‘New York Times’ Reporter Sydney Ember Attacks Bernie Sanders Using Corporate Lobbyists And ‘Stealth Edits’
Boing Boing reports that Sydney Ember, a New York Times reporter that focuses on covering Bernie Sanders, primarily sources corporate lobbyists, war criminals, and far-right figures to discredit the presidential nominee. Not only that, Ember’s coverage, which FAIR revealed is consistently negative, does not disclose her connections to the finance world and even undergoes “stealth edits” to tilt the coverage’s slant in the negative direction.
Ember reportedly began working for the Times after a position as an analyst at the hedge fund and coal-booster Blackrock. She is also married to Mike Bechek, son of the former CEO of Bain & Company, where he used to work.
Of the corporate figures Ember quotes are: Jim Kessler, executive vice president for Policy at Third Way, a think-tank made mostly of bankers, CEOs, and corporate lawyers that push for cutting Social Security and Medicare and seek to prevent higher taxes for billionaires; Jarrod Loadholt, called “a Democratic strategist” according to Ember but more specifically a consumer finance lobbyist that supported a bill that enables banks to practice racial discrimination; and Tracy Sefl, referred to by Ember as “a veteran Democratic strategist” but more specifically a former senior advisor for Hillary Clinton who has worked with the right-wing news aggregator The Drudge Report. Sefl was also “a hired gun at a Republican-led firm Navigators Global.”
Big surprise: the New York Times reporter covering Bernie Sanders has a long record of unfairly attacking Sanders — while neglecting to mention that the sources she quotes are corporate lobbyists. https://t.co/rORQrFXaGo
— Jacobin (@jacobin) July 2, 2019
According to FAIR, Ember has many other corporate sources that she uses for quotes and, unlike other Times reporters, she does not identify their corporate ties or controversial histories.
“Amber’s articles on Sanders (sometimes co-written with other Times reporters) often quote as neutral authorities individuals who are on the other side of a wide ideological divide, with longstanding antipathies to Sanders’ left socioeconomic perspective,” wrote Katie Halper in her FAIR report.
“Moreover, many of these ‘experts’ are corporate lobbyists, whose work in a particular area is not guided by academic, journalistic or other professional standards, but by the economic and political interests of their clients. Ember spins the identity of her authorities, who are themselves professional spinners.”
Sanders already received pushback from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the 2016 race, which was confirmed by leaked emails showing the systematic bias against his presidency, per Left Voice.
More recently, fellow presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson claimed that their mics were not on for portions of the second Democratic debate, highlighting potential bias from MSNBC. Per The Inquisitr, Yang has also been left off of MSNBC charts many times before, and FAIR previously spotlighted the ties of MSNBC to Washington insiders that are supportive of Joe Biden.
