Times Change: Inside the New York Times’ Heated Reckoning With Itself
nymag.com
nymag.com
Huge job cuts. Many journalists are now doing work of multiple positions in many places especially online media. New York Times has reduced the number of their total editors in the last 10 years for example. Every major online media had layoffs comparable to 10% of their total workforce in the last 5 years. It affects mid level journalists the most so there are more interns now.
Most of the jobs have been concentrated geographically. Whatever people say, environment changes how they act and what they believe in the most, likely to report.
There isn't enough exclusive content. Any big announcement or what rich people say can be read on social media by directly following their account. Why buy a NYT subscription for that?
There are thousands of big YouTubers reading the latest news from NYT to their subscribers and taking NYT's cut if they actually do something exclusive and costly.
News has become an entertainment commodity for people. The vast explosion of content means fewer people are willing to pay for less but greatly researched content compared to more content and noise.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/20/u-s-newsroo...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
A business that unfortunately has lost its viability, which is how we've ended up in this current predicament.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times...
"It has hired hundreds of journalists to staff a newsroom that is now 1,700 people strong — bigger than ever. Its stock has risen fourfold since Trump took office, and the Times has consolidated its Trump bump into a business that includes Serial Productions, the podcast juggernaut; Audm, the audio-translation business; and a TV show based on the Times series “Modern Love” that was filming its second season this summer, until a COVID-19 false positive on-set forced it to halt shooting. More than a million people subscribe to its Crossword and Cooking apps alone, and the company has been able to weather the pandemic in part because it now has more cash on hand—$800 million—than at any point in its history."
People pay for quality. It's why people still pay for services like HBO instead of watching free content on youtube.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-t...
That's only for digital which is well expected to grow. They still have to catch up to their historical revenue.
or in addition to
It doesn't have more revenue than it did a decade and half ago.
In 2000, total revenue was $3B+ [1]
In 2019, total revenue was $1.8B [2]
[1] https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2020/06/2000_Annual_Report.... [2] https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2020/04/Final-2019-Annual-R...
Helps explain why they dislike Google/FB so much.
It's a fundamentally different approach to advertising compared to what Google and FB are doing.
I think the problem is more that it's harder to quantify a carefully crafted brand campaign, and easier for middle-managers to look at a chart of click-through return rates and make decisions based on that.
I see this as the ability to test and measure beating out a better method that is less quantifiable. Basically the same thinking that leaves us with policies like No Child Left Behind where education has shifted from learning to test taking yet people are still under the impression they are the same thing.
Under these conditions it becomes unnecessary for someone to do the basic legwork of seeking out stories and curating them, no? Interpreting the stories of course does require someone’s time and energy, but for example there would be no need to go and investigate what is happening with the earthquake rescue because the first responders could effortlessly share their thoughts/experiences, the person in charge could instantly add their voice to the info stream telling everyone what the clean up/rescue plans are, etc. What role would a newspaper play in a setup like this?
Now, we aren’t there yet. We are not a hive mind and sharing what we are witnessing takes time and effort. A first responder isn’t going to stop and tweet about what’s going on. And the even bigger hurdle is consuming this much information. That problem hasn’t been solved yet. But we are closer to that than not: Twitter and Reddit allow regular people to share what they are seeing: earthquakes, protests, awards ceremonies, graduations. Curation will only get better. Whereas before only the select few had a voice because it was expensive, now almost anyone can broadcast to a huge swath of humanity.
In other words, "and then a miracle occurs". I don't see how this requirement could ever be met in general. For particular cases (like first responders at an emergency being able to directly feed what they are seeing and doing), perhaps.
The name of this aggregator is journalist.
Take - for example - the question:
"Did Trump ask the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton in 2016".
The direct quote is this:
"Russia, if you are listening I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."[1].
That led to "Russian officials began to target email addresses associated with Hillary Clinton’s personal and campaign offices “on or around” the same day Donald Trump called on Russia to find emails that were missing from her personal server"[2]
Turns out that people disagree very strongly about what that means[3].
[1] https://youtu.be/-b71f2eYdTc?t=20
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-asked-russia-to-...
That's because brain interfaces in the same general category already exist. Much less sophisticated, of course, but as the saying goes, that's just an implementation detail. :-)
Most of the big successes have been involved "reading" brain signals and using them to control things like the modular prosthetic limb or speech synthesis.
In contrast, it seems like most of the "write" stuff has been comparatively crude (e.g., phosphenes in visual areas), though the somatosensory stuff (also for the modular limb) is pretty neat. Have I missed something?
I'm am not trying to say gatekeeping information platforms would solve this or is even morally correct - I am just trying to demonstrate the downsides of such a system that lets the floodgates open to content creation with lax moderation. if you want some semblance of truth and accuracy in the media people consume, it doesn't hurt to have some bounds on what is an acceptable source of news (again with caveats)
I imagine that having some sort of reputation system might eventually be the answer. After all “is john@example.com a liar?” would also be instantly accessible information. But again we know there are lots of powerfully people today who are dishonest and yet there is little consequence for them because enough people like the lies to prop them up. I don’t see that changing.
A buddy was a photographer for a very well respected newspaper. In a grand cost-cutting measure the newspaper simply bought all the reporters iPhones and fired all the photographers.
The reporters are now expected to take photos for their own articles "Because iPhones make that really easy".
At Tronc, they had an all hands shortly after buying the NY Daily News. A staffer on the call said “we’re ‘New York’s picture paper’ but our equipment is all old. When can we get new cameras?” On the call, the execs said NYDN is losing money, so it will have to get profitable first. Then a few months later, they fired all photographers and social media people.
https://petapixel.com/2018/07/26/ny-daily-news-cuts-all-phot...
The New York Times is as partisan in its readership as MSNBC or Fox(!!).
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m...
The audience tells you the message. There's a reason no one calls Fox left-wing, or NYT right-wing.
That article talks about the reader's partisanship, not the actual content or particular news org.
Yes, that's what the parent said.
You will see instantly how opinion/intersectionalist/narrative it is now relative to then.
It used to be Cable News, now it's Cable Opinion.
The article points to this: there is an ideological war in the NYT that speaks to their bottom line:
"There’s still this huge gap between what the staff and audience and management want. The audience is Resistance Moms."
There's also a huge gap between editorial and news at the NYT, apparently, they don't like each other.
There are also different editors for each side - there is effectively 2 'Top Editors' so it's a weird dynamic.
To be fair though - historically, papers were always very biased, usually in the names of their owners. Rich dudes would buy papers to slander their political opponents. So a mix of crude facts and the polity stabbing each other in the back.
It's not like NYT can't publish bias; it has the Opinion section. NYT has grown into a media empire and is pumping out more content in more areas than ever before. Why not just create a new "woke" section, where progressives are given more reign over what to publish and in what tenor?
The erosion of journalistic standards in Newsroom and Opinion will ultimately bring about its downfall. Those standards are the reason why so many people subscribe. If the standards fall away, eventually some other outlet will come along upholding those standards and siphon away the subscriber base.
Marshall McLuhan anticipated the change when he said the medium is the message. What he meant is that the UI and dynamics of each media format determines what kind of dialogs are possible.
Typographical media encouraged history, background, and timeless reflection. Television changed that by chopping news into 30 second pieces, with no background understanding required, infrequent depth, and a change of topic after every 3 stories for a message from our sponsor, after which you'd return to something completely different.
Neil Postman explains it in his classic 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. News has become entertainment. Entertainment has become trivia and indulgences.
https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/5/8/15440292/donald-t...
"Person X did Y on Z date" is a perfectly fine information properly residing in the news section. Writing about what the consequences of Y are very easily leaves the purely factual space once Ys consequences reach a certain complexity.
That may seem antiquated now, with an unlimited amount of opinion readily available on social media or advocacy websites.
It’s tempting to think that their real value was always the reporting itself, but then how do we explain why technologies like the internet (and even TV before that) have seemed to massively disrupt their business model?
I have $52 for 52 weeks here as a subscription option, then $9.95/mo.
(https://store.wsj.com/shop/us/ca/wsjcass21/?trackingCode=aaq...)
> In 2018, a group of data scientists at the Times unveiled Project Feels, a set of algorithms that could determine what emotions a given article might induce. ... “Hate drives readership more than any of us care to admit,” one employee on the business side told me.
Sounds like the exact same feedback-optimized gradient-descent optimization for engagement that is biting social media in the ass is affecting them, too.
If it is OK for media to report news with a bias, then will that accelerate the echo chambers across the political spectrum where news media only report on angles they favor?
Just wanted to raise this for discussion.
But there is a huge difference between those who try to be unbiased, and those who don't.
BTW, what are good examples of journalists being honest about their biases?
However, I must say that I'm not subscribed to any newspapers, and the main reason I've chosen to do so is that newspapers can:
- Work for political and business moguls by offering crowd manipulation as a service
- Work for ad buyers by trying to optimise engagement
- Work for subscribed readers by trying their best to provide quality information
Any of those is a valid business I guess, but I'm only interested in the latter. And newspapers try to sell me the third option without dropping the others. It's true that if something's free you are the product, but in this case they're trying to both make me the product and make me pay. Not cool.
Also you are throwing out the baby with the bath water, just because news is funded by the rich doesn't mean every little mundane article they publish is biased. Oftentimes the facts are there, but the analysis or framing is biased. It's still probably more accurate than trying to get all your news via Twitter or something.
What would the baby be in this case?
News are not fundamentally important to me, at least not to the point where I'd want to get them regardless of quality. The absolute crushing majority of news I read don't require or cause any action on my part.
Of course I'd like to be informed of current events, developments in politics or international news; but no information is better than wrong information - my alternative would never be social media, it's just the absence of general news.
My views might seem extremely pessimistic, but they're rooted in two facts:
1 - I am yet to see any piece of news related to my area of expertise where information is accurate. I should assume that it's the same for all areas, and mine isn't a weird exception.
2 - I am the son of a journalist, and happen to have close friends that work daily with press. Insider views on the journalism business can rapidly turn you into a cynic.
If I started a news site, I would target the audience with bigger pockets and more comfortable with subscribing to online services (many people are resistant). That would be people living in expensive cities.
Even if you are a non-profit, you are still beholden to your donators. Mozilla can't go ape shit on Google.
Ethically, is it okay to be biased towards one party (esp as a journalist) when that partys positions are objectively projective, dishonest, and baseless across senior party members, senior partisan journalists in the parties favor, and dutifully documented over the years?
It seems like the NYT's decision to print Senator Cotton's conservative opinion piece was a poorly executed attempt to compensate for their prevailing liberal bias. It's a good idea, but I think they should solicit articles that might actually be convincing to the paper's reader base rather than easily-attacked incendiary pieces with glaring factual errors.
Opinion pieces are a special case, though. For non-opinion articles, I'd prefer that papers strive to lay out the facts as objectively as they can and leave the conclusions to the readers. Their bias will still show up in which stories they choose to promote, which is why I think it's important to get news from at least a few different sources with different biases. I use the opinion section as a rough guide to identifying a paper's editorial biases. Although it may contain articles that diverge from the paper's views, there is usually a clear trend.
If newspapers try to push back on those lies they get accused of being biased. At that point it is a very thin line between publishing the truth, and pushing one side of the story.
I read Tom Cotton’s op ed about civil unrest in the US and then Regina Ip’s op ed about similar issues in Hong Kong. I’m struggling to understand why anyone would think Cotton’s piece needs the post-publication disclaimer and the other does not. A clear double standard seems to be present.
I haven't read either article (because I'm not a subscriber), but I gather that the former is advocating using the US military to put down civil unrest in the US, and the other is defending the actions of Hong Kong police to put down civil unrest in Hong Kong.
If you suppose the principle being applied is very broad, something like "no support of any state action against civil unrest should ever be published," then that principle does seem to be applied inconsistently. But that seems very unlikely to be the principle NYT is purporting to have.
Somebody was murdered at a protest, and two bullet-points the NYT splashes with are "blame the victim" context hits because the deceased was on the "wrong" side.
It should not be necessary to visit a toxic site like Breitbart to get a balanced diet, but at the moment as an NYT reader I feel it is.
I was surprised to read that the opinion section garners 20% of the reads despite being 10% of the content. I personally avoid the opinion section because it feels impotent; the republicans control the government and indignant opinions change nothing about that.
A colleague at a hip American energy-tech startup tells me that this is the new normal for zoomers (<26 years old) in the workplace. "Speaking their mind" at all times on chat when it would be absolutely inappropriate for them to do so in person, no awareness of or care for the existing hierarchy. This meshes badly with boomers and gen-x'rs who implicitly expect a much higher degree of formality, and react in unpredictable ways to insubordination or feeling challenged. It's only going to get worse as the generational shift widens.
> As a “big S” Socialist [...] I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests. [1]
[1] Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-t...
Like the great houses of Game of Thrones fighting a huge civil war, while an unstoppable army of wights readies invasion from the north.
Perhaps one can throw around accusations of bias in economics and politics easily, but our own world squabbles in internecine insular conflict while Global Warming, Species Depletion, and other major threats loom.
If your "side" denies the existence and threat of those and calls those "liberal" issues, then it taints the entire "side" it represents.
The denialism of global warming the fundamental argument to "reality has a liberal bias". Until the right accept the basics of rationalism and science, "centrist" media should appear liberally biased to the right wing zealots of our time.
It's also the reason I subscribed to the NYT - just to support the podcast.
Tucker Carlson is a despicable human being, utterly without guile or integrity or good faith.
Can you explain this? I don’t particularly like him and have only seen a few clips here and there, but I am surprised anyone might have such a strong reaction.
See also https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/buffalolawreview/vol6...
Right message, wrong person.
Journalism is in crisis but it's not money, there's more journalists today than there ever has been. More budget than ever before. More journalistic freedom than ever before. This freedom isn't the problem. The problem is that political activists are becoming journalists, this occurs at the same time where a political ideology is in their death throes.
USSR collapsing was a huge blow to the left-wing but worse China's free trade zones success is undeniable. Shenzen went from tiny town to over 10 million people because of capitalism. The free trade zones in China resulted in hyper globalization and all the 'problems' from China is because they adopted capitalism. In 2004, China made a huge change, they recognize private property.
Communism is dead, China has been shifting toward capitalism. Obviously you can't immediately switch to capitalism. Who are the remaining communists? Cuba? North Korea? Vietnam? Laos? Venezuela? Spain? Greece?
Not only is communism as dead as ever and it's leading to communist political activists taking over some journalistic positions and pushing communism. The problem is that they keep getting caught and rebranding. Marxists, collectivists, communists, socialists, postmodernists, etc. They go by many names and all propose the same thing.
The conflict in the NYTimes is that journalism tends to lean left and they certainly dont have any right-leaning viewpoints. So the conflict arises where moderate left-wing collides with the communist journalists.
Why is everyone a racist? Because communism requires a classless society and intersectionality demands this.
Why is Russia the big bad evil people trying to ruin everything? They are the ones who are anti-communist.
But let's talk about other so-called trump 'lies'. What about the continued doubts by the NYT that there would soon be news about a working coronavirus vaccine at the end of October, early November? What about the Steele Dossier that is now known to have been paid for by Russia (which Trump said at the beginning, but was claimed to be a lie)? What about the forced firing via threat of withholding aide of the Ukrainian prosecutor by Joe Biden, who denied being involved with his son's business dealings in the Ukraine? We were told that was lies, but there is indisputable DKIM evidence that an e-mail from Burisima to Hunter Biden thanked him for meeting his father while he was in office (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim). Are those lies too?
Sure Trump lies, like any other politician. But sometimes he tells the truth, and the truth is so ludicrous, that it seems like lies, but when it finally comes out that it was true, we all sit and say to ourselves... maybe we should believe the guy. But I mean... continue on with the denial, you'll just turn more formerly anti-Trump people into pro-Trumpers.
Like I said though... Keep going. People like you have converted me from a never Trumper to a Trump supporter. And people like you have converted my aunt, a former Obama-supporting liberal, into avid pro-Trumpers. Honestly, from my perspective, I say keep going on and do whatever it is you do. It'll just make more people like me.
It’s not my job to think for you. And are you really trying to use reverse psychology to get me to argue with you? You are spewing conspiracy theories straight out of 4chan and Trump’s Twitter feed. You have lived under Trump for almost four years and you still support him? And I’m supposed to attempt to convert you back? No thanks, I have better things to do than to argue with people who refuse to look at look at reality unless it’s through the walls of their conspiracy theory bubble. Best of luck to you and your aunt. I hope you find some inner peace. I suspect that if Internet comments bother you enough to switch political affiliations that you need some of it.
This should be the modus operandi of most internet discussions. Well said.
So your defense of “Trump lies constantly” is “not absolutely every thing he says is a lie”, which is true, but man, that’s a really weak defense. Congrats, you set the bar low enough that he can get over it, but maybe having to set that bar so low is a problem.
The Steele dossier includes information from Russian sources. It was not "paid for" by Russia.
No one has argued that Hunter Biden was not being paid because he was a Biden. The question was whether it led to improper behavior on the part of Joe Biden. That email proves nothing. It's entirely plausible that Hunter Biden got this guy an invite to some social function where shook hands with the Vice President. This is also entirely ignoring the fact that the firing of the prosecutor wasn't some sort of one off idea that Biden came up with on his own. There are independent speeches by all sorts of people from 6 years ago that complain about the corruption of the prosecutor in question, which makes this whole point moot. The prosecutor was fired for not investigating the company that hired Hunter Biden.
Like most liars, Trump isn't inventing everything out of thin air, but he misrepresents so often and so much that you can't draw any useful conclusions from anything he says.
Trump said there would be news of a vaccine. Obviously, it won't be available by November. If you listened to Trump or Pence, you'd know that the US arranged for a working vaccine to be delivered by December or January, not November.
> The question was whether it led to improper behavior on the part of Joe Biden. That email proves nothing. It's entirely plausible that Hunter Biden got this guy an invite to some social function where shook hands with the Vice President.
And indeed, that would actually make Joe Biden's claim that he had no involvement with his son's business dealings a lie. Biden could have been honest and said, I met a few of my son's friends but we never discussed business. However, he didn't. He unequivocally stated that he had absolutely no knowledge of his son's business dealings and had no interaction with anyone from Burisima. That is a lie.
> The prosecutor was fired for not investigating the company that hired Hunter Biden.
Then why did the new prosecutor immediately drop charges and investigations against Burisima? if this was the reason he was fired and replaced, shouldn't the new prosecutor then take up the charges?
Sorry for the late reply. Hacker News has partially shadow banned me for not toeing the party line.
Literally in USA today today my man: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/11/10/we-d...
Quote: When the FBI obtained the dossier in September 2016, compiled by a former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, Comey told lawmakers he was unaware Steele's primary source was a suspected Russian agent.
A Russian agent is someone paid by Russia. Hence the dossier was sourced from misinformation spread by a paid Russian agent.
You're moving the goalposts. You original said the report itself was "known to have been paid for by Russia".
It's plainly false that the report was paid for by Russia and your attempt to assert this as an indisputable fact by prefixing it with "known to" makes it doubly disingenuous.
This particular claim isn’t as bad as the Charlottesville lie, but Trump didn’t say that COVID is a hoax — he said;
> ”Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.”
> ”One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”
The next day when asked about it;
> Trump: No, no, no. “Hoax” referring to the action that they take to try and pin this on somebody, because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them, not — I’m not talking about what’s happening here; I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the hoax. That’s just a continuation of the hoax, whether it’s the impeachment hoax or the “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax. This is what I’m talking about. Certainly not referring to this. How could anybody refer to this? This is very serious stuff.
But what the media reports is that Trump called nazis good people (he said exactly the opposite) and that Trump called COVID a hoax (he said exactly the opposite). I think these lies upsets a lot of people and drive a lot of support to Trump who otherwise wouldn’t support him.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/democratic-ad-twists-trump...
Gotcha.
You don't convince people to stop telling the truth with your cute little nonsense about turning people pro-trump. On election day, this year, he claimed victory before all the votes were counted. If you support that, you don't support democracy. Nothing else compares.
Every time a right wing tries to say the "media" is unfair I ask for a single example and they always fail. 100% of the time. All just a bunch of whiners IMO.
But sure, please take pride in your support of Trump, who peddled the racist conspiracy theory that Obama isn't a citizen. Good for you champ.
They are only left-leaning in specific center-right ways?
Neoliberalism isn't a left ideology.
And yes exactly what you wrote in your second paragraph.
You can be pedantic all you want. But 90%+ of America’s won’t follow what you’re saying if you’re saying at best NYT is center right.
You also likely won’t be able to have the conversation without seeming smug (or insert other related adjectives) either. Likely hurting any discussion you have.
At which point, any pt of discussion is defeated.
Neoliberalism isn't a left view in America, either. While it's true that only since Trump it's been somewhat displaced by vague mix of kleptocracy and protectionism as the economic policy of the dominant faction of the Republican Party, it remains widely shared between both parties, there's nothing left, even in American terms, about neoliberalism.
> But 90% of people in America will have no clue what you mean when you say things like that.
If I rephrased neoliberalism as “corporate capitalism”, they'd understand it perfectly.
We can all agree that “Shining Path” Maoist rebels view the NYT as to the right of center...
It absolutely blows my mind that people can say something like "CNN is relatively unbiased", and yet nearly 100% of every (political) story follows the same pattern: In the last four years I don't remember a single CNN headline that was positive of Trump. Of course you can say that he's a complete screw up that never once in four years did a single positive thing, but if you're honest with yourself, you know that's not true. The same way that in the next four years they won't publish a single negative article about Biden, but that doesn't mean he's a saint that never once did anything that could be reported on negatively. That people can't see how insanely biased these sources are really blows my mind. The proof is there for you to see - how many months or years will it take before you see a single negative story about Biden?
"A print headline on Tuesday’s front page for an article about President Trump’s statement addressing last weekend’s mass shootings has added to a continuing debate over how news organizations cover his administration.
Times editors were concerned that the initial headline — “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism” — did not contextualize Mr. Trump’s message on Monday and decided to change it for later editions to “Assailing Hate but Not Guns.”"
This strikes me as an open acknowledgement that negative spin is a hard requirement when reporting on Donald Trump at the New York Times.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/reader-center/trump-mass-...
It came out harder (to the point of abuse) on Trump because Trump is from NYC (big plus), major player in revitalization of Manhattan (big plus), big in pop media industry (umm, sort of plus) but was everything the UWS wasn’t (how dare that Republican Queens lowlife). If there ever was a use case for the word “intersectionality”, it would be the NYT view of Donald. And the NYT didn’t navigate those choppy seas well.
I think this is key. The journalist Matt Taibbi has been chronicling this and writing detailed analysis of the trend that these 'center-left' publications became suddenly 'far left' (culturally, not economically, if you ask me), very hyperpartisan coastal establishment DNC. Most importantly, the incentive structures within these organizations have found ways to 'weed out' those who don't toe the line: Trump out at any cost.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not lamenting Trump being out. I'm lamenting journalistic integrity being out. It's now fully acceptable to wage a war with a newspaper, something we criticized Fox and the Murdoch papers for doing. But the real loss here is the independent spirit; an independent mind holds opinion even if everyone in the room downvotes them, if they think that opinion is correct and supported with reason. Instead, what we have is a sort of herd mentality where the group decides what's good and bad.
That tech people were hired in droves and this is the result, I find quite scary given how influential young tech companies have become.
Most recently the Times wrote an article that asks the question, on the topic of the beheading in France of the teacher, did France do it to themselves? In reference to the Mohammed cartoons and its secular tradition. Additionally the Times seemed to support suppressing The NY Post's account based on their Biden article.
^^ Both of these examples would never be tolerated by the ethical journalists of yesteryear, when seeking the truth, no matter how ugly took precedence over hyper-partisan The End Justifies the Means attitude being seen here.
But it really comes down to money, doesn't it. As Taibbi documents, the Fox News model has spread to MSNBC and CNN, and of course the Times and Washington Post. Cater to your base is more profitable an idea. That's the real reason the Cotton thing was removed and an editor fired; they feared they'd upset their reader base - their clients.
When Trump is gone, what will the NYT do when an African-American is killed in a police matter? How will they spin incidents of unrest?
The Times has gone way past the pale in terms of left/right. They are now in the same boat MSNBC/CNN/NBC/etc. are in (the opposite boat than the one occupied by Fox/Breitbart/etc.) They won't be considered 'news' much.
Will they try to tack more to center, or go whole-hog on the left side?
I didn't do a thorough search, but a brief search didn't turn up much difference between how the Times covered such things in the two or three years before Trump (BLM started in mid-2013) and how they covered them after. I'd expect they will continue to cover them the same way after Trump.
Comparing the times to breitbart shows how ignorant you are. Breitbart peddled conspiracy theories (seth rich, dem voter fraud etc) while the times reports... the news.
NYT's slant is currently ammo for "class reductionists"[1], but if they were to enage in some of the dirtbag left stuff of the sort that Putin likes to sponsor, they could make the MSNBC Moms uncomfortable from both sides of the political spectrum (!), and antipodal-ly restore some bipartisan credibility.
[1]: https://www.salon.com/2020/07/25/how-calling-someone-a-class... (much better than "Salon" would usually indicate)
---------
The article puts James Bennet in a kinda good light, but that is wrong as the Opinion section is trash trolling of boomers and he made it worse.
It would be bad business sense in the short term, but they should admit that "columns" from the same people until they are long past being out of ideas are superfluous in the internet age, and keep the opinionated stuff to the magazine long-form investigative piece (like the magazine).
Basically keep the emotions at a minimum by maintaining an attention-span-requiring vs outrage-unleashing trade-off.