In any of the places I worked at in the past an anti-union consulting firm would have been called in to bust things up before it ever got this far.
Their coverage is much more complicated than left vs right, but one theme is they don’t question the loudest narratives, and they hold grudges when they perceive someone to not give them enough access.
The right tends to be louder and more uniform and persistent in messaging, so that coloring often gets unconsciously added to articles rather than the journalists taking a step back and analyzing the whole picture.
It’s the quick/lazy way to write stories after all, and journalists have deadlines. The author may be left leaning and some of that may even show, but a little left leaning flavor doesn’t mask that it’s based on the right’s take.
The choice of coverage also is very herd like, not left or right.
The NYT also goes out of the way to appear fair and balanced, trying to find the “average” in stories. But as anyone but the NYT knows, averages are skewed easily.
Go on the NYT website right now and find me a single article currently on the front page that's negative about leftist policies or politicians, or a single article that's positive about rightist policies or politicians.
I bet you can't find any.
Repeat this experiment, any minute, any hour, any day, any year, for the last 10 years, and you will get the same exact results.
But that is tangential to the discussion in this thread, which is that the NY Times is leftist. It's not. It, along with most of it's readership, is your typical establishment news organization in the US. Nothing status-quo shaking coming out of the NY Times.
Here's a quick search on how a leftist publication covered something like the bombing of al-Shifa hospital: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-gaza-propagan...
However, it's also a fact that the Israeli government has been attempting to milk these finds for far more than they're worth, to an extent beyond embellishment and closer to outright fabrication (c.f. the alleged "command center" under al-Shifa, the Hamas "shift schedule" that was really just an ordinary Arabic calendar, and so on).
In short: yes Hamas is bad, and all that. But for its own part, the Israeli government never seems to miss an opportunity to leverage available circumstances to undermine its own credibility.
Compare that to an actual leftist publication like The Nation, where the second most popular article is literally about the enduring legacy of Marx's Capital (lol): https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wendy-brown-marx-c...
Or over at Jacobin where this is the top story: https://jacobin.com/2024/09/ruwa-romman-dnc-speech-palestine
Because it's really not - especially not in the US. Go look through their articles. How many serve corporate interests? How many are fundamentally ultra-capitalists?
You guys act like these are commies. No, they're right-leaning, just not far right insane wackos (Fox News). You're right, they're not out here questioning how black Kamala is. No, that absolutely does not make them left wing.
Right around this time 8 years ago, the election was over... in the media. Clinton won, trump didn't, in like September of 2016. Like, the world was collectively shocked. Because, according to the media, trump was cooked.
How does that square?
Compare for example media treatment of Sanders or even Warren when he opposed her and you can see that it's not her leftist tendencies that made her win in the media.
Respectfully I don’t accept your premise here. You’re saying she was center of left? But still “left”, as it were? And you agree the media crowned her king months before the election?
So the media ordained her the winner. You do agree or you do not?
In that the media vastly prefered her over Trump, it was because she was pro-establishment and better aligned with corporate interests, not because she was economically to his left. The case of Warren and Sanders (where famously the media was happy to compare Sanders to Trump, reinforcing the idea that their opposition to Trump is not due to his right-wing economic policies) as well as the comparison to previous Democratic candidates is evidence I think is much more compelling than the assumption of leftwing/rightwing partisanship.
Huh. If that were true she would have won. So it can’t be true. Unless your claim is “the right was too far right” in which case your “right-of-the-electorate” cannot be mathematically true.
Were you trying to make a different point? The current one doesn’t hold water.
Not who you're discussing with, but Hillary did win the popular vote by about 3 million votes.
Besides, there are people who just don't vote if your platform or personality is not engaging. That was a big phenomenon with Clinton and is generally what decided whether or not Democrats win: the higher the turnout, the higher their chances. If a Democrat runs to the right, they lose turnout from leftwing voters who stay home, they don't (just) win votes from the center.
Also, Clinton did win the popular vote, despite all of this.
Found on the front page of the NYT website, just now, after a few seconds of skimming:
Kathleen Kingsbury
The Question Kamala Harris Couldn’t AnswerObviously not a leftist bias.
This was on the front page a couple of weeks ago
Aside from that, right now I see an item claiming Harris has flip-flopped on progressive policies.
I have no idea who that is.
> Aside from that, right now I see an item claiming Harris has flip-flopped on progressive policies.
I have no idea if this is true. Has she? Who is the authority on that?
Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. “Flip flop” is an insult in politics.
0:https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/leaked-message...
1: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-boudin-recall-...
2:https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-the-battle-ove...
3:https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-...
Hmm. Maybe an anti-anti-union consulting firm is a business opportunity?
Easier to align people when you remove the whole troublesome "money" part. Question is how to motivate Americans to work together if not for money?
The only obvious customer would be a union, and they already provide that service themselves.
Allsides media bias rating for NYT is lean left[1], a -2.2 with -6 as the most extreme and 0 as neutral. Rating is left for their opinion section[2], a -4.
1. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times
2. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times-opinion-...
Editorial Review: Sep 2018
The NYT's slant has shifted post 2020.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times...
No, it isn't, and it's not remotely close.
The median US voter is far more left wing than you would know from politics and media. Most voters actually support an arms embargo vs Israel, support universal healthcare, support action on climate change, want an end to the prison industrial complex, want minimum wage increases, gun control, an end to predatory college costs and loans, stronger worker's rights, reproductive rights, cannabis legalization, reduction in militarism, affordable housing, etc.
The NYT is central to fooling these "median voters" into supporting politicians and parties that have absolutely no intention of supporting genuine left wing action.
To say the NYT supports unions in general is to ignore very recent history, such as their coverage of Amazon and Starbucks union efforts. You also need to ignore a very very long and well described slant against left wing causes in general. Here, have a nice digestible Chomsky piece from nearly 30 years ago: https://chomsky.info/199710__/
An apt quote from Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, which was published in 2013 but set in 2001:
> How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to be to think of the New York Times as a left-wing newspaper?
There's nothing particularly radical about wanting more fair healthcare, labor rights, education, housing etc.
As I pointed out, the majority of Americans want those things. It's pretty basic human decency, empathy, efficiency, etc.
And yet, when you raise these _majority_ viewpoints, someone pops up from behind a Bush to call you 'tankie'/'commie'/'literally Stalin'. That's not an accident. There are some people who like things the way thay are, and about 6 of those people own 90% of all media.
We spent over 8 trillion dollars (!) in the Middle East, murdering millions, all based on lies; and now our Democrat candidate is overjoyed to get endorsements from the architects of those wars... At every stage, from plotting to image rehabilitation, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon to Yemen, etc, to Gaza, the NYT was with those warmongers all the way.
They're not left. Never were.
That isn't true at all. You're probably thinking of the NYT 20 years ago, under the Bush administration. Do you read the newspaper, or are you parroting talking points? I used to subscribe until the blatantly conservative bias became overwhelming.
> They're probably anti-union in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing
Didn't they just report a 13.3% increase in YoY profits on their most recent financial quarter? Your chart shows a company with healthy growth for several years running. A billion dollars in profit last year and on track to do it again this year isn't "tenuous".
You can't just look at results over the last four years when you're analyzing a newspaper that's 172 years old. They've had massive declines in recent years, which caused huge cutbacks. I think it's reasonable for them to try to preserve their options to cut costs in the future.
> Surprisingly, ABC News was rated Lean Right (1.18) in the July 2024 Blind Bias Survey. A total of 478 respondents rated ABC. This rating differed from AllSides’ current rating of Lean Left (-2.40) at the time, and triggered the Aug. 2024 Editorial Review.
> AllSides speculates this outlier response is because the survey content was collected on July 15 and 18, 2024, which were just days after the July 14 assassination attempt of Donald Trump.
> The Lean Right rating was incorporated into the final rating for ABC News, but was weighted less to account for outlier conditions.
This is literally just putting your foot on the numbers to make it show what you want - the network showed more right-leaning content and they said, "Well that doesn't count." Why doesn't it count?
Look at the increasing number of criticisms of Times coverage from the Left. Look at their trajectory since the Cotton editorial. Look at how they're covering this election. It's not a left wing paper, under A.G. Sulzberger.
> You can't just look at results over the last four years when you're analyzing a newspaper that's 172 years old. They've had massive declines in recent years, which caused huge cutbacks. I think it's reasonable for them to try to preserve their options to cut costs in the future.
They had massive declines from the mid-oughts to 2018 in line with the rest of the newspaper industry. They've reinvented themselves as a tech media company and are on a better track now, so it makes sense that the employees who made that happen want the same union protections as the rest of the employees of the newspaper!
They also were never doing so badly that they weren't still making millions of dollars in profit, which I'm not willing to call "tenuous" for a newspaper that's 172 years old.
Really telling that the NYT's attempt to please everyone has pleased almost no one, though. Progressives are angry that hate groups get airtime in the name of "objectivity". Conservatives still think it's a left-wing paper and won't read it. Liberal centrists are playing Wordle?
> They're probably anti-union in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing
Why does your link say that their profit is up 60%(!) since 2020?
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edit: tbh, I think people think the NYT is left-wing only because they associate NYC with Jewish people, and they're still steeped in conspiracy theories of "Judeobolshevism." So I guess that's on the Dreyfus affair (through Ezra Pound, Eustace Mullins and the Birchers.)
The NYT is a paper owned by a rich family that has always praised every dictator the CIA has praised, and passed on any lie they were asked to.
The politics of the median voter in the US is not relevant for this discussion.
In the world outside of petty dictatorships, though, left/right determination is made on the basis of alignment with various policies and philosophies -- so increasingly, people within the US are losing credibility when it comes to any conversation about left/right politics.
If anyone remembers, in the eighties the Repubs were into importing foreign labor (i.e. cheap; hence “no uvas”) and Bernie used to protest against dumping refugees in his state. This has reversed!
People underestimated how many Bernie Sanders supporters switched to Trump when he dropped out in the 2016 election. Some of us have been seeing this realignment coming for that long.
>Cheney with pretty unsavory characters in history, but now he’s lauded by progressives. This shit is getting weird.
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Ok I'm done with the clichés.
And, yes, the world remembers Bernie's about-face on policy -- there's been quite a lot (e.g., [1]) written on the topic. But it's pretty normal for politicians and even political parties to change their minds in issues over a span of time as long as Bernie's career. This should be expected of politicians: they should be willing to change their minds and adapt their policies to new facts gained over time. Moreover, they exist to represent We The People, so when we change our collective minds, politicians who fail to keep up are replaced! Bernie is still around despite his change of heart precisely because it followed that of his constituency.
Do you remember when Theodore Roosevelt ran on the Progressive Party ticket? That party, founded by a lesbian, was eventually folded back into the mainstream Republican party back when Democrats were conservatives. There's nothing weird about parties and politicians changing their minds on stuff.
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/25/21143931/b...
I think leftists are basically in favor of unions in the US because leftists are generally in favor of labor protections, and unions are the best we can get inside the capitalist system. More extreme leftists might prefer some kind of socialist system, but that’s not on the table in America really.
Liberals are, of course, typically market oriented (that’s what liberal economics are). A liberal point of view would be “of course people have a basic right to associate with people of their choosing, negotiate contracts, and a union is just a vehicle for doing that.”
A union is about as much collectivism as a liberal can stomach, more of a stop-gap for a leftist.
A left wing paper would typically be pretty anti capitalist, anti imperial, etc. which the NYT is definitely not.
This is a global forum, it's important to remember that while the democrats in the US are called "the left" there, they really really are not a left wing party.
They broadly support capitalism, broadly support imperial military power, broadly do not support single payer health care, broadly do not support nationalization of industry, oppose criminal justice reform, oppose upzoning, oppose transit, oppose large tax hikes, and are active in the eradication of minorities.
Biden shut down a major labor strike, he expanded drilling for oil, he made it easier for states to medically and socially discriminate against trans people, he's pumped up the police, and he's continuously armed a state accused of genocide. Biden has put forth one of the most restrictive border policies we've ever had, and kept many trump era policies. The democrats also had the opportunity, years ago, to permanently secure abortion access and chose not to. They have by and large expanded the carceral state (and coined the concept of super predators to ensure Black people remained incarcerated.)
Also, and this might be a shock, democrats are anti gun, while many many leftists believe in gun ownership. (Karl Marx, Martin Luther king Jr., Malcom X, etc were all believers in individual ownership of firearms.)
Leftists generally believe in nationalization, limiting corporate and executive power (or eliminating it), social housing, socialized medicine, free food and water, elimination of oil drilling, trains, dense urban areas, mutual aid, "wellbeing for all", free education, free childcare, etc.
I've never once seen a Democrat say that we should abolish private property. If you think democrats are left wing you simply don't understand what left wing means.
> Just because other countries are withering away under socialism
on the topic of preposterous things to claim...
The NYT is corporate wing. There's no charitable way to look at their reporting on the current election cycle and make the claim that they've treated the candidates equally. Donald Trump hasn't uttered a consecutive set of coherent sentences where he starts with an idea and finishes with an actual conclusion that isn't "and it'll be better / worse than ever before" in at least 5 years.