Offtopic: I am a European, and I like to read quality journalism. Which do you recommend, a subscruption to Washington Post or NYT?
The opinion sections are of highly variable quality, as people here keep pointing out. And these have always escaped the objectivity ethic. I'd just avoid reading them.
what are European newspapers like then? tabloids?
None of which is to say that these are bad papers - they aren't. But the idea that you can stand back from partisan politics and report some kind of objective truth is more prevalent in European broadcast media: both the BBC and its private sector competitor ITV News, for example, do not aim for a particular political constituency (though, like the US papers, they're often criticised for their implicit positioning).
If tomorrow for some strange reason half of the UK decides that actually the old testament is right and we should demolish all the Egyptian statues in Kensington, that doesn't make the Guardian part of a war if they say that's ludicrous. It just makes them sensible.
the WSJ subsidizes a lot of bow-tie conservatives, but the NYT is also granting credibility to a lot of bankrupt lines of thought that have no actual real support in this country. Banning abortion has less than 20% support in the US, yet if you read the opinion pages of the NYT you could only think that both sides have roughly equal support.
Really newspapers shouldn't have opinion pages. It's literally the comments section of their newspaper. Just let journalists call a duck a duck, so then you don't need the opinion pages to point out that, maybe X is bad.
ban = 20%
limited = 50%
anything goes = 30%
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
So 70-30 for at least some form of restrictions on abortion.
If rtpg means banning abortion even when it would save the life of the mother or in cases of rape, it's true that few people support a ban that extreme.
But if rtpg means banning abortion except when it would save the life of the mother or in cases of rape, both sides do have roughly equal support.
NYT is more generic, but also has a higher volume of articles about everything under the sun. For learning about the American situation, I've found WaPo a good compromise.
I'd also recommend WSJ for a generally balanced business-centric outlook on America (their editorial and op-ed pages are basically "more tax cuts!" regardless of what is going on, but the reporting is good).
It's also far cheaper than any comparable subscriptions in my European country (Germany), at least for the first year.
Another alternative I want to mention is The New Yorker: It's something like 1 Euro per week for the actual print edition, and it's a beautiful magazine both in style as well as in its content.