PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2017-03-08 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did the New York Times Contradict Their 20 January 2017 Report About Wiretapping? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • In March 2017, several web outlets circulated an image purportedly showing the front page of the 20 January 2017 print edition of the New York Times along with accusations that the newspaper's reporting on President Trump's claims that former President Obama had ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower phones had been contradictory: The image is of the Times' front page and its Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides is real. It's also true that the New York Times reported about two months later that President Trump had offered no evidence to back up his claim that the Obama administration had tapped his phones. However, these two articles are not contradictory In order for the New York Times 4 March 2017 report (Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones) to contradict the newspaper's 20 January 2017 report (Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides), the paper would have had to have provided evidence (or at least asserted) that the earlier article was based on an Obama administration wiretap of Trump's phones. This, of course, was not the case. Although the Janaury article did use the words wiretapped and Trump in its title, it did not state that Trump Tower telephones were specifically targeted by a wiretap initiated by the Obama administration. Rather, the article stated that intelligence agencies were monitoring Russian officials, and that some of the conversations they intercepted in the course of their investigations may have also involved Trump aides: Furthermore, the article stated that it was still unclear if the intercepted communications were linked to the Trump campaign, or Trump himself, at all: This article, which was also published online under the title Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates, was cited in a 3 March 2017 Breitbart report which many pundits believe was the basis for President Trump's wiretap claim again his predecessor. Although radio host Mark Levin collected several reports related to wiretapping and Trump's alleged connections with Russia, no evidence has yet surfaced showing that the Obama administration had initiated a wiretap of Trump Tower phones: Matt Rosenberg, one of the authors of the above-quoted Times article, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that nowhere in his reporting did it state that Trump himself was under surveillance: When Rosenberg was pressed on the issue by CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord, he responded that only the most obtuse misreading of the article would lead one to conclude that Donald Trump was under surveillance. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url