You may have heard of Nick Kristof, two time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the estimable — nay, legendary! — New York Times. He’s hobnobbed with the rich and famous and written books and now holds the title as author of the slimiest piece of propaganda passed off as journalism I’ve ever read.
Kristof’s affront to journalism, a sob-story about a man named John Brodniak whose health woes Kristof turned into a naked emotional plea for government-run health care, slipped by all the fact-checkers and layers and layers of editors at the Times. But it didn’t get past Michelle Malkin. She noticed a habitual weaseling in Kristof’s column (and a “the sky is falling” blog post that followed up on the column) and concluded that he hadn’t actually done any research except for dramatically transcribing Brodniak’s story. So she did some of her own. The results are here. I warn you, though, you might not want to let your young children get a look at the screen because the beating she administers him is efficiently brutal. Also, there’s a picture of Brad Pitt with a pointy beard that would rival Mephistopheles himself.
After such a whupping, you might think that Kristof would have gone back and tried to address the issues Michelle raised, such as this:
The column leaves the tear-jerking impression that Brodniak is just inches away from dying for lack of health insurance — and that he is a shining example of why, in Kristof’s words, “universal coverage” is so “urgent.”
But, um, Kristof himself reports an inconvenient fact in his overwrought column: Brodniak has government health insurance!
And this:
Kristof sounds the usual moonbat talking points in invoking the cost of the war in Afghanistan to justify shrugging at the costs of a government health care takeover.
He might be able to get away with this if had been a consistent opponent of the Afghanistan invasion from day one. But back when New York Times columnists backed the Afghanistan invasion in the months after the 9/11 attacks, Kristof argued passionately that the war wasn’t merely worth the cost — but was actually a net life-saver.
Nope, Nick Kristof decided to toss out a non-responsive update to his blog post full of the same sloppy journalism and hearsy. Michelle answered with a blog post that destroyed Kristof’s column like it was a cement truck on an episode of Mythbusters.
If you need a more graphic depiction of just how badly Michelle destroyed Kristof’s little foray into writing government propaganda, take a look here. Imagine Kristof’s column is the truck and Michelle’s two blog posts are…well, you can figure it out.
Kristof and the New York Times should not be allowed to get away with this. I encourage you to share Michelle’s posts with as many folks as you know, and politely request to the Times’ ombudsman that he do the right thing and correct the record.
Tags: Media Bias, Michelle Malkin, National Health Care, Nick Kristof
