7 ms·

When the New York Times lost its way

64 points by systemstops 3y ago

xkcd-sucks 3y ago
Interesting this timeline of the NYT "losing its way" only begins at the point of allowing Trump to be elected - I seem to recall a lot of stuff written in that paper around 2001 which was obviously not consistent with the ethical and professional practice of journalism, to the degree that we as middle-schoolers learned the concept of "manufacturing consent" to describe what was happening in the news. And the timeline begins here for me just due to age; probably it goes back further
- purpleflame1257 3y ago
  Back to the 20s and 30s at least, when they ran glowing coverage of the USSR's forced collectivization, ignoring the resulting mass famines and megadeaths. The NYT would be better served as a one page crossword sheet with wedding announcements on the back.
  - 303uru 3y ago
    Lol, the wedding announcements. A family friend who started what's essentially an SSO for education got a glowing wedding announcement and I found it so embarrassing. Who cares?
  - meowface 3y ago
    They did apologize for that: https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/ https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-s... It's still completely inexcusable, but I think they understand how wrong it was.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Jayson Blair alone is highly noteworthy and came over a decade before the timeline presented.
- eesmith 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_of_Our_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_of_Our_Times > 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-V1-N8/ https://archive.org/details/LiesOfOurTimesCollection/Aug1990... to give an idea of what it covered.
- abvdasker 3y ago
  I came here to note the Times' unacknowledged lies about the Bush admin and Iraq War and was pleasantly surprised to see you beat me to it. This piece is nothing less than an interminable but polite screed from someone with an axe to grind and doesn't touch on any of the real problems at the heart of mainstream media. 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.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    That doesn't mean he's wrong though.
Jiro 3y ago
I don't see the phrase "Scott Alexander" anywhere in this article.
- meowface 3y ago
  The article they finally ended up publishing on him was quite terrible, too. Doxing stuff aside, I actually wasn't expecting the article to be as bad as it was.
iamdelirium 3y ago
Yeah, the author has only himself to blame. Guy didn’t even read the op-ed before he published it. How can you run an editorial board and not do the minimum it requires.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  From the article: >... 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bequanna 3y ago
Trump, Trump, Trump. Is anyone else sick of living in a world where that is the media’s answer to literally every question?
- meowface 3y ago
  A lot of the article is about how the New York Times was too negatively obsessed with Trump. The author definitely doesn't like Trump, but a big focus is on the anti-Trump bias.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Trump has 4 indictments amounting to a total of 91 felony charges. 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.
  - mrangle 3y ago
    Trump could have been charged with 9 or 911 felony charges, and it would still look like political persecution. 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.
    - tchock23 3y ago
      At this point they aren’t projecting, they are just using his own words: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/donald-trump-sean-hannity-dictator-day-one-response-iowa-town-hall https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/donald-trump...
      - mrangle 3y ago
        You think that you're making a point by implying that what he said was different than what it was? 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.
viknesh 3y ago
As someone who once had an NYT subscription (no longer) and now has an Economist subscription, I totally agree with the sentiment. The Economist absolutely has an angle, but it comes across with much more explanation of the objective facts around a given situation, akin to a 3rd party observer explaining an issue and their opinion of it. In contrast, the NYT is quite patronizing, with half-assed attempts to explain "both sides," but you always know what the "right side" is. 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.
99_00 3y ago
The NYT and elite Universities bit the hand that fed them. ‘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-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Are you advancing some kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, very similar to the one that Musk endorsed recently? If so this guy probably wants you to write an op-ed, to ensure he gives voice to both sides of the issue.
  - john015 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - 99_00 3y ago
    Support for Israel is high in the US. 86% among white evangelicals. https://religionnews.com/2022/05/26/poll-white-evangelical-support-for-israel-higher-than-any-other-christian-group/ 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.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
For me it was this: https://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-error/ https://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-... 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.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  That article shows what looks like an honest mistake. Iraq did eject American weapons inspectors, just not the rest. It doesn't cite this as evidence for WMD but as a political cudgel that neoconservatives could use to push their policy. The rest of the article builds a narrative about what actually happened in Iraq using reporting from the NYT.
  - slim 3y ago
    nothing honest about it. they repeated the same "mistake" 6 times in 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2022. If they told the truth, it would be obvious that US gov is evil, not Irak gov.
    - lern_too_spel 3y ago
      Again, the "mistake" they repeated was the year that the inspectors were expelled, which they erroneously stated as 1998 instead of 1997. 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-place-spy-device-in-iraq-aides-say.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/08/world/us-used-un-team-to-...
debatem1 3y ago
From the article: "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.
giardini 3y ago
"The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist." - Summarizes what has happened but doesn't properly attribute the causes of what happened. Author remains in denial.
karaterobot 3y ago
Having read the whole article, I thought it was sobering, well-written, maybe a little too exhaustive for a convenient dalliance during the workday, but worth reading if you have not already.
- dsubburam 3y ago
  I have been using my own RAG tool bookmarklet[1] to help get quick assessments. I asked "is the author optimistic about the New York Times for the future" (and got an answer that was basically "No." You've read the whole article--you can tell me if that's accurate). [1] see my user profile
atonse 3y ago
I'm generally center-left-leaning and a paying subscriber to the NYT and I've felt this way for years now. But still stuck because it is sadly still my main source of news, but increasingly opinionated. And occasionally I find pieces on the economist and FT refreshingly just informative. 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.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  > 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) 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).
syndicatedjelly 3y ago
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?
- iamthirsty 3y ago
  Just got to the same paragraph, and that last line really seals the point of the affect internal division and tribalism has eroded the independence of journalism — specifically at the NYT — and pressured us to be against ourselves in spite of, and not for, our ideals.
deleted 3y ago
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mitchbob 3y ago
https://archive.is/2023.12.14-195852/https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way https://archive.is/2023.12.14-195852/https://www.economist.c...
mrangle 3y ago
Media relies on generational amnesia to recover its credibility. Go back any number of decades and the clumsy partisan propaganda will be evident, in a manner that is insistent on steering major events or their responses. Pick any decade. 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.
entropyie 3y ago
Iraq... End of story
exabrial 3y ago
The NYT lost its way when it became the premier propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party, even going so far to justify outlandishly unscientific claims in the name of pleasing/deluding the voting base.
korginator 3y ago
For years, the New York Times has had a cosy relationship with the China Daily which itself is a mouthpiece of the Chinese communist party. 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.
interestica 3y ago
I made this bookmarklet which lets you quickly view the day's printed front page. It usually goes live in the early hours of the day: 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";

64 points by systemstops 3y ago

Interesting this timeline of the NYT "losing its way" only begins at the point of allowing Trump to be elected - I seem to recall a lot of stuff written in that paper around 2001 which was obviously not consistent with the ethical and professional practice of journalism, to the degree that we as middle-schoolers learned the concept of "manufacturing consent" to describe what was happening in the news. And the timeline begins here for me just due to age; probably it goes back further

purpleflame1257 3y ago
Back to the 20s and 30s at least, when they ran glowing coverage of the USSR's forced collectivization, ignoring the resulting mass famines and megadeaths. The NYT would be better served as a one page crossword sheet with wedding announcements on the back.
- 303uru 3y ago
  Lol, the wedding announcements. A family friend who started what's essentially an SSO for education got a glowing wedding announcement and I found it so embarrassing. Who cares?
- meowface 3y ago
  They did apologize for that: https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/ https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-s... It's still completely inexcusable, but I think they understand how wrong it was.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Jayson Blair alone is highly noteworthy and came over a decade before the timeline presented.
eesmith 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_of_Our_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_of_Our_Times > 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-V1-N8/ https://archive.org/details/LiesOfOurTimesCollection/Aug1990... to give an idea of what it covered.
abvdasker 3y ago
I came here to note the Times' unacknowledged lies about the Bush admin and Iraq War and was pleasantly surprised to see you beat me to it. This piece is nothing less than an interminable but polite screed from someone with an axe to grind and doesn't touch on any of the real problems at the heart of mainstream media. 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.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  That doesn't mean he's wrong though.

Jiro 3y ago

I don't see the phrase "Scott Alexander" anywhere in this article.

meowface 3y ago
The article they finally ended up publishing on him was quite terrible, too. Doxing stuff aside, I actually wasn't expecting the article to be as bad as it was.

iamdelirium 3y ago

Yeah, the author has only himself to blame. Guy didn’t even read the op-ed before he published it. How can you run an editorial board and not do the minimum it requires.

karaterobot 3y ago
From the article: >... 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.
deleted 3y ago
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bequanna 3y ago

Trump, Trump, Trump. Is anyone else sick of living in a world where that is the media’s answer to literally every question?

meowface 3y ago
A lot of the article is about how the New York Times was too negatively obsessed with Trump. The author definitely doesn't like Trump, but a big focus is on the anti-Trump bias.
taylodl 3y ago
Trump has 4 indictments amounting to a total of 91 felony charges. 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.
- mrangle 3y ago
  Trump could have been charged with 9 or 911 felony charges, and it would still look like political persecution. 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.
  - tchock23 3y ago
    At this point they aren’t projecting, they are just using his own words: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/donald-trump-sean-hannity-dictator-day-one-response-iowa-town-hall https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/donald-trump...
    - mrangle 3y ago
      You think that you're making a point by implying that what he said was different than what it was? 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.

viknesh 3y ago

As someone who once had an NYT subscription (no longer) and now has an Economist subscription, I totally agree with the sentiment. The Economist absolutely has an angle, but it comes across with much more explanation of the objective facts around a given situation, akin to a 3rd party observer explaining an issue and their opinion of it. In contrast, the NYT is quite patronizing, with half-assed attempts to explain "both sides," but you always know what the "right side" is. 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.

99_00 3y ago

The NYT and elite Universities bit the hand that fed them. ‘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-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Are you advancing some kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, very similar to the one that Musk endorsed recently? If so this guy probably wants you to write an op-ed, to ensure he gives voice to both sides of the issue.
- john015 3y ago
  [flagged]
- 99_00 3y ago
  Support for Israel is high in the US. 86% among white evangelicals. https://religionnews.com/2022/05/26/poll-white-evangelical-support-for-israel-higher-than-any-other-christian-group/ 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.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

For me it was this: https://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-error/ https://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-... 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.

lern_too_spel 3y ago
That article shows what looks like an honest mistake. Iraq did eject American weapons inspectors, just not the rest. It doesn't cite this as evidence for WMD but as a political cudgel that neoconservatives could use to push their policy. The rest of the article builds a narrative about what actually happened in Iraq using reporting from the NYT.
- slim 3y ago
  nothing honest about it. they repeated the same "mistake" 6 times in 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2022. If they told the truth, it would be obvious that US gov is evil, not Irak gov.
  - lern_too_spel 3y ago
    Again, the "mistake" they repeated was the year that the inspectors were expelled, which they erroneously stated as 1998 instead of 1997. 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-place-spy-device-in-iraq-aides-say.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/08/world/us-used-un-team-to-...

debatem1 3y ago

From the article: "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.

giardini 3y ago

"The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist." - Summarizes what has happened but doesn't properly attribute the causes of what happened. Author remains in denial.

karaterobot 3y ago

Having read the whole article, I thought it was sobering, well-written, maybe a little too exhaustive for a convenient dalliance during the workday, but worth reading if you have not already.

dsubburam 3y ago
I have been using my own RAG tool bookmarklet[1] to help get quick assessments. I asked "is the author optimistic about the New York Times for the future" (and got an answer that was basically "No." You've read the whole article--you can tell me if that's accurate). [1] see my user profile

atonse 3y ago

I'm generally center-left-leaning and a paying subscriber to the NYT and I've felt this way for years now. But still stuck because it is sadly still my main source of news, but increasingly opinionated. And occasionally I find pieces on the economist and FT refreshingly just informative. 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.

devilbunny 3y ago
> 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) 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).

syndicatedjelly 3y ago

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?

iamthirsty 3y ago
Just got to the same paragraph, and that last line really seals the point of the affect internal division and tribalism has eroded the independence of journalism — specifically at the NYT — and pressured us to be against ourselves in spite of, and not for, our ideals.

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mitchbob 3y ago

https://archive.is/2023.12.14-195852/https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way https://archive.is/2023.12.14-195852/https://www.economist.c...

mrangle 3y ago

Media relies on generational amnesia to recover its credibility. Go back any number of decades and the clumsy partisan propaganda will be evident, in a manner that is insistent on steering major events or their responses. Pick any decade. 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.

entropyie 3y ago

Iraq... End of story

exabrial 3y ago

The NYT lost its way when it became the premier propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party, even going so far to justify outlandishly unscientific claims in the name of pleasing/deluding the voting base.

korginator 3y ago

For years, the New York Times has had a cosy relationship with the China Daily which itself is a mouthpiece of the Chinese communist party. 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.

interestica 3y ago

I made this bookmarklet which lets you quickly view the day's printed front page. It usually goes live in the early hours of the day: 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";