Disclaimer I worked at NYT but this is just unsubstantiated garbage. Say what you will about the company and journalism as a whole but you’d be hard pressed to find a better group of truth-seekers out there. waves hands at every other “news” outlet
I don't see it that way. Not after years and years of noticing the pro-establishment bias. One example that still sticks with me is the coverage of the of the so called aid convoy at Cucuta, Venezuela. (As an aside, almost all coverage of Venezuela by the mainstream media is grossly deficient.)
The short of that story is this: Something happens. The mainstream media (including the Times) write about it in a way that is unflattering to the Venezuelan government (or whatever enemy du-jour is targetted). Weeks later, when it no longer matters, the Times prints a more accurate version, but still manages to be as uncomplimentary as possible. As the time itself said--two weeks later:
>"CÚCUTA, Colombia — The narrative seemed to fit Venezuela’s authoritarian rule: Security forces, on the order of President Nicolás Maduro, had torched a convoy of humanitarian aid as millions in his country were suffering from illness and hunger." (from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-...)
Independent South American journalists got it right. The UN tried to set the record straight about this aid convoy, the day after the event. But from the NYT, we got 'the narrative'. And that article that finally said Mr. Maduro didn't do it, came out two weeks later. By then the damage was done.
I've observed that same dynamic with other events as well, such as during the Bolivian coup attempt of 2019. The OAS manufactured a non-existent electoral crisis. No major US paper pushed back on that narrative, which was later shown to be an artifact of how the votes counting process--as the Bolivian government claimed all along, rather than any real crisis.
The Times simply can not be counted upon to give unbiased coverage in other situations either: Syria, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Russia, Ukraine, China, are all strongly biased with the official US narrative.
This is why I cannot subscribe to this paper. It is too often useless as a place where I can go to to get truth.
The propaganda outlets have really been pushing hard the line that you can't trust professional journalists, and people who get their news from influencers just seem to accept it uncritically.
It’s not propaganda, Noam Chomsky wrote a book about how media is used to advance otherwise unpopular government policies decades ago and the NYT is mentioned in it. If anything this post is propaganda.
Even Chomsky has said that you could read the NYT from back to front to partially counteract the bias toward cozying up to power. (I.e., the stories that show bias in favor of U.S. govt are the ones at the front that are most prominently placed.)
Toplevel OP, however, is saying some things that are more radical and less studious:
* "NYT aligns itself with power at every opportunity." Because the statement is totalizing it is trivially disproved. Off the top of my head-- see the "Pentagon Pundits" story by David Barstow[1]. It won a Pulitzer and was published while Bush was still president. It was also a front-page story IIRC.
* "never ran the story to protect GW's chances at reelection." IIRC Glenn Greenwald was the most vocal/detailed critic of Keller's cowardice on spiking the domestic surveillance story in the lead up to the 2004 election. But even he didn't claim Keller did in order to help GW win the election. OP made that up out of whole cloth.
I don't think HN comments like this are propaganda, but they are low-effort and apparently impulsively written.
At least nobody has yet used the pretentious terms "Gell-Mann Amnesia" or "Overton window" in this thread, so that's progress. :)
The Times is especially pernicious because of the hallowed reputation it has. It lets it spin the narrative at crucial moments. Look back at Judith Miller and the Iraq war. Or in the recent case of the Gaza conflict - their false reporting on mass rapes in the debunked "Screams Without Words" article helped give Israel political cover during a critical juncture of the carpet bombing of the Palestinians.
Their coverage of Gaza and Israel has been the deepest hit to their reputation.
The ratio of “college hate speech” to coverage of Israel’s targeted and mass war crimes has been unbelievable. I’d be deeply ashamed if I worked there.
(Putting aside that this apartheid has been going on for far longer, of course, without consistent coverage.)
No it isn't garbage. During the Biden regime they ran every culture war story that was expected from them. During COVID they ran a hardliner policy for two years. Then, when they were told about an imminent policy reversal around December 2021, they suddenly started manufacturing the new consent with questioning if lockdowns hurt school children etc.
They had been Iraq hawks, they are Ukraine hawks now.
The NYT most closely matches Chomsky's media analysis of all outlets, and unlike other outlets the NYT hides it well.
Relevant quote: "In politics, a regime (also spelled régime) is a system of government that determines access to public office, and the extent of power held by officials. The two broad categories of regimes are democratic and autocratic."
It is true that as a term it has accrued some negative connotations due to the frequent use of the all-encompassing "regime" to speak of governments where their exact denomination tends to fall on the autocratic side of things. From a journalistic point of view, it is better to use a neutral term than a charged one; which unfortunately as you've noticed yourself it can taint the term to readers who are not familiar with its exact scope.
But it is correct to call it Biden's regime, just like the current administration (perhaps a better term given its popularity in the US) is part of Trump's regime.
With respect to culture wars and firing the "vaccine" hesitant it was a regime. Trump is now establishing a regime of a different kind. One can be unhappy with both.
I'm not the same person. But a vaccine which doesn't actually provide lasting immunity is a really shit vaccine. And while I wouldn't say that means it doesn't deserve to be called a vaccine at all, certainly many people think that.
No, it’s not. The tetanus vaccine saves lives and must be redone every so often. The cholera vaccine as well. There are many excellent vaccines that save lives that require boosters.
It's certainly not that they come up with outright lies. They have a ton of good people who work there. But there's something rotten higher up in the way they put their finger on the scales.
Biden’s age was a bigger factor because it was absolutely clear he was in rapid cognitive decline. No doubt it’s also happened to Trump at his age (as it does to everyone), but Biden essentially hid from any unscripted press the entirety of his Presidency.
Trump does the opposite. We can all judge his actual cognitive faculties because he’s constantly tweeting or in front of cameras. It’s pretty clear to anyone with a brain that most of the things the Biden administration did, Biden himself had very little to do with. Trump, again, is the opposite.
The NYT honestly should have been covering Biden’s decline more. It bordered on a coverup. The fact that people were surprised at his debate performance points to that.
But once he was out of the race and there was only one old guy, age ceased to become an issue.
That's what makes what they're doing kind of insidious. They're not making things up - Biden is indeed old. It's how they weight things and how much they push them.
There's a reason the "NYT Pitch Bot" account is so popular - it's poking fun at a real phenomenon.
Obviously the editorial page is not in favor of Trump.
The organization as a whole... IDK, I have a suspicion that they kind of view the chaos as good for business and exciting, rather than 'boring and dull' like Biden.
It's not a blatant bias, it's more subtle than that. It does not involve spreading falsehoods. More things like 'both sides!'.
Biden has severe spinal arthritis and neuropathy in his feet. The guy walks around in pretty severe pain and suffers from a stutter.
The story of the cognitive decline was pushed aggressively by the Trump people because it’s good TV. Just like they neutralized Desantis with the weirdo campaign.
It’s pretty obvious that Trump is a turnip. I’ve heard him speak in person… the sound bites sound cogent on TV, but the dude is like a drunk monkey he can’t string sentences together. The reactionary policy isn’t out of Trump’s head, its from a little army of fascist attorneys.
Both are odious Presidents… it’s ridiculous that a country as large and powerful as the United States is led by 80 year olds.
Oh, come on. Are people still using the "stutter" excuse? Go look up a video of him from 2000 or whatever. His stutter sure did get worse!
The story of cognitive decline was pushed because it was true. That's why he basically did no press, and why he used a teleprompter during times no other president would:
https://archive.is/C60uH
When he did speak without one, he regularly said stuff like "they don't want me to talk about that."
I don't disagree that they're both way too old. However, the Trump we have now seems to be basically the same Trump we had in 2016. He rambles about as much as he did then. He could quickly deteriorate though - we'll see.
>And once the race was no longer between two old guys, age ceased to matter much to a number of news outfits.
Age never mattered with regards to Trump, but it was a meme with Biden even when he was VP. In terms of press coverage and popular perception it was never a race between two old guys, it was a race between "the old guy" and Trump.
Hey what is up with Biden’s rapid decline nowadays, anyway? I guess considering the rate he was apparently declining when it was a hot-button political issue, by now he must be a vegetable by now, right?
Their comment is vastly more substantiated than your feelings are. We all know that NYT suppressed a story about unlawful mass surveillance, then published it to avoid being scooped.
This is besides the mountains of bullshit they pushed to promote the Iraq war - propaganda they have never, and will never fully admit to.
I don't really disagree with you but at the same time I wouldn't expect any run of the mill employee to know about this sort of conspiracy if it were real.
Often times I hear a fairly important piece of negative news about <group>, then look up which MSMs have reported it. Chances are I can find it on CNN, but it’s completely missing from NYT, or only one tangential sentence/paragraph in a related piece. Lying by omission is powerful.
