The New York Times editorial board, “Will the Real Chris Dodd Stand Up? 1/7/10:

That coziness — especially the V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage he received from the now-defunct subprime lender, Countrywide Financial — is one of the reasons his state’s voters have turned against him. [Emphasis added]

The New York Times’s David Herszenhorn, “Senators Are Cleared of Ethics Complaints,” 8/7/09:

The committee noted that the Senate’s gift rules allow lawmakers to obtain loans provided they are made at terms available to the general public. And that seemed to be a crucial factor in its decision.

“The loans you received,” the committee wrote, “appear to have been available industry-wide to borrowers with comparable loan profiles.”

It’d be great if the editorial board at the New York Times read their own paper’s reporting.  According to both the New York Times and the Senate Ethics Committee, Dodd did not receive a “V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage.” He received on “at terms available to the general public.”

To be precise, when the Times editorializes that CT voters turned against him because he received a “V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage,” what they really must mean is that voters turned against him because Republicans and a lazy press accused him of receiving a special deal, when there was zero evidence to support it. It was a media swarm that had no bearing on the truth — a truth that even the New York Times reported in the end.