Thread by @HoarseWisperer

I’m just going to gush for a second.

The NYT’s sprawling exposé on the fraudulent myth of a successful Donald J. Trump is just everything journalism is supposed to be.

It’s a soaring journalistic achievement of legwork and research. It’s a careful unraveling. A distillation.
1/

It’s the kind of comprehensive investigative reporting that topples tyrants and preserves democracies.

It is a masterwork.

A Pulitzer is due and all but assured.

2/

Yet, at the same time it is also an accidental confessional and partially indicting of the Times’ itself.

Tucked among the 13,000 words is a single paragraph about the Times’ role in erecting the false edifice of the swaggering, young impresario who never was.

2/

The story reveals that it was the Times that ran the first major profile on Donald J. Trump; and it was the Times that first broke a cardinal rule of journalism that many have since broken endlessly:

They let the subject be the source.

3/

Their profile took Trump’s claims of owning buildings they drove past in a meandering tour of the NYC area as true - even though they weren’t. His father owned them.

The Times first fell for the con... and then broadcast it.

4/

Overall, the piece is just so damn gratifying a work of journalism though. A compelling, comprehensive read...

Yet, you can’t help but walk away from it realizing just how poor so much of the NYT’s facile, incurious access journalism is by comparison.

5/5