ALEX BERENSON IS NOT AMUSED: In stealing my story today, the New York Times committed a serious breach of journalistic ethics (yes, that’s a thing). Is it, really? Plus:

I want to explain why what Times reporters Peter Baker and Emily Baumgaertner did today in stealing my Saturday scoop about the visits by a Parkinson’s specialist to the White House was so offensive – and not just to me.

For the Times didn’t merely steal my reporting, it appears to have tried to hide its theft. Their original story – available at the Internet archive called Wayback Machine – claimed the White House had released the visitor logs showing that Parkinson’s specialist Dr. Kevin R. Cannard has visited the White House at least eight1 times since summer 2023 “in response to a request from The New York Times.”

That line is an apparent effort by Baker and Baumgaertner to explain how they discovered the visits – which the Times reported as “Breaking News” – and why they happened to write the article now, two days after mine, rather than months ago.

In reality the Biden Administration’s visitor logs are public, online, and available to everyone at any time. The Times did not need to “request” them, it simply needed to go to whitehouse.gov and search them, as anyone can. And – after I pointed out that fact on X – the Times secretly edited the story to remove that line.

Stealth edits are kind of their thing.