
NBC’s Jane Timm Writes Completely Unbalanced News on Arizona Election Audit
- NBC’s Jane Timm presents Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs as an objective authority, ignoring her many outrageous and extreme statements and related conduct
- Entire article misstates events, facts, in order to fit the mainstream narrative frame
- Timm only presents an unbalanced, partisan, unobjective view. Doesn’t bother to even explain the opposition’s theory of voter fraud
OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Indicted Outlet: Jane C. Timm | NBC News | Link | Archive
NBC’s Jane Timm wrote a news story about the Arizona audit of the 2020 election results that is filled with purposeful errors. While a reader might want to excuse those errors as ignorance, the pattern is clear that Timm is covering for extreme-left Katie Hobbs and the effort to delegitimize the Arizona Senate’s investigation into the election results.
Major Violations:
- Lying Headline
- Unbalanced
- Partisan
- Missing Context
- Bad Sources
Let’s start with the lying headline that Timm or Timm’s editors place on this story:
Maricopa County will need new voting machines after GOP’s audit, Arizona secretary of state says
Let’s do the same trick:
Katie Hobbs might be unstable, GOP official says.
Jane Timm is a biased partisan hack, anonymous tipster says.
NBC gives up on journalism, reader says.
This trick is a way to put opinion as the blaring headline, knowing that more people will read the headline than the story itself. It’s a cheap trick, and its designed to give one person, in this case radical left-wing Arizona official Katie Hobbs, the ability to define the story and set the narrative frame.
What would a more balanced and objective headline have looked like? Something like this:
Concerns raised over election machine integrity after outside handling
Disputed Arizona Ballot Recount Criticized by Democrat Secretary of State
But the critical difference is that it would present it as an active controversy with two views and not as one conclusory statement summed up by one side’s sole views.
In her lead paragraph, Timm says:
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said Thursday that the voting machines Republicans turned over to private companies as part of their audit of the 2020 election are no longer safe for use in future elections.
Note that Katie Hobbs is referred to by her title, and the Arizona Senate is referred to by their party. This is a partisan sleight of hand. The phrase “private companies” is also not entirely accurate either, since these are people with a delegated authority from the Senate to conduct the investigation. The Arizona Senate has not ‘turned over to private companies’ as much as they have hired a private company to come in and inspect the subpoenaed items. Timm is misusing words here in order to make the Arizona Senate seem reckless, and ultimately to validate Hobbs’ concerns.
Timm makes no mention that Hobbs has made many error-filled and wild speculations about the audit in order to shut it down, sending a letter to the Arizona Supreme Court begging them to shut things down because they might use the wrong color pens. [1]
Hobbs had made it quite clear all along that she was going to fight the audit as hard as she can, giving important context to the story where her complaints would likely be seen as a continued partisan complain campaign, and that Hobbs’ arguments are likely in bad faith. [2]
Indeed Hobbs sent in her own observer to the process, but tried to previously send in the same observer as a “journalist” but when he impersonated a journalist without credentials he was turned away from the recount arena. [3]
All of this context is missing from Timm’s article.
Katie Hobbs is also so deranged and unprofessional as a sitting elected official, that she refers to Trump voters as “nazis” and has a pattern history of making extreme-left commentary. [4][5] But again without this kind of context, which puts into question her ability to make an unbias and objective determination about the reliability of voting machines, the reader of Timm’s article would be left to think that Katie Hobbs is a balanced person.
Here is how Timm/NBC explains Hobbs:
“I have grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised and election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas’ control,” Hobbs wrote in the letter to the county’s mostly Republican Board of Supervisors, which oversees the county elections.
Again she carefully notes the Republicans and gives Hobbs the respect of a title, and removes the context of her partisan affiliation, and completely ignores all of Hobbs’ other bad faith actions to resist an audit, and to malign her political opponents.
Hobbs’ faith and love in democracy is powerful now that her preferred candidate won, but it’s certainly relevant to point out that prior to the election she was obviously less sure and was spinning voter fraud conspiracies of her own. [6]
In an often sharply worded letter, Joe Kanefield said Wednesday there’s no basis for Hobbs’ claims that President Trump and his administration are conspiring to undermine the timely delivery of ballots in Arizona. He called the complaint that Hobbs made “purely speculative,” saying she provided no evidence.
“Making accusations of criminal misconduct by the president and other federal officials based on mere conjecture undermines the integrity of our elections,” Kanefield said. And what makes it worse, he said, is that these are “coming from a ‘trusted source’ for election information,” referring to the fact that Hobbs is the state’s chief election official. [7]
Now Katie Hobbs wants to tell us that any kind of conspiracy theories are undermining Democracy itself. The outrageous overall hypocrisy is left out of Timm’s article. Instead, Timm makes Hobbs seem like a neutral observer with some concerns. By removing and omitting context to this story, you shape the conclusions of the reader. Without any information about Hobbs’ past actions, you can’t see the bad faith.
Timm then completely gives her opinion as fact by calling the entire recount effort “extraordinarily partisan.”
The audit itself is an extraordinarily partisan effort after Arizona Republicans spent months questioning the accuracy of President Joe Biden’s narrow win in the state while boosting former President Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen from him.
We previously fact-checked the Washington Post redefining words in order to prevent calling Biden a liar when he claimed a ‘bipartisan’ bill was bipartisan because some Republican voters somewhere supported it even though no elected Republican did. [8]
Here, of course an election audit is necessarily going to partisan. Is it ‘extraordinarily’ partisan? Is there any kind of objective measure of partisanship?
Polling shows voters in both parties believe there was large-scale systemic voter fraud. [9]
And when Timm says that it is a lie that the election was stolen, can she point to any serious investigation of those claims? Can she even honestly articulate what those claims are? The political left has done an expert job preventing any discussion of voter fraud allegations, preventing any investigation, suppressing any evidence, litigating out of court people with such claims, firing and hurting people who make such claims, shutting down entire social media accounts, groups and platforms because they make those claims, and then arrogantly saying there is nothing to see there.
It just seems odd to have such an obvious and heavy-handed cover-up of something that is allegedly so squeaky clean and legitimate.
If the election results were so self-evidently not defrauded, why is the political left calling anyone who questions it a domestic terrorist? Timm doesn’t even bother to explain because she’s not a journalist, and she doesn’t care about the truth of the matter, she just repeats what she’s told. She’s declared it a lie without even bothering to interview a single alleged witness of voter fraud. [10]
#ModernJournalism
#NBC
#JaneCTimm
Perhaps the most serious omission in this entire article, however, is that it never even attempts to explain the theory of voter fraud that the Arizona Senate is investigating. Here is the brief snippet in the piece that tries to mock that theory:
The recount operation has been dogged by controversy and conspiracy theories since Day One, as state and federal experts and law enforcement officials have questioned the legality and prudence of the auditors and their efforts. The Justice Department and election experts have warned that some of their proposed processes could violate federal law, while auditors’ searches for things like bamboo and secret watermarks have drawn scorn and mockery.
Timm is dissembling here because she calls it a ‘recount’ when, instead, it is more properly a ‘forensic audit.’ The difference being that in a recount there is simply a question of whether or not the ballots were properly counted. Said another way, a recount is asking whether they counted the ballots accurately, if the math works out. A forensic audit is an examination of the ballots themselves to see if they can determine whether unofficial, unauthorized, illegal ballots were added to the tabulation.
Many key areas such as Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, who on election night were originally reporting a Trump victory, had their counts stopped in the middle of the night, a surge of Biden ballots came out of the blue, and the results significantly changed.
A simple recount won’t change anything if there are illegal ballots added to the original count. But since Timm doesn’t explain that other then to mockingly reference bamboo and secret watermarks, and then even have the audacity to link to a Trevor Noah piece on the matter, is unprofessional.
People are not unreasonable to be suspicious and also not unreasonable to think that it might not be documented or admitted at the time, especially since the Democrat Party has a long history of voter fraud that took decades to document, including Lyndon Johnson’s election to the Senate, [11] and John Kennedy’s win over Richard Nixon in 1960. [12]
There are so many problems in Timm’s writing and reporting that it’s hard to capture them all here. Simply reprinting the press releases from extreme-left AZ Secretary of State Katie Hobbs would have more journalistic quality.
OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Bibliography:
1 ] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/soros-connected-az-sec-state-sends-letter-maricopa-audit-team-another-attempt-stop-audit-scared/
2 ] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/soros-clinton-connected-arizona-sec-state-katie-hobbs-preparing-fight-senate-audit-maricopa-county-rather-support-election-integrity/
5 ] https://www.rt.com/usa/506536-arizona-katie-hobbs-trump-tweet/
8 ] https://tgpfactcheck.com/washpost-redefines-words-to-avoid-calling-biden-a-liar/
10 ] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCekdKDk6d8opUrUEXtXD4XQ
11 ] https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/11/us/how-johnson-won-election-he-d-lost.html
12 ] https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/12/16/22176920/jfk-stolen-1960-election-chicago-illinois
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