Among the targets of President Donald Trump’s tweets yesterday included the New York Times, which he blasted as a failing publication.
How much longer will the failing nytimes, with its big losses and massive unfunded liability (and non-existent sources), remain in business?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017
The failing @nytimes, which has made every wrong prediction about me including my big election win (apologized), is totally inept!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017
That’s one way to start off your vacation, I suppose. While the Times is profitable, it is true that the paper is in decline. The company netted only $23 million on $1.56 billion in revenue last year, which is an embarrassingly thin margin (and implies that declining revenues will quickly put them in the red).
While we don’t know why Trump decided to go after the Times yesterday, a report put out today by Breitbart on the company’s hiring practices may shine some light onto that question.
According to emails from a NY Times reporter that Breitbart obtained, employees at the paper are not only receiving leaked information from the White House, but are also soliciting government employees to become leakers. There’s an epidemic of leaks in the Trump Administration, and the media is helping add fuel to the fire.
“Thanks again for taking the time to speak today,” Coral Davenport, an “Energy and Environment Correspondent” for the New York Times, writes in an email to John J. O’Grady of the EPA workers’ union. O’Grady is the president of the AFGE Council 238 in Chicago—which represents EPA workers.
“As I mentioned, I’m working on a story looking specifically at concrete examples of unusual secretary at E.P.A.,” Davenport states, continuing:
I’ve heard a lot of second-hand rumors, but in order to report these incidents, I’d need to have first-hand or eyewitness accounts. I’m looking for examples of things like, information being communicated only verbally when it would historically have been put in writing, people being told not to bring phones, laptops or even take notes in meetings where they would in the past typically have done so, eyewitness accounts of things like the administrator or top political appointees refusing to use official email, phones or computers, or any other specific, first-hand examples of practices that appear to demonstrate unprecedented secrecy or transparency.
H/T Breitbart
Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently addressed all the leaks, and investigations into leaks have increased threefold in the first six months of the Trump Administration. Sessions made it clear that there would be no hesitation in bringing criminal charges against any leakers.
But over at the Times, there’s no problem in encouraging people to break the law. Breitbart reached out to Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhodes-Ha for comment, who said that there was “nothing abnormal” about the emails. “The email demonstrates the process of reporting and gathering facts,” Rhoades-Ha said in an email early Tuesday.
Well, by all means, keep encouraging it. It’ll be hard for any leakers to report and gather facts from a prison cell.
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