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Ha. If they are, their favor is just slightly more favorable than Al Jazeera's.
There are a couple of references below to start with, but if you do a search on Trump sanewashing you'll be overwhelmed with them.
1: https://margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/about-those-new-york...
2: https://mediabiasdetector.seas.upenn.edu/blog/sanewashing-in...
Wasn't expecting this kind of political comedy on HN but thanks for the laugh. We talking about the same guy who got politically slandered straight faced for years for a sleazy joke while playing a character on a fictional TV show where actors playing parody and mythical character fake jump on each other from cages and ladders.
Trump says insane thing, instead of repeating insane thing NYT rewrites it in a format that sounds like something a sane person says.
Here's an example where NYT totally disregards the gravity of what Trump is saying (blowing up NATO) and instead portrays him as a successful real estate mogul intent on protecting the West. NYT adds a bunch of flourish to make Trump sound more coherent than he did in the actual interview:
NYT article version:
>“Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed, with a real estate mogul’s eye, the landmass of Greenland — three times the size of Texas but with a population of less than 60,000. He seemed to dismiss the value of having Greenland under the control of a close NATO ally.
>When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
>The conversation made clear that in Mr. Trump’s view, sovereignty and national borders are less important than the singular role the United States plays as the protector of the West.
Interview transcript:
David E. Sanger: Why is ownership important here?
President Trump: Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.
David E. Sanger: So you’re going to ask them to buy it?
Katie Rogers: Psychologically important to you or to the United States?
President Trump: Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.
They do NOT have such consideration for democratic populist politicians.
Using normalizing language in a headline such as this is a longstanding practice of theirs.
(Laughable? Your homework assignment for tonight is to Google the term Pied piper strategy. The NYT played ball with the Democrats at their request, and never stopped carrying it.)
(I used the word because it's appropriate here in multiple aspects, and repeated it as you didn't understand the point. Trump has been long involved in the WWE. And the word started making the rounds in tech circles when a Thiel-adjacent boosted the concept. But of course like every fake "red pill" that becomes pop culture, the goal was merely to shout down one version while marketing another of his own making)
The Pied Piper Strategy was interesting to read about, but that doesn't agree with my experience of reading the Times. It seems more than happy to pander to its subscribers' biases.
Day after day, I'd scream at them under my breath: You idiots are going to get him elected. You know that, right? Right?
Turns out that yes, they did.
In the sense that it sells papers and ads? Sure, I guess. That’s the price of an attention economy. Someone who commands attention gains economies.
Or do you mean the Times is ideologically aligned with Trump?
Look at the headline here for instance - US and Iran send conflicting signals, as though both parties are sending incorrect messaging regarding a potential peace deal.
What's really happening though is Trump unilaterally lying through his teeth (established), perhaps so that entities tied to him, likely his erstwhile bankrupt family, can manipulate the stock market (speculative). Of course, you won't see the NY Times or any American paper of record narrate the news that way. That's what GP means by the NYT's sanewashing. Because for them, any news sells, and you don't cut off the source.
Occam's razor would suggest that they're just another biased news outlet which can only push its agenda so far and that calling Trump out any more than they do would cost them the marginal centrist left segment of their readership if there are even still any of those.
In any case it's not about the Pied Piper thing. That's just to point out that the NYT and other media outlets has an agenda that is not necessarily driven by stereotypical left/right politics. In that situation, they were cooperating with leftist interests to "elevate" Trump and other candidates who were deemed likely to sink the Republicans in the general election, making him look like a more viable candidate than he was and thereby creating a self-fulfilling story.
As I said, I watched this unfold in real time, with no idea of what was actually happening behind the scenes. Today, the same supposedly left-leaning outlets continue to report on Trump with exquisite, obsequious generosity. Why? "It sells papers" is my Occam's Razor solution, but I agree that this may not be sufficient or conclusive.
Once you see it you can't stop seeing it. Biden had "gaffes," Trump has "a unique way of speaking." Criminals have "bad genes," but the NYT tells us that "In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics." Trump spews conspiracy theories about vaccines and autism, but the NYT describes a generic policy proposal on chronic health issues. Trump claims that schools are performing gender-reassignment surgeries on kids without parental consent, and the media says "Trump focuses his appeal on conservative moms." Trump goes off on tangents about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, CNN reports a speech focused on local labor issues. Trump responds to a question about child care costs with a rambling off-topic rant about tariffs and the Federal deficit, which is then duly reported as "Trump suggests tariffs could help with child care costs." The BS never ends.
(BTW, I didn't flag your post and in fact tried to vouch for it, but that never seems to work.)
But isn't its willingness to corrupt its reputation to execute the Pied Piper strategy evidence that they are biased against Trump? They want to capture eyeballs, but they know their audience and NY liberals are the eyes they are targeting. Just read the readers' comments.
Maybe there's a difference that we are discussing between the NYT not calling out Trump's prodigious issues enough and their bias on every other topic. N.b., though, the NYT followed all the other MSM sheep in excusing Biden's dementia until they couldn't.
> (BTW, I didn't flag your post and in fact tried to vouch for it, but that never seems to work.)
Much appreciated.
What they want is access to whoever is in power, so it's natural enough to suspect that favors and bias will flow in that direction. In early-to-mid 2016, I'm sure they expected HRC to win the election, just as many/most other observers did. There would have been a lot of pre-existing points of contact with her campaign, given that she was one of New York's senators at the time. So the NYT had the motive and means to do her campaign a favor by amplifying the less-viable Republican candidates. It would have seemed harmless enough.
Then, when Trump ended up winning, maintaining access meant taking a more Trump-sympathetic stance. With Maggie Haberman in charge of maintaining the relationship, all it cost was their soul. I think it was as simple as that.
Classifying individual news outlets as "left-biased" or "right-biased" tends to obscure what (and who) really motivates them. A newspaper or news network without access to power is dead in the water, and political alignment will always come second to that. Otherwise, for example, you'd need another explanation for why the NYT was such a faithful cheerleader for the Iraq war. They couldn't get enough of the neocon Kool-Aid.
They do this in a few ways:
1. Sane-washing, as talked about. They will take legitimately incoherent ramblings that sound straight out of an insane aslyum and rewrite them to be understandable. This gives the impression that Trump is reasonable, when he is not.
2. Attributing reason to action. Trump often does erratic things without providing reasoning. The NYT and other media like MSNBC will then fabricate potential reasoning behind it. Often this reasoning is as good as it can be, even though that usually means it's still bad.
3. Benefit of the doubt. Trump is at a point where he lies more than he tells the truth, however, all his statements are still taken as truthful, or at least as being something he believes to be true. Nobody believes Trump is malicious on anything, even if he has shown he is malicious.