Did you hear the latest from Vogue magazine about what a corrupt you-know-what UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is? Here’s the headline:
If there’s one very appropriate pattern among Trump administration appointees and associates, it’s their penchant for big spending. (Trump, let’s remember, has a literally gold-plated New York residence.) Nikki Haley is the latest to join the ranks of those officials who apparently prefer things that come with high price tags (and at taxpayer expense). The New York Times is reporting that Haley’s New York City apartment (near her workplace as United Nations ambassador) has $52,701 “customized and mechanized curtains,” which were purchased and paid for by the government despite a since-lifted State Department hiring freeze and other budget cuts.
And here’s the original New York Times story this is based on:
Not until the fourth paragraph do you learn this:
A spokesman for Ms. Haley said plans to buy the curtains were made in 2016, during the Obama administration. Ms. Haley had no say in the purchase, he said.
The U.S. had to move its UN mission, previously located in the Waldorf-Astoria, after the Waldorf was sold to Chinese investors who want to redo the entire thing.
Ask yourself this question: would the Times run a story about $52,000 curtains if the current UN ambassador was the appointee of President Hillary Clinton? To the contrary, they’d run a “style” story on how elegant the new digs were and how our UN ambassador was “milking the soft power dividend” (heh) of being able to host diplomatic meetings in such a fine setting.
We don’t even need to hypothesize this. Here is how the Times did puff up the old UN suite when that soft-power-milker extraordinaire Samantha Power was the occupant in 2015:
The adults were doing their level best, but for a while, the evening seemed doomed to a stately pace. A family of Syrian refugees had been invited to dinner in a penthouse atop the Waldorf Towers, the official residence of the United States ambassador to the United Nations. . .
Looking out a penthouse window, Mr. Al Teibawi and his son Monzer, 17, who said his gaze had lingered over the map of America in geography class, saw the Art Deco spire of the Chrysler Building: a skymark. They felt sure they had seen it somewhere before.
“That is the building the monkey climbed in the movie,” Monzer declared.
Ms. Power invited the Al Teibawis back for a Super Bowl party and said that wherever her family lives after she finishes her service as ambassador, they would always be welcome in her home.
How nice for everyone involved. And I’m sure the Times will puzzle over why so many of us hate them with a white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.
JOHN adds: The Times reportedly says that its editors “are reviewing” the story about the curtains:
Spox for @nytimes tells me that editors “are reviewing” the @nikkihaley curtain story.
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 14, 2018
As pretty much everyone on Twitter has said, the editors are supposed to do that before the story is published. Or that’s the way it used to be, anyway.
UPDATE: The Times has indeed issued a correction and a new headline:
Good for them. But what does it say about their editing process if such an egregious story got through in the first place? Would they have corrected it if not for the internet being able to crowd-source it and call them on it? And to repeat: would they have run such a story at all if the UN ambassador was a Democrat? And will all the other media outlets that jumped on the headline, such as Vogue, issue corrections?
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