So when I wrote my post about that deceptive New York Times story about the Dobbs decision, I predicted that they would put the first four paragraphs on the front page and make sure the jump was before the sixth paragraph. That’s because the information that undercut the B.S. in the first four paragraphs began appearing in the sixth paragraph. Here was my prediction:

Moreover, this technique of starting out with a wildly misleading claim and then gradually backfilling the story with facts that totally undercut the initial claim has been around at least as long as I have had this blog (over 20 years) and almost certainly longer than that. I had a regular feature called The Power of the Jump that showed how the L.A. Times routinely fed you one version of events on the front page and tell you the inconvenient facts on the back pages, after the “jump”–where nobody reads.

My guess is, this Kantor/Liptak story will likely appear on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, with the first four paragraphs prominently featured. I bet the jump comes before the sixth paragraph and certainly before the ninth.

But I guess we’ll see.

We did.

Here’s a closer image of the story. Count the number of paragraphs. (And notice the other stories, which have plenty more than four paragraphs on the front page, showing that they are capable of putting eight paragraphs on the front page when they want to.)

Again: “My guess is, this Kantor/Liptak story will likely appear on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, with the first four paragraphs prominently featured. I bet the jump comes before the sixth paragraph and certainly before the ninth.”

Every bit of this was deliberate and planned.

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