The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism
nymag.com
nymag.com
This is a very dangerous sentiment. If you look at the movements for abolition and Civil Rights, the most successful appeals were calling America to live up to her founding ideals.
However, it seems that many people are trying to effect change not through encouraging Americans to live up to their county’s ideals, but the shame them and guilt-trip them into doing it.
The problem is that guilt is a very poor long-term motivator. Think of you have a someone you are trying to do better. Are you more likely to succeed by telling them how horrible they are and how they have always been horrible and how their parents were horrible? Or do you tell them that they are a fundamentally good person and that they should try to do better in this area as well?
The shaming approach may feel for satisfying, but it is likely to create a strong backlash and and problems down the line.
Think about it, there is no denying that America has been fabulously successful for white people. Now do you tell white people that their success was because of the ideals and open society, and they should cultivate them more, or do you tell them that their success was due to oppression of brown/black people? And if you tell them the later, what will you say when others also come and agree with what you are saying and say that we should get back to oppressing brown and black people in earnest, since that what our success was built on?
Shame and guilt-tripping on a national level is a fundamental part of modern non-violent protest in the US: https://www.history.com/news/selmas-bloody-sunday-50-years-a...
Both are true. Part of cultivating the ideals and open society is being aware of the artifacts of racial prejudice and privilege that still influence it. One can accept that white privilege exists without interpreting it as a blanket condemnation of all white people.
You're pretending that my comment was arguing that oppression of black people is the only reason for any success by any population, which would of course be an absurd and easily refuted claim, when it explicitly argues otherwise, as would be obvious from even a cursory reading of it in good faith.
You need to put a bit more effort into constructing your strawmen, this one was mostly hollow.
For a time, Italy was successful too, but they slipped. Why they slipped I'm not fully clear on.
Israel got USA support and investment, including military. That's about it. (You can repeat the same for e.g. South Korea, who are an even bigger success. For now.)
UK was a success (for a time) based off a huge empire and consequent innovation needed for war and to adapt for living in weird places, and to look like they own the world and not like a dark smudge of coal. Big cultural exports.
And lately it's only holding to its financial industry, boosted by the position of middleman between EU and US. No idea what will happen to it now. They cannot be industrial powerhouse anymore to rival China or Germany.
This is a great way to describe it. I usually check the NYTimes front page a few times a week. It’s really gone of the rails.
Headlines have gone from slightly biased journalism, to opinion pieces in disguise and it looks like every NYT reporter is trying to outdo each other.
I’m not naive enough to believe that any news source is truly unbiased, but the NYT appears to have given up any attempt to do so now.
Go to NYTimes.com and count the links you see "above the fold". On my monitor there are 7 non-opinion links. But there are 11, yes eleven!, opinion-section articles.
If you want to read "news" and not "opinions" these days it's impossible. Because flamebait opinions get all the clicks and generate all the revenue. I don't blame them for their choices. But I don't respect them either.
:(
And this is the newspaper that that published the Pentagon Papers!
In any event, I don't think the term was ever used to indicate a lack of editorial bias. Certainly the NYTs has never qualified if that's the meaning of the term.
Was there ever one then? And if not, then what did the term ever mean?
Before you answer, please consider the case of Walter Duranty and the NYTs covering up Soviet-lead genocide in Ukraine during the 1930s (the Holodomor, a term many Americans have never heard before.) It wasn't until 1990 that the NYTs came clean (https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-not...), more than half a century too late. Were they the newspaper of record in the interim period?
I consider "being the newspaper of record" to be an ideal. It is almost certain that anyone striving for the ideal will fail at times. Do I think the NYTimes ideals were lies when they written? No. I believe the organization tried as a whole. Even if individually or collectively they fell short at times.
But I don't think that is their ideal at this moment in time. Their new ideal is one of activism. Which I personally find disappointing.
They fail sometimes, but that's what I love about US journalism, it is very self-critical and publications call out each other for factual errors.
The way I see it, something as expansive as an entire country is doubtlessly a hyperdimensional matter. From any particular point of view, you can only glimpse one projection of that hyperdimensional mass. The projection you see is factual (insofar as any human perception can be factual) but it's nevertheless one of many factual projections.
Consider if you were a flatlander looking at a 2d projection of a cylinder. Depending on your perspective, that cylinder may appear to be a circle, or a rectangle. Both projections capture factual information about the true form of the object in question, but two flatlanders with different perspectives could perceive radically different projections of the same cylinder and could have a bitter dispute over who was right.
If there is an interesting idea underlying the linked opinion piece, the author is making a good job hiding it below cheap rhetoric.
...and then jumps to a ridiculous, unfounded relationship that somehow a piece about slavery = neo-Marxism. I had to read that sentence three times: "Surely he meant to elaborate. Surely..."
People with double-agendas always fell on themselves.
I agree, WSJ seems to have swung back a little. Strange times!
At least everyone agrees NYT is a rag now
What sells is the bait, the piece that confirms your thinking rather than challenges it.
A fair bit of education (see Yale / Harvard etc) is going down this path as well, especially outside the sciences I think.
We are also getting more articles that never even attempt to explain what the other viewpoint might be. I just read a super long article, some govt agency apparently targeting a local dance crew - without detail or context of the actual targeting of the crew (ie, a regulation calling them out by name?) or comment from the agency (ie, responding to complaints? Motivated by hate of dance? Targeting something else entirely).
HN treats it like it is some sort of objective, academic study
some commenters even use this opinion piece to complain that the NYT runs opinion pieces
Probably related to the modern polarization of the nation, though which is the chicken and which is the egg is hard to say.
Marxism does have a good answer to the original question of the piece: "How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another?" - Marxists argue that ideas can be progressive at one time, and become reactionary at a later stage of history. Ideas do not determine history, but are in general a reflection of class forces. When capitalism was progressive, in the founding days of the country, the ideas that upheld the system of private ownership were progressive ideas! The forces these ideas represent helped defeat monarchies and slavery. Today, advocates of the free market play the opposite role, of holding society back, because capitalism is in a deep crisis and socialism has become socially and technologically possible.
Well, quite a bit of it, yes. It takes some phenomenal doublethink to set out 'all men are created equal' as a basic principle during a war of independence, then enshrine slavery in the rule of law when it comes time to write an actual constitution.