Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about one major media outlet’s premature response to the State of the Union address.
Before the State of the Union address, politicians and interest groups from the party opposite the president sometimes offer “prebuttals,” denunciations of the president’s remarks even before they’ve been released or spoken. These anticipatory denunciations of unseen, undelivered remarks are the stuff of speculative, spin-cycle political talking points, not news.
Yet this year, the New York Times broke with precedent and ran a print article headlined “Wobbly Claims on Jobs, Inflation and Crime,” assailing President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech before he even delivered it.
The “fact check” carries the byline of the factually challenged New York Times “fact-check” reporter Linda Qiu. The New York Times uses her pedantically against Trump but not against New York City’s truth-stretching mayor Zohran Mamdani. This latest column is entirely off base when it comes to the substance, attempting to undermine Trump’s claims of progress on inflation, jobs, crime, and immigration. On immigration, the Times rolled out fact-checking terminology—”slightly exaggerated”—that is comical in its demonstration of Times bias. When the Times fact-checkers discover Democrats saying things slightly exaggerated, they call them “mostly true.”
What’s more than slightly exaggerated is any pretension remaining at the Times that the newspaper is nonpartisan rather than totally in the tank for the Democrats.
Did the newspaper run prebuttals of Biden’s State of the Union addresses? I looked and found a 2023 piece by Qiu. It ran online only, not in print, and with the more neutral headline, “Fact-Checking Biden Before the State of the Union,” a far cry from the accusatory “Wobbly Claims” language used against Trump. Biden’s 2022 State of the Union got no preemptive fact check. In advance of the 2024 State of the Union, the Times ran in print a similarly anodyne headline: “Evaluating Biden’s Recent Talking Points on Taxes, Industry and Jobs.”
