The Tragic Death of an Icon

RIP, Gray Lady. You'll always have the Pentagon Papers.

If Jeff Childers’s brutal slaying of The New York Times’s pathetic attempt to absolve itself of its inescapable plandemic guilt was the final nail in the terminally ill Gray Lady’s coffin, consider this post her eulogy.

I alluded to this zinger in yesterday’s post, but ICYMI, over the weekend, The Times published a bootlicking tribute to NASA—the very agency responsible for leaving two astronauts hanging in space (literally) for the equivalent of an entire human gestation period. (And if you’ve never experienced the joy of pregnancy, I’m here to tell you that 280+ days is a long, exhausting time.)

It was like an extended holiday vacation, really!

Notably, the “quick return of astronauts” is not referring to Williams and Wilmore, the real-life crew of NASA’s botched remake of Lost in Space. They’re talking about the replacement space explorers who inexplicably volunteered to take up the interstellar baton. (I mean, I can’t speak for my fearless followers, but if the bungee snaps when the guy right before me jumps, I’m probably rethinking my afternoon activity plans.)

“Typically, the two groups of astronauts — the new arrivals and the ones about to go home — overlap on the station for up to a week, but this time, the agency said it was looking at a quicker-than-usual return, as early as Wednesday,” The Times gushed in the gaslightiest statement since “the benefits of Covid vaccination far outweigh the risks of minor, temporary side effects”.

After briefly explaining exactly how the new crew made its way from the SpaceX capsule *which, not importantly, was provided by Elon Musk* into the International Space Station—a low-tech tale of seals and hatches and utterly irrelevant timestamps—the article’s oblivious author painted a rosy, feel-good picture of a warm extraterrestrial reunion among colleagues.

In journalism school the very first thing you learn are the “five w’s and an h:” who, what, when, where, why, and how. These six elements are the crux of any story and are generally answered in the opening paragraph, mostly to accommodate lazy readers who can’t be bothered to read any further. If this had been my assignment, I would have begun my piece thus: “Elon Musk (who) heroically (how) sent a SpaceX capsule (what) this weekend (when) to rescue a pair of astronauts the Biden administration astro-abandoned for the better part of a year rather than face the ‘bad optics’ of having a Trump supporter save the day (why).”

Perhaps the Times scribe has been trapped under a Tesla truck and missed that part where Musk offered to retrieve the orbital orphans months ago—a gesture that was rejected by the then-regime because the guy offering aid was the captain of Team Trump, you see, and there was an election looming. Oversights happen. But to completely ignore the billionaire First Buddy’s central role in the long overdue recovery operation is media malpractice, dereliction of duty, and editorial negligence all rolled into one shameless display of agenda-driven spin.

My favorite part of the “Paper of Record’s” essay is its ending, where the glorified publicist penning the piece is practically breakdancing on a banana peel to put a smiley slant on the disastrous operation.

“Nine months is not an unusually long stay in space — many astronauts on the space station live there for months, and some have even lived there for more than a year. Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore have used the time to conduct experiments, many exploring what the absence of gravity does to a body.

The pair’s unexpectedly long stay in orbit has intrigued space nerds, hobbyists and members of the public alike, fascinated by their fate. Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore have embraced their circumstances, broadcasting regularly from the station and speaking fondly about their layover in space.

‘It makes you really want to enjoy every bit of your time that you have up here,’ Ms. Williams told ‘The Daily’ last week.”

It’s been great! They’ve loved every minute! In fact, they’re actually heartbroken at the thought of having to return to boring old Earth! Sure, they thought they’d only be gone a few days—does the ISS even have a washer and dryer?—but who wouldn’t enjoy an extra few months of extreme social distancing?

To be fair, in shockingly clear interstellar interviews, the not-stranded astronauts [they insist, at least on the record, that the word isn’t entirely accurate] have had some glowing things to say about their employer (“NASA does a fantastic job of keeping us connected with our families and those that we care about and care about us that are on the planet while we’re off the planet!”) and accept the unpredictable nature of their chosen careers. They’ve also confirmed that “what [Musk] says is absolutely factual,” while admitting that the details of Elon’s initial rescue offer were never shared with them—two poignant facts The Times didn’t feel were important enough to include in their so-called coverage.

Read the string on X.

In honor of the once-venerable, lifeless paper, I’ve written her obituary. After all, she may be a shriveled, toothless, senile bag of bones now, but if memory serves, at one point in time, she was a beauty.

We gather here today to bid a relieved farewell to The New York Times, once a proud bastion of investigative journalism, now relegated to something only a few rungs below digital kitty litter.

In her twilight years, she clung desperately to the illusion of credibility, bravely ignoring accusations of crusading for wokeism and claims—from a former editor, no less—that she had officially lost her way. She did not die of natural causes, but rather of a myriad of self-inflicted wounds: specifically, blunt-force bias compounded by chronic fib-rosis and a lethal case of narrative poisoning.

Her final moments were spent as one might expect—furiously spinning reality into a comforting fairy tale, where astronauts marooned for nine months were actually having the time of their lives and Elon Musk wasn’t even a footnote in his own rescue operation.

The Gray Lady is survived by her embattled colleagues at CNN and MSNBC, who continue to peddle fiction under the guise of news, and by The Washington Post, which now assumes full responsibility for reminding us that “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (while personally dimming the lights).

May she rest in peace, her legacy forever etched in the annals of journalistic servitude and fondly remembered as the place where truth went to die.

Ashes to ashes, narratives to dust.

Feel free to share your fondest memories of the dearly departed (or tell us about that time she kneed you in the throat) in the comments.