years.
LaForge’s answer to McKenna saying he was misquoted was to claim that others backed up what McKenna had to say, but the Times doesn’t need to list them in the article:
https://twitter.com/WatsonDanielLLC/status/822110278913576960
https://twitter.com/palafo/status/822116866588086272
Um, that’s not how it works:
If that's your defense of the article, with all due respect, that's pathetic for a serious journalistic institution like the NYT.
— Alex Zelinski (@A_Zelinski) January 19, 2017
Pathetic is right.
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