In stealing my story today, the New York Times committed a serious breach of journalistic ethics (yes, that's a thing)

After this I’m getting back to my job, which is breaking the news that outlets like The New York Times would rather hide unless I give them no choice.

But I want to explain why what Times reporters Peter Baker and Emily Baumgaertner did today in stealing my Saturday scoop about the visits by a Parkinson’s specialist to the White House was so offensive - and not just to me.

For the Times didn’t merely steal my reporting, it appears to have tried to hide its theft. Their original story - available at the Internet archive called Wayback Machine - claimed the White House had released the visitor logs showing that Parkinson’s specialist Dr. Kevin R. Cannard has visited the White House at least eight times since summer 2023 “in response to a request from The New York Times.”

That line is an apparent effort by Baker and Baumgaertner to explain how they discovered the visits - which the Times reported as “Breaking News” - and why they happened to write the article now, two days after mine, rather than months ago.

In reality the Biden Administration’s visitor logs are public, online, and available to everyone at any time. The Times did not need to “request” them, it simply needed to go to whitehouse.gov and search them, as anyone can. And - after I pointed out that fact on X - the Times secretly edited the story to remove that line.

( Doing my best to keep them all honest. And you can help! For 20 cents a day.)

Why? Because the falsity of that claim only highlighted the paper’s effort to hide the fact that the Times was late and not early to the news about Cannard.

In reality, this “breaking news” was little more than a rewritten version of my article from Saturday - which has been read hundreds of thousands of times on Substack, with its highlights seen more than two million times on X.

(Two million views, but apparently none at the New York Times…)

Baker and Baumgaertner simply did not want to credit me. In the wake of my mRNA Covid jab reporting, the Times now wishes that my decade-long career there had never happened and will do anything to ignore me.

But refusing to credit a clear scoop - as the Times did today - is an upscale form of plagiarism and a violation of journalism ethics. When someone else breaks news you didn’t have, and you follow it, you credit them. ( As I did in Saturday’s piece, noting that the New York Post had reported one of the visits; it was that piece that led me to check the logs myself.)

Worse, though, by refusing to mention me, the Times has misled its readers. And in this case, that omission does not just damage me. It changes the article.

Why?

Well, as you know, I have sued the President and that many mainstream media outlets despise me for my mRNA reporting. Those facts do NOT change the truth of what I wrote Saturday.

But some readers might be more likely to look skeptically at this reporting if they knew it had begun with me. In failing to report that fact, the Times has denied readers information some might find important.

So the real damage is not just to me, but to everyone who reads the article.

We’ll see if anyone at my old employer steps up to apologize, or even admit the truth.

I’m not optimistic.

Now back to work.

(With your help, I hope!)

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/in-stealing-my-story-today-the-new?r=3hzb&triedRedirect=true