The NYT’s White House Correspondent Does the Democrats’ Work for Them

By Becket Adams

Sunday, January 04, 2026

 

We need to talk about Peter Baker.

 

The New York Times reporter has set himself apart in an industry crowded with bad actors and slipshod journalists by becoming something of a propaganda savant, working in partisan agitprop the way Michelangelo worked in oils and Donatello in marble.

 

No matter the situation or players involved, if there’s a story involving Republicans or other elements within the Trump administration, we can always rely on the Times’s chief White House correspondent to use his megaphone to frame the event according to whatever the current Democratic narrative is, no matter the facts.

 

Consider, for example, how Baker chose to characterize the Trump administration’s recent decision to impose travel restrictions on five censorial European technocrats.

 

“Trump administration sanctions five foreigners it considers at odds with American values: Russians? Chinese? Iranians? No, Europeans who fight disinformation and online abuse but stand accused by Trump officials of censorship,” Baker wrote.

 

Putting aside for a moment that the Trump administration currently has travel and banking restrictions on Russians, Chinese students and CCP members, and Iranians, let’s focus for a minute on how Baker chose to portray the Europeans at the center of these travel restrictions. From Baker’s framing, we see an image of selfless servants whose greatest desire is to protect the public square for the good of humanity. But if one actually reads up on these Eurogoons — former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate Imran Ahmed, Global Disinformation Index cofounder Clare Melford, and HateAid’s Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg — one quickly learns that their disdain for First Amendment–style freedom of speech is virtually unrivaled in the West, and would be compatible with the draconian practices of modern China.

 

Breton is one of the architects of Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which affixes a bayonet to the EU’s online content moderation efforts. In December, the EU fined Twitter/X $141 million for violating its social media regulations. Imran Ahmed leads efforts to pressure social media platforms and online organizations to censor users more aggressively or remove them entirely, including a campaign to get Google to ban The Federalist from its advertising platform. Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Ahmed held secret meetings with its London staff to discuss broader efforts to deplatform specific individuals. Internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate also show that Ahmed listed “kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top goal — not reform it, not limit it, not censor it, but “kill” it. Clare Melford likewise makes it her business to blacklist U.S. websites that don’t strictly comply with EU regulations. The GDI created a “dynamic exclusion list,” which it shares with ad companies, labeling news sites as “high-risk” for “disinformation.” Melford claimed in an interview that the GDI’s defunding list has had a “significant impact” on ad revenue for targeted sites, effectively starving them financially. Her top ten “riskiest” outlets are nearly all right-leaning, including the New York Post, the Daily Wire, and The Federalist. Reason magazine and RealClearPolitics are also in the top ten. Laughably enough, among the sites marked as having “the lowest level of disinformation risk” are NPR, ProPublica, and HuffPost.

 

Meanwhile, Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg are with HateAid, a Germany-based organization designated as one of the DSA’s “trusted flaggers,” responsible for reporting and monitoring speech that EU authorities deem undesirable.

 

These are people who believe it’s the government’s duty to police speech, by force if necessary. In other words, no friends of the American way.

 

Yet, by Baker’s account, the Trump administration has chosen to move against veritable Mother Teresas, all while turning a blind eye to Iran, Russia, and China. It would be one thing if Baker were mistaken about just this one issue, but this sort of statement is part of a pattern, with his preferred political party almost always the beneficiary.

 

There’s the time Baker compared the Trump White House handpicking its traveling press pool to Vladimir Putin expelling Kremlin pool reporter Yelena Tregubova (who, in 2004, may have also been targeted in a bomb explosion outside her apartment). Or the incident in 2020 when Baker reported, then quietly deleted, the insane claim that President Trump was editing videos from a private location, using green screen technology to make it appear as if he was on the South Lawn of the White House. Or the moment when Baker, eager to criticize the Trump administration for deploying National Guard troops to the nation’s capital, cited false information to claim that the deployment had hurt local businesses.

 

“With troops sent by Trump into the streets of Washington, reservations to restaurants for this year’s Restaurant Week are 24% lower than those during Restaurant Week 2024,” he tweeted on August 26, linking to a since-corrected Times story whose authors later realized that they looked at year-over-year data that incorrectly compared Restaurant Week in 2024 to not Restaurant Week in 2025.

 

Baker still hasn’t bothered to delete or add a correction to his online claim.

 

Or my personal favorite, from 2024: “Biden Promised Calm After Trump Chaos, but the World Has Not Cooperated.”

 

How Baker secured a top position at the New York Times remains one of journalism’s great unsolved mysteries. The most likely explanation is that his grossly misinformed and transparently partisan reporting simply aligns with the Times’s values.