After months of berating the Associated Press over its investigation of the New York Police Department's Muslim surveillance program, the New York Post is suddenly tongue-tied. Following an article by the Associated Press which found that the six-year NYPD program has not yielded a single terrorism investigation, the paper hasn't published a single piece of coverage of the AP story.
The Associated Press uncovered the admission on August 21st:
In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday
The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames. [...]
But in a June 28 deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case.
“Related to Demographics,” Galati testified that information that has come in “has not commenced an investigation.”
It's not surprising that the NY Post is not covering the issue, given that it goes against the pro-surveillance narrative the paper has been trying to push for over a year. For example, in an editorial on November 22, 2011, the NY Post declared, “New Yorkers should be thankful that its police department has been collecting information and conducting surveillance of Muslim communities.” After all, they noted on December 26, “there is very good reason why anti-terror investigations often lead to the Muslim-American community.” The Post's editorial board penned pieces defending the program on February 13, March 14, March 22, March 30, and April 17.
In June, a Post editorial baselessly alleged that the Muslim surveillance program “led to the arrests of several would-be terrorists.” In July, the editorial board got more specific, claiming that, “the NYPD's Intel Unit has had a sterling record since it was established in the wake of 9/11, helping disrupt 14 terrorist plots against the city in the last decade.”
The commanding officer of the NYPD “Intel Unit” would seem to disagree that the Muslim surveillance tactic played a role:
“I never made a lead from rhetoric that came from a Demographics report, and I'm here since 2006,” he said. “I don't recall other ones prior to my arrival. Again, that's always a possibility. I am not aware of any.”
While the Post editorial board has never really been one for facts, failing to report a news piece that goes against your narrative takes pushing misinformation one step further.
UPDATE: The New York Post editorial board finally weighed in on August 26, largely utilizing semantic arguments against the Associated Press and failing entirely to rebut Galati's admissions that the surveillance program is ineffective. Many Post readers, however, were left with only one side of the story. As of August 28, a full week after the story broke, the paper's straight news sections had still not reported on Galati's testimony.