False Alarm at the Times

No sooner had Hawaii sent out its false alert of a ballistic missile threat inbound for the 50th state than a special unit at the New York Times sprang into action. It’s unclear whether that scramble began before or after Hawaii sent out word that the alert was in error (we’ve heard speculation on both sides). The assignment, though, was clear: Get up online before the other papers an editorial blaming this fiasco on — wait for it — President Trump.Aloha! Just how tricky this would be became more evident with every passing minute. Mr. Trump himself was halfway around the world when a Hawaiian state employe pushed the wrong button. Not a button exactly, Governor Ige explained in a low-key and straightforward broadcast interview. It involved clicking on a computer screen rather than pressing the kind of button that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has on his desk.In any event, this put the Times in a pickle. How could it blame Mr. Trump if people had been worried about atomic attack all along? Yet could it afford to ignore the fact that President Obama, on whose watch North Korea exploded an H-Bomb, warned his successor that North Korea would be his most urgent national security threat? Seems so. The Times decided to try to palm off on its noble readers the idea that it’s been years since anyone feared a nucular attack.“It was the sort of nightmare that had only ever been real for most people’s parents or grandparents — the fear of an impending nuclear attack,” the Times began its editorial. Its editors decided to ignore the Gray Lady’s own coverage of the enduring nature of Americans’ fear of an impending attack (such as “Awaiting the Crack of Doom,” 1988; or “Cold War Nuclear Fears Now Apply to Terrorists,” 2010; or “The Apocalypse Market is Booming,” 2013). After all, the paper’s aim was to pin the blame on Mr. Trump.Then it turned to the next problem. Which was that the alarm was false. Hmmmm. Finally the Times craftiest wordsmith came up with the construction that the mistaken alert had “made tangible the growing fears that after decades of leaders trying to more safely control the world’s nuclear arsenals, President Trump has increased the possibility of those weapons being used.” How had he done this? By moving to expand our own deterrent forces.What alarmed the Hawaiians, the Times decided to argue, was not the warning that lit up every cell phone in the state. It was not that the alert included the words: “This is not a drill.” What caused Hawaiians to start stuffing their children into storm sewers and cowering for any cover they could get was, the Times tries to convince its readers, the fear that Mr. Trump was modernizing our own outdated nuclear forces. It calls it “Trump’s nuclear risk.”In other words, it’s Mr. Trump whom Hawaiians fear — not Kim Jong Un. Were this coming from Hawaii, it would be one thing. But there’s no indication of it in the Times editorial. Its editors decided against referencing a report in November that ran in Los Angeles Times under the headline “As North Korean threat grows, Hawaii prepares for nuclear attack.” It reports that Hawaii has launched the most aggressive civil defense measures of any state, including, it now seems, the system that produced the false alert today.The Times Blame-Trump Unit chose not to quote the head of Hawaii’s emergency management agency, Vern Miyagi, who told the LA Times in November that he deems the North Korean bomb a “major, major concern” but an attack unlikely. “Any attack against us is suicide,” Mr. Miyagi allowed, because, the LA Times notes, America’s retaliation against North Korea would be far greater. As was our retaliation against Japan after Pearl Harbor. Then again, too, had Pearl happened on Mr. Trump’s watch, the New York Times would have blamed him rather than Tojo.

False Alarm at the Times

False Alarm at the Times

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