POLITICS: The NY Times finally tells the truth about Biden’s border failures — AFTER the election

At a rally supporting Poland’s anti-Soviet Solidarity movement in 1982, the left-wing writer Susan Sontag was attacked by her comrades for pointing out that subscribers to the mass-circulation and pro-America Reader’s Digest (“deplorables,” we might call them now) were better informed about communism than readers of left-wing intellectual magazines like The Nation.

Along the same lines, readers of The Post have been provided a much more accurate picture of America’s immigration crisis than those relying on legacy media like the New York Times for their information.

Until this week.

With the election safely over, the Times has finally informed its readers that, wouldn’t you know it, “the immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in US history”, and “the Biden administration’s policy appears to have been the biggest factor.”

Well, knock me over with a feather.

Like the legacy media’s belated acknowledgment that The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was accurate all along, it’s only after the news can no longer hurt their preferred candidate that American’s Newspaper of Record is willing to publish the truth.

The story itself is well done and provides lots of good information — information that was available all along to anyone who cared to look. For instance:

• “Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.”
• “About 60% of immigrants who have entered the country since 2021 have done so without legal authorization.”
• “high levels of immigration do have downsides, including the pressure on social services and increased competition for jobs.”
• “The scale of recent immigration helps explain why the issue has played a central role in American politics over the past few years.”

Captain Obvious, call your office!

The scale of the betrayal of their readers by the Times and other legacy media over the past four years was evident from a reader’s online comment about the article: “What is frustrating is that while I feel I am an informed citizen, I never had a clear idea of what the immigration situation was.”

What an indictment of an institution that claims to offer “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

I’d always understood “fit to print” to mean that the Times wouldn’t stoop to presenting its readers with the prurient and the trivial.

Instead, I guess “fit to print” actually means “doesn’t contradict our preferred story line.”

That reader who was frustrated that he didn’t have the whole story should have broadened his media diet by reading Jennie Taer’s reporting for The Post.

Or my colleague Steven Camarota’s analyses of the very same data examined by the Times. Or Todd Bensman’s 2023 book “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”

Or my colleague Steven Camarota’s analyses of the very same data examined by the Times. Or Todd Bensman’s 2023 book “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”

To be fair, the writer of the Times story, David Leonhardt, has been trying to warn his fellow liberals about the political and policy problems caused by their single-minded pursuit of unlimited immigration.

He runs the Times’ “The Morning” newsletter and in the past year has been able to get away with addressing immigration a couple of times.

But it’s telling that until this week, his most extensive treatment of the issue was published not by the Times but by The Atlantic magazine.

It’s not healthy in a democracy for the prestige media (don’t laugh) to tailor its news reporting to satisfy a political agenda.

If the Times’ belated decision to tell its readers the truth about the border is a sign that things are changing, it will be all to the good. But I’m not holding my breath.

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.