Twitter Strips The New York Times of Verification, But Then Elon Musk Makes It Even Worse for Fake News Company

Twitter has finally caught up with the times.

In a splashy move Saturday that was as important for its symbolism as it was for its technical consequences, the social media giant under the ownership of Elon Musk stripped The New York Times of its coveted verification checkmark, reducing the reach of the Times’ poisonous tweets that already carry more influence than the “paper of record” deserves.

Then Musk tweeted a gloriously justified insult, adding to the technological injury.

To be clear, it isn’t the Times alone that was targeted. The Times itself reported on Friday that the development was looming, under the not-at-all-sensational headline, “Twitter’s Blue Check Apocalypse Is Upon Us. Here’s What to Know,” and noted that the Times could have kept its blue checkmark if it had paid Musk’s price.

Other news organizations are likely going to find themselves in a similar situation, according to a Washington Post report Sunday.

But the Times is the organization that considers itself the “newspaper of record.” It’s motto is still “All the news that’s fit to print” — which is laughable coming from a newspaper that has shamefully downplayed the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Conservative activist, podcast host and commentator Benny Johnson was one of earliest to catch something missing with the Times’ Twitter account.

BREAKING: Twitter has Un-Verified The @NYTimes pic.twitter.com/zpJ3vJ6tsj

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 2, 2023

But Musk by then had already summed up the situation in a dig designed to prick the egos behind the massively egotistical Times.

The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2023

“The real tragedy of the @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,” Musk wrote.

And in that, he hit the nail on the head. The reality is that the Times’ reputation is built much more on its history than the daily practice of journalism as the word used to be understood.

In fact, the Times openly abandoned even the pretense of journalism back in August 2016, when a front-page commentary piece by then-Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg all-but announced that Trump’s unorthodox candidacy would force reporters to “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.”

“It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness.” Rutenberg wrote. “It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.”

In other words, it was the Times’ mission to attack Trump by any and all means necessary (note how “true to the facts” came after “true to readers and viewers”), and the Times has been on that mission ever since.

It’s not just Trump, of course. It’s the whole progressive agenda, whether it’s climate change, or “transgender” issues, or the supposed right of women to be full members of the Augusta National Golf Club two decades ago. (It’s hard to believe now, but that was actually a crusade at the Times once.)