The New York Times seems to be Trump’s new ‘catch-and-kill’ outlet

Donald Trump's theft of classified documents was worse than anyone knew, as additional documents were released Tuesday showing that, months after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, documents were found in Trump’s bedroom and classified material was allegedly copied to a laptop for Trump’s Save America PAC.  Trump’s legal team is currently attempting to have all of the evidence thrown out, claiming that the search was unconstitutional and “illegal.” Judge Aileen Cannon is set to hold a hearing on Wednesday on a defense motion to completely dismiss the charges against Trump. How does The New York Times cover this—new evidence in what is arguably the biggest presidential scandal in history and a Trump-appointed judge holding the case in her hands—on its front page? It doesn’t. The Times does have a story on the documents, but it's hidden inside under the headline "Trump Lawyers Accuse Prosecutors of Misconduct in Documents Case." Like the headline, the first paragraph of the story focuses on how federal prosecutors are fighting “allegations of misconduct and politicization in how the government handled the investigation that led to an indictment accusing Mr. Trump of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office.” The whole focus of the article is on how Trump’s attorneys are seeking suppression of evidence and dismissal of the case. While there’s mention that Trump’s legal team and federal prosecutors produced “hundreds of pages of documents” related to these unsealed motions, there’s no information about what was actually in those documents. Contrast this with The Washington Post coverage headlined “Unsealed motions in Trump’s Fla. case suggest new evidence of possible obstruction.” This article does more than announce that supporting documents were released. It even mentions how the documents contain evidence that a Trump employee avoided the view of security cameras when moving boxes of documents. The Post article also discusses how the FBI search warrant included standard language authorizing the use of deadly force, which Trump is now trying to politicize with claims that President Joe Biden sent the FBI to Mar-a-Lago to assassinate him.  Better still, contrast The New York Times’ coverage with how it covered the story when former FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The day after Comey spoke, every single column of the Times’ front page was devoted to the possibility that a document might appear on a laptop.  But when it’s discovered that Trump actually did have documents copied onto a laptop that belonged to his PAC? Crickets. In 2017, Columbia Journalism Review called out the Times for its obsessive coverage of the Clinton email story, pointing out that of the 150 articles that ran on the front page in the final month before the 2016 election, only 10 delved into policy.  “The various Clinton-related email scandals accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined,” the CJR article concluded. That included how the Times moved quickly to kill an emerging story about connections between the Trump campaign and Russia on the same day that the front page was devoted to Clinton’s emails. So far in 2024, the Times has filled its editorial section with stories about Biden’s age, while still keeping most of Trump’s scandals safely buried. The Times online political section doesn’t give a clue to any of the events around Trump’s classified documents case, though it does provide a nice focus on the campaign of spoiler candidate Robert Kennedy Jr.  However, readers can locate a story about oil and gas producers turning away from Biden to support Trump. The story covers how oil and gas producers are opening their fat wallets for Trump, bolstering his fundraising. It’s not until the eighth paragraph that it mentions that the big oil and gas fundraiser for Trump’s super PAC came “a month after Mr. Trump hosted energy executives over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Florida. He asked them to donate $1 billion to his campaign so that he could retake the White House and dismantle Mr. Biden’s climate regulations, including the pause on permits.” Is this presented as a story of how Trump solicited and is now collecting on the biggest bribe in political history? No. Those two sentences are the only mention of Trump’s billion-dollar deal. And it ignores how the oil industry favored Trump by a huge margin in past elections. It’s not as if The New York Times doesn’t cover some Trump scandals. It had daily coverage of Trump’s criminal trial over charges of falsifying classified documents. With the trial happening blocks from its offices, that was a bit hard to avoid.  And it did dispatch Maggie Haberman, so she was there to hear former Trump fixer Michael Cohen testify that she was one of his go-to choices when he wanted to find someone to write favorable news about Trump. David Pecker,