New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet on Sunday defended his newspaper's critical review of the Trump administration's coronavirus pandemic response following the president's tweets rejecting the outlet as "fake news."
"It's pretty clear from the story that the warnings about the virus, and the possibilities that it would be as dangerous as it turned out to be, were being widely discussed at all levels of government – starting with government scientists early on that predicted that it would be a catastrophe, all the way up to close advisers of the president," Baquet told CNN's "Reliable Sources."
"The theme of the story is the combination of the president sending out the notion that he thought it was not going to be a big deal – combined with bureaucratic in-fighting, combined with the sense the president and people around him don't listen to experts – meant they were quite slow in responding to the pandemic."
Trump took a preemptive strike against Sunday's scathing rebuke with tweets rejecting reports with "unnamed" and "anonymous sources," showing "they are made up to defame & disparage."
"I will also add, because the president has chosen to attack it, it is based on many on-the-record interviews, documents," Baquet told host Brian Stelter. "There is a tremendous email chain among scientists inside and outside the government, where they talk about the growing crisis.
"So, I would suggest that people read it, rather than take the president's tweet at its word. It is a very well-documented, powerful chapter in understanding why the government was so slow in dealing with this pandemic."
Baquet has been a repeated guest on Stelter's show, rejecting Trump's leadership throughout his first term.
Baquet did admit the whole world has been disrupted by the global coronavirus pandemic, but he claimed his paper's report traces the virus from Europe to New York City, not China. The Times reporters were among the American media kicked out of China and Baquet was asked whether he was being careful not to blame China.
But Stelter, a frequent Trump antagonist, did not press Baquet to comment on the failings of Democratic leaders in New York state and New York City during the pandemic. New York City, home of the Times, has become the world epicenter of cases and deaths, while most of the U.S. has far lower rates of cases and deaths.
New York state has more than one-third of the confirmed cases (188,694) of the U.S. total (551,081). With regard to deaths, New York state (9,385) accounts for over 43.3% of total U.S. COVID-19 deaths (21,668), according to Worldometers data culled from Johns Hopkins University and recent media reports.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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