On Thursday afternoon, the New York Times published a triple-bylined news story about Kamala Harris having narrowed Donald Trump's polling lead in the presidential campaign. That story, at the time of publication, included a quote from Anna Ayala, 58, of San Jose, saying, "I'm a Democrat, but I've changed my mind after everything that's happened with Joe Biden's administration [...] I mean, the border situation is out of control." Within an hour the quote had been scrubbed from the story; a little later, the following correction appeared:
The Times removed comments from one voter in an earlier version of this article after learning that the person had been convicted in an extortion scheme in which she made fraudulent claims.
That's putting it lightly. As sharp-eyed early readers noticed, Ayala is an infamous serial fraudster—she has a Wikipedia page!—who has basically dedicated her adult life to filing specious lawsuits, including a 2005 hoax in which she stashed a severed human finger in the bowl of chili she ordered at a Wendy's and then claimed to have found it there. You could learn about this from the Times' own coverage of the ensuing criminal case, at the end of which Ayala received a nine-year prison sentence.
How did the Times come to publish a quote from one of the very few living people famous only for being a brazen liar? A spokesperson for the paper directed me to the correction, which doesn't really answer that. The Times/Siena College poll at the heart of the story asks respondents whether they're open to being contacted by a reporter to discuss "the issues in this survey." It's possible that the Times reporters—Shane Goldmacher, Ruth Igielnik, and Camille Baker—simply went down the list of people who said yes to this, picked a few names, and unwittingly came up with one of America's most famously untrustworthy individuals.
In any case, this is an instance in which some quick pre-publication googling by an editor would have been an absolute lock to avert embarrassment. The first result under Anna Ayala's name leaves no doubt as to what her deal is.
Beyond that, there's another question: Why in particular did the Times, once it learned of Ayala's identity, bother to delete what she said? The quote was already junk no matter who said it or how disreputable they might be; it was an exemplar of a cynical and dismally familiar routine in which Times politics reporters shop for people who'll say some version of "I'm a Democrat but [verbatim Republican talking point]." Elsewhere in the same story, 29-year-old Los Angeles contractor Eddie Otzoy says he's switching from Democrat to Trump supporter in this election because of Trump's response to the July 13 assassination attempt at one of his rallies: "The way he handled it after the fact, the way he pretty much stood up in defiance of what happened, kind of gave me that sense of pride that I hadn’t felt when it came to our country in a while." How many millions of Americans have long internalized the knowledge that you can get your name in the paper by saying this bullshit?
What mattered to the Times wasn't whether Ayala's quote was true in any verifiable sense. After all, anybody can say anything about how they voted four years ago and how they'll vote this year and why—which is why the exercise is worthless in the first place. What mattered was whether the quote could be offered as representative of some numerically or politically significant body of voters—in this case, those who affirm media-centrist ideas about the Immigrant Menace and the absolute political necessity of always being even bigger assholes about it.
The most authentically representative thing about Ayala's quote is also what makes it ill-suited to the paper's purposes: It came from the mouth of a full-of-shit grifter and public nuisance, the breathing incarnation of post-Trump Republican politics. They should have left it in.
