khosq.com

Is this an example of typical NYT weaseling or just bad writing?

"Other scholars said that the number was a useful addition to the historical record, but that it did not introduce a new version of events."

Kaiser said the document amounted to a "death record." He didn't say that it amounted to a new version of events. So what is that "but that it did not introduce a new version of events" doing there, right after the Kaiser info? Is the author saying "but" compared to what Kaiser said, or "but" compared to what is generally said, or "but" compared to what? The article doesn't make that clear. It is ambiguous.

So the question is whether this ambiguity is intentional or the result of bad writing? I would say it's intentional, but, at the same time, the NYT has had writers who make things and up and plagiarize for years on end without the editors doing anything about it.

I think that, not only is the ambiguity intentional, actively, as in someone made the decision to add that ambiguity, but even the bad writers were intentional, passively, as in nobody wanted to anything about it. NYT editors are not good editors, recent history suggests. The paper has a reputation, and people automatically think that any paper that has survived in NY for so long must be important, but the way any living thing survives in New York is through brute power and brute deception, neither one of which is a friend of the truth.

To put it in a nutshell: In the aggregate, meaning if you take the sum total of all the stories, NYT stories about the events of 1915 nowadays are always going to be accompanied by a lot of deceptively hidden lies. That is the kind of pigs that they are. That people read the mush of truth with lies that is in there and believe it means that people are really loosing their minds and that the US is, indeed, self-destructing like Rome. Except that this time there is no excuse about there being lead in the water.