Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, August 24, 2022
Sounds about right.
The newspaper which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its false reporting on Trump-Russia collusion has hired the reporter who brought the fake dossier authored by Christopher Steele to BuzzFeed.
And what did The New York Times hire Ken Bensinger for?
To cover “right-wing media.”
In an Aug. 18 announcement, David Halbfinger, the Times’ politics editor, suggested that Bensinger “is well prepared to report on right-wing media,” The Blaze noted on Aug. 22.
“His recent work on the Oath Keepers (an anti-statist militia group, some of whose members were present at the January 6, 2021, Capitol protests) and on the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case in Michigan were cited as evidence of the reporter’s understanding of ‘the rising threat of armed militant groups,’ which Halbfinger intimated is relevant to the reporter’s new beat,” The Blaze added.
What the Times omitted from the announcement of the hiring is that Bensinger was the individual responsible for bringing the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed, which the outlet released on Jan. 10, 2017.
Writing for American Thinker on Aug. 23, Monica Showalter noted: “So his idea of ‘right-wing’ is the Oath Keepers? That’s who the right wing is to him? I’ll wager he’s got every ‘neo-Nazi’ in America, all six of them, in his Rolodex, raring for new reports. You can imagine what the stories he’s going to be reporting are going be like about the ‘right wing.’ We can tell what they’ll be…even before he writes them.”
In its announcement, the Times referred to Bensinger as a “distinguished journalist” who had broken many stories.
What it didn’t mention is that, at a 2016 Fusion GPS retreat in San Francisco, Bensinger met with former Wall Street Journal reporter and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Simpson, who had been hired in 2015 to dig up damaging information on Donald Trump, reportedly told Bensinger about a political opposition research report drafted by Steele.
The dossier was made available to several other reporters. None of them could verify anything in it. No outlets would publish it, until Bensinger brought it to BuzzFeed.
“The fact that reporter after reporter didn’t want to touch it is what prompted FBI director James Comey to hold his meeting with President-Elect Trump in Trump Tower in 2016, to supposedly inform him about the existence of the unverified dossier, which, it turns out, was pervy made up crap from the imaginations of drunken Russians linked to the Brookings Institution, simply making the ‘pee tape’ stories about President Trump visiting Moscow hotel rooms and asking the local hookers to urinate on him for the movies, which were inventions that came natural to them,” Showalter noted.
Even CNN’s Jake Tapper would state only that the dossier had “compromising” information and would not publish it.
But Bensinger did, “suggesting that he was a gullible guy who hated Trump so much that he just ‘knew’ that the dossier had to be true, or if it was not true, that the damage would be done anyway, which is just as good,” Showalter wrote. “Didn’t matter to him. Publish first, ask questions later. And it turns out it wasn’t true, leaving BuzzFeed with egg all over its face as other reporters harrumphed about their more skeptical and exacting journalistic standards.”
And, seemingly appropriately giving his and the Times’ record on publishing false information, Bensinger has landed his beat at what was once known as the “newspaper of record.”
He’ll be “alongside award-winning Russia hoax promoter Maggie Haberman,” Showalter noted.
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The one reporter who published fake Steele dossier chosen to cover ‘right-wing media’ for NY Times added by Editor Two on
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