Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha gave a “golf clap” to the New York Times for reporting that the “Decoy Dan” in Alaska was intentionally set up to confuse voters.
“Kudos to the New York Times here, guys, because the story was justified completely; we’ve seen it in plain sight for weeks, the two Dan Sullivans,” Concha said Monday on Fox and Friends First.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the second Dan Sullivan running on the Alaska ticket was recruited by Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola’s campaign to dilute votes from the Republican incumbent with the same name. The outlet faced backlash from readers on the proximity of the report to the midterm elections, prompting the New York Times to defend its decision.
The outlet posted an interview with the reporter, Kellen Browning, on why he and the newspaper decided to release the story when they did.
“Once the story was nailed down, not publishing would have been a more overt act of putting our finger on the scale of this election,” Browning said. “Publishing what we knew, and letting readers decide how they felt about it all, was the only ethical option.”
Concha said the news organization shouldn’t have responded to critics for reporting “without fear or favor.”
“The fact that the New York Times even has to remotely defend doing actual journalism because some of its readers, but mainly those on social media, they couldn’t cry harder that the story may end up deciding the balance of power in the upper chamber, that is the Senate,” Concha said.
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Concha said people were decrying the article as “treason.” He added that critics couldn’t write the story off as coming from the “right-wing ecosystem.”
“That tells you everything about something called confirmation bias, and that is when viewers, or in this case, readers, they only want to hear good news about the political team they root for instead of hearing what they need to hear,” Concha said.