When the New York Times lost its way
economist.com
economist.com
I believed the Iraq WMD narrative. I didn't trust the US government not to lie to me. I expected the NYT to have bias; I didn't expect the NYT to egregiously lie.
The article GGP posted is mostly just a summary of a story the NYT itself reported in 1999, so if you believe that article told the truth, you must also believe the NYT article told the truth. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/08/world/us-used-un-team-to-...
With the NYT, I've often found myself reading articles and checking 2-3 times if I'm accidentally reading an op-ed piece instead of an article due to the obvious bias (even if that bias happens to agree with my politics, I don't want the bias there... I just want the information).
Or finding that articles that would normally belong in the New Yorker or NY Times Magazine are in the main "newspaper" (if those distinctions even make sense anymore).
But occasionally they do good work. But that's increasingly rare.
Yeah. I recall seeing someone comment - quite some time ago, probably 20 years now - that the NYT was morphing from "slightly staid establishment mouthpiece" to "what upper-middle-class professional women want to read". My wife is a subscriber; QED? She reads the thing every day. I might glance at the homepage and read an article or two now and again, but I'd be perfectly fine with only a games subscription (the crossword is excellent, and Spelling Bee has helped me tremendously with anagramming).
- Summarizes what has happened but doesn't properly attribute the causes of what happened. Author remains in denial.
[1] see my user profile
That op-ed was a tough editorial call. It troubles my conscience as publishing Tom Cotton never has. But the reason is not that the writer, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban, kidnapped a Times reporter (David Rohde, now of NBC, with whom I covered the Israeli siege of Jenin on the West Bank 20 years ago; he would never be afraid of an op-ed). The case against that piece is that Haqqani, who remains on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist list, may have killed Americans. It’s puzzling: in what moral universe can it be a point of pride to publish a piece by an enemy who may have American blood on his hands, and a matter of shame to publish a piece by an American senator arguing for American troops to protect Americans? javascript: link=today=new Date();dd=today.getDate();mm=today.getMonth()+1;window.location="https://static01.nyt.com/images/"+today.getFullYear()+'/'+((mm<10)?%270%27+mm:mm)+%27/%27+((dd<10)?%270%27+dd:dd)+"/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf";It's still completely inexcusable, but I think they understand how wrong it was.
> Lies of Our Times (LOOT) was a political magazine published between January 1990 and December 1994. The magazine was published on a monthly basis.[1] Ellen Ray was both its co-founder and publisher.[2] It served not only as a general media critic, but as a watchdog of The New York Times, which the magazine referred to as "the most cited news medium in the United Slates, our paper of record."[3]
Archived publications at https://archive.org/details/LiesOfOurTimesCollection/Aug1990... to give an idea of what it covered.
I'm not sure I've ever encountered a more egregious example of the professional self-flattery you hear all the time from journalists. James Bennet is utterly blind to his real function within these institutions. The piece is at least useful as an unwitting illustration of journalists' ideological belief in their own nobility and importance.
‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that a strong Hamas (but not too strong) would keep the peace and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...
If so this guy probably wants you to write an op-ed, to ensure he gives voice to both sides of the issue.
https://religionnews.com/2022/05/26/poll-white-evangelical-s...
I can't comment on the level of support among jews as I can't find data.
How can you run an editorial board and not do the minimum it requires.
>... this was standard practice. Dao’s name was on the masthead of the New York Times because he was in charge of the op-ed section. If I insisted on reviewing every piece, I would have been doing his job for him – and been betraying a crippling lack of trust in one of the papers’ finest editors. After I departed, and other Opinion staff quit or were reassigned, the Times later made him Metro editor, a sign of its own continued confidence in him.
I agree that, in retrospect, stepping in to oversee his editor's decision-making could have resulted in a different outcome for Bennet. But, it does not seem to be an abject failure of professionalism. It seemed like he trusted the established processes and norms too much, and his failure might have been to trust them to hold up under significant pressure.
I remember seeing several pro-China op-eds and advertorials in the NYT during the pre-Covid days, scratching my head wondering if I was in a different universe.
At the same time, there were several dozen covert and overt editorials that bashed countries and governments that were not pro-China. For example they continue to publish several blatant anti-Indian and anti-Hindu pieces which sound more like sensationalist attention-grabbing propaganda.
As a former paid subscriber to the NYT, it's sobering and sad to see how they have pivoted and where they're headed.
A fun and particularly relevant thought experiment is to imagine what the media coverage would have been for Donald Trump should he have been President during the 9/11 attacks. Would the media have sought to convene the nation around leadership, as it did, or would it have tried to remove the leadership for criminal incompetence at the least?
The MSM seeks to dictate the limits of acceptable democracy to the limits of its preferred agendas. When that effort failed, it incited and covered for eight months of pre-election riots that killed two and half dozen citizens. It then internally lashed out when a contrary voice was mistakenly printed.
"These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias."
The NYT lost its way when it internalized the right wing's framing of them as having the hated liberal bias. It was always an effort to work the ref, affirmative action for Republican blowhards.
As we've seen in the years since no one is more grievously wounded by that than serious and substantive people on the right, who are now an endangered species not just on the pages of the NYT but in American public life more broadly.
Is anyone else sick of living in a world where that is the media’s answer to literally every question?
I think every single American should be obsessed with ensuring that dictator wannabe never sees the insides of the Oval Office again.
I'm sick of living in a world having people like you failing to recognizing the clear and present danger Trump presents.
If this precendent was going to be set, it can't have come after four years of a press induced national Russia hysteria targeting him. That failed to jail him. That was the single politically allowable wager, and it lost.
Now the people who are still casually using words and phrases like "dictator" and "clear and present danger" seem to be projecting.
All that he said is that he's going to enforce existing border law and drill for oil. Two things that are within the scope of "dictatorial" executive power on any mundane day.
If you want to stop that type of dictatorship, you'll need a time machine to speak with George Washington.
The only thing that will haunt this nation for generations to come is this type of bs that seeks to reframe what you are referring to as sinister.
And it won't stand up to the long memory of the successful antidemocratic effort to completely hobble a democratically elected POTUS while in office, threaten the nation with nine months of murderous riots before an election, distract from that effort by mischaracterizing a three hour riot and imprison its particpants, and then attempt to imprison DT using unprecedented charges because he's again running. Utilizing lots of "dictatorial" open lies and evidence suppression in the attempt.
But go on.
The question that DT answered was filtered down from the Left wing MSM, who is apoplectic at the possibility that they and others will be wrapped up in conspiracy, and worse, charges due to their antidemocratic, and worse, actions since 2016.
They are attempting to insulate themselves from culpability by attempting to make DT deny that he will seek reprisal in exactly the same manner of hostility that he and others have experienced. Lest he be a "dictator". His answer well trolled the brazenly hypocritical attempt.
Can you elaborate on the specific things Trump did that have shaped your opinion to think he is a “dictator wannabe”?
More dangerous than what he has done is what he has said. He has said that he will be a dictator on day one.
Trump's track record in life — e.g., all the suppliers and other creditors whom he stiffed — doesn't give great reason to believe him about anything.
I take Trump's "joke" very seriously. His actions during his first presidency, his admiration for the world's despots, and his actions after being voted out of office all point to Trump's desire to be a dictator - and now he's "joking" about it.
You're a fool if you think he's joking.
As far as elaborating on what Trump did, he's been indicted for 91 felonies. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand the gravity of those crimes? If not, then you need to get out from under your rock. Either that or you're just being willfully ignorant.
Even if he did not intend or support the unlawful methods that mob later employed (which he clearly did, as his conduct during and after the events shows), that's enough to show his disdain for democratic norms.
"One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit They Cheated in 2020 Election"
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...
``` Nate Silver described Rasmussen as "biased and inaccurate", saying Rasmussen "badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates." ```
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/?s=FiveThirtyEight rates Nate Silver's site, FiveThirtyEight, as having "LEFT-CENTER BIAS".
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rasmussen-reports/ rates Rasmussen reports (who did the poll showing 1 in 5 persons used mail-in votes to commit election fraud) as having "RIGHT-CENTER BIAS".
That having been said, so what? Suppose the poll had revealed that HALF the actual number illegally used mail-in voting? How about 1 in 20? Would that be OK with you?
Fact is, mail-in voting has proven to be a failure and a scourge on our democracy. Get rid of it.
Edit: I think this quote from the article summarizes the NYT shift:
> Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm.
> Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias.
> I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock. Having concluded they had got ahead by working hard, it has been a revelation to them that their skin colour was not just part of the wallpaper of American life, but a source of power, protection and advancement.
> At one point, Baquet, musing about how the Times was changing, observed that one of the newsroom’s cultural critics had become the paper’s best political-opinion columnist. Taking this musing one step further, I then noted that this raised an obvious question: why did the paper still have an Opinion department separate from the newsroom, with its own editor reporting directly to the publisher? If the newsroom was publishing the best opinion journalism at the paper – if it was publishing opinion at all – why did the Times maintain a separate department that falsely claimed to have a monopoly on such journalism?
> The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism.... by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion.
> The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise. It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism...Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.