I recently watched “How to Become a Tyrant” and they mentioned a NYT reporter in the 30s, the Moscow bureau chief IIRC, who was more or less bribed by Stalin* to write articles denying people were starving in Ukraine. He even won a pulitzer for the “reporting”. I don’t know that it was the start of “the decline” of the New York Times (and full disclosure: I subscribe) but the WMDs weren’t the first egregiously wrong reporting.

Searching for anything relating to NYT and Ukraine obviously gives a lot of more recent results but I found this Huffington Post article[1] that I think has enough background to point you in the right direction if you’re curious to learn more. And I think this[2] is the journalist’s wikipedia article.

Edit: It was Stalin he had a very friendly relationship with, not Lenin.

[1]https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5a15c588e4b0f401dfa7ecce

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

cf Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent_(film))

My opinion of the NYT plummeted when they doxxed Scott Alexander

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...

A personal favorite example of mine was the article “Recycling is Garbage” from 1996 that is chock full of misinformation and continues to do damage today. I wouldn’t be surprised if the article was sponsored by the plastics industry. (I’m speculating with zero proof, it just feels and smells like paid propaganda and corporate interests.) The online version has had orders of magnitude more readers than the excellent rebuttal at the time by the Environmental Defense Fund, but the NYT gave the author another platform to reprise his anti-environmental rants again six years ago, where he repeated the untrue talking points. There are a lot of real problems with recycling, some of them stemming from lack of buy-in and participation, and these NYT articles are fueling the anti-recycling sentiment with myths, undermining the will to improve the situation. The article’s pushing and glorifying of throwing things away is even doing damage to the idea that we should reduce consumption of single use plastic packaging, which is far more important than trying to recycle plastic.

The answer probably depends on the specific geographic and political distance of the commenter related to the New York Times.

Here's one critique in the form of a song: https://slate.com/culture/2018/02/i-am-the-very-model-of-a-n...

There have been some noticeable stinkers that I have been aware of for maybe 20 years, up to and including the Jason Blair affair. However, I have seen a steep decline in quality since 2010-2012.