Broad strokes agreement with your critique, particularly of the market segments in which the NYT has sufficient market share/mindshare to be a semi-monopoly or at least the market trend mover (I suspect there is a term of art in marketing for that second, but I don't know what it is).
e.g., the Overton window of Respectable Opinion within the American bien pensant classes, a group not coeval with the chattering classes, but one with a high level of overlap.
I find the wokeness (sensu lato) in the news pieces to be far more pervasive than you do, I think, although I agree that the opinion section has climbed down a bit from the Everest that was Kendi.
I would offer, as an admittedly weak analogy, that the NYT dominates in a similar way to Apple. I can't think of who plays the role of Google in that analogy :); the remaining prestige newspapers like the Post are perhaps Microsoft?
Yeah, I think I am being a bit more gentle with the Times than I probably should be. My suspicion, though, is that more than we realize the peak-woke Times vs. the post-woke Times really comes down to a personality difference between Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn. I have a feeling that a great deal of the Times going off the rails circa 2020 had to do with Baquet's leadership style, so I wanted to stay away from indicting The Times too harshly from the experience of one particular moment in time.
One must know the New York Times inside and out in order to provide such a deep and reasonable critique. Perhaps this is a little reductive, but I think of it as the daily edition of the CIA World Factbook. The CIA World Factbooks are extremely useful and have a lot of accurate information. You're also getting one very specific point of view. Also, a small point, but you're so right about the recipes. They never taste good enough to warrant the amount of effort that you have to put into them.
heya, i would just like to say that the term "woke madness" is at best a dog whistle for conservative white supremacists and at worse, meaningless and fully open to everyone interpreting it in any way they feel is "truthy". it would be far more appropriate to unpack exactly, and i mean exactly, what you are referring to when you use that term, and instead replace the term with a description of behaviors that cannot be misinterpreted by bad actors posing as "good guys".
Hi darius/dare, I take your point, but I do find it to be a useful shorthand for a real phenomenon. There was a period in America where it was very, very difficult to say a whole variety of things in liberal society without feeling like one would immediately face career death (whether that was 'misgendering' or referring to a biological basis for gender or questioning the efficacy of vaccines, etc, etc). I know a lot of people who lost jobs or faced real social stigma for one or another of these 'thought-crimes.' These were not the kinds of instances that ever rose to media debate, but, taken together, cases like this created a pervasive sense across the society that you had to walk a very narrow line of correct-speech and correct-action or face the consequences. I really think that it would be absurd to pretend that this didn't happen - or is not happening. If you feel that "woke madness" is the wrong term, I would happily accept a substitute.
sure, i am not disputing the behaviors of censorship, and of fascism cloaked in the skin of protection. however, the reality is that we have seen the demonization of diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race studies and all forms of critique against the white supremacist underpinnings of american culture. this demonization also stole the term woke from the very black and brown activists who had used it as internal shorthand. propaganda like this is insidious, it benefits those who pit the working class against each other. i think the term woke madness also benefits them. it puts the blame on the most marginalized, blaming them for wanting to be treated better by those in power (who, lets face it, probabaly havent earned that power).
and by the way... what is so hard about calling someone the names, or pronouns, they want to be called? the uproar about this is beyond petty, beyond insane. if a white male changed their name from bill to thor, no one bats an eye. but if bill wants to change their name to sarah...
i dont have a cute term that includes all the facets of all of these tactics. i do know/think that part of it is overcorrection, part of it is fascists, republicans and conservatives capturing (more) power by scapegoating minorities and the working class, and part of it is the rampant levels of social inequity that create stress, addiction, fear and pain on a level that is grotesque.
i think we need to be ultra careful with our language, our hyperbole, etc, when we talk about these very real issues that can and do cause harm.
like you said, people losing their jobs, because the social and national discourse is toxically impoverished. we dont seem to be good at naming behaviors without jumping to ideological abstractions.
Delightful to read, as expected, and I agree with most of what you say, as far as it goes. That said, I think you are too forgiving of the NYT (which I have read daily, for years). The elephant in the room is politics in a constitutional way, that is, is this the 4th estate in the sense that the US has relied upon since Ben Franklin ran a paper? With a monopolist serving ""heroin for our side" (as you nicely put it), then public discourse as represented by print media is not coterminous with the polity, which gets its "facts" elsewhere. Nor is the NYT nearly as scrupulous as your opening suggests, or is only about the small things. Instead, disadvantageous news is simply elided, which a monopolist can do. Anti-Israel protests in front of Sloan Kettering's cancer ward? Only after WSJ and others reported, and buried. With its near monopoly, the NYT can report (and some of its staff openly espouse reporting) only those stories it believes advances the cause, or trimming/cutting/emphasizing in order to do so. You note this. So, simply didn't report in any serious way on Biden's collapse. Harris has free pass as Barri Weiss & Co and Ross Barkan keep saying. The news will be curated. This is not the bias inevitable to being human; this is a shift in professional ethos.
At one level, we might say that the shift is from reporting to advocacy. But I think it's actually a bit deeper. As you note, "Tesla" (again, nice,) the Times has become about "lifestyle." It's more than just entertainment. It's sex and parenting and what to eat and where to travel and what to read and . . . there is something quite totalizing about this. The Times is the organ of the symbol manipulating class (I'm a law professor), that is, it articulates, reiterates, and solidifies a class identity. This is where the comparison to Pravda has bite. To think that my class is conterminous with the nation, or simply has the legitimacy to rule the nation, is a Clintonite fantasy. We've lost what another group of mandarins called the mandate of heaven, and the decline of the NYT is a big piece of that puzzle.
I see two futures, in principle, for the NYT, and one likely outcome. The Times could attempt to "go back" and become the Gray Lady, the paper of record, if perhaps with some loyalty to the Dems. But reputation is hard to recover, and it would require a wholesale turn around, probably a shift in ownership and a bloodbath. Alternatively, the NYT could really lean into this lifestyle stuff. The magazine for the class of people who love the Ivy League. (Yes, of course, and my kids too.) My guess is that nothing of either sort will happen anytime soon. Instead, the NYT will continue pretty much as it is: claiming political virtues it does not have, and articulating received opinions on just about everything, in that signature good but deadening style that you decry. The paper has never been more profitable, and if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Those are all good points. I agree that I am being fairly gentle with The Times. The reason is that I think The Times really is going through a period of course-correction. As much as I can understand the personalities, it's Joe Kahn playing the part of Nikita Khrushchev and David Wallace-Walls doing the rehabilitation work of revisiting stories that The Times got wrong during Peak Woke. Kahn's Semafor interview gives a very interesting glimpse of just how furious he is with the direction the Times took under Dean Baquet's watch. So I kind of feel like The Times deserves something of a pass at the moment, and a chance to get its house back in order. But I share the same reaction that you do. There are some stories that are just jaw-dropping - particularly the willingness to reprint Democratic Party campaign spin.
Very generous to all concerned! It's worth remembering that the Great Awakening led to the "Burnt Over" country of New York . . . that may be where we are now. Keep up the good work.
Growing up in the Midwest (a Chicago suburb), I heard of the NYT only when I got to college…an Ivy League school, yes, and one whose daily newspaper i coedited/wrote/photographed for. 40+ years later I retain a fondness for the rag, mostly online/sometimes from my local 7-11, but it’s far from my only news source, even for international news in English. And I have to differ slightly on a newspaper’s place in the arts…most of which is local, but one can’t travel to NYC or overseas regularly for biennales, so it’s nice to know what’s opening in NYC/other places, and I follow up on what interests me via other theater/opera/painting friends/sources.
As for the fluff—Wirecutter especially—I let it go. Don’t mind seeing the photos of good food, but NYT charges extra for recipes (ditto crosswords), so I continue to Google whatever ingredients I have on hand and generate my own fun in the kitchen.
Hi Patricia, yeah I suffer a bit from Times-myopia because I grew up in New York City and the Times really was the home team. So there was a period that was kind of exciting to me when all these other newspapers were folding up and shrinking and a particularly New York sensibility seemed to be prevailing as the Times became this sort of supernova, but now I'm seeing the other side of it. The Times is just too powerful and has too much influence over established opinion.
The bit on lifestyle is really insightful, Sam. I'd thought about that with the games/arcade silliness (which I participate in, shamefacedly), but not with how this creeps into other areas.
One byproduct of this monopoly is that fact checking is no longer a given. Maybe there's some of that for the most prominent pieces, but there is a lot of minor material that is not fact checked at all, except by the author, which of course is not sufficient.
This is the biggest problem with Substack, too, as far as I can tell. Ted Gioia recently posted something about how many individual Substacks you can subscribe to for the cost of a single newspaper subscription, which I confess made me both sad and angry. Sure, you get more unfiltered voices, but the platform defaults to the hot takes, to Hamish and Chris and Mills riffing on live video. That might seem hip and everything, but it is not remotely comparable to journalism. Who fact checks Ted Gioia or anyone else publishing on this platform? Maybe that world is gone for good, and we're now stuck with a sea of competing facts. But I'd like to see some evidence of Substack voices that are actually doing righteous watchdog reporting and building real credibility. There's plenty of gimmicky content here, too, and the grievance hustling and the advocacy.
Yeah that's a really good point. I'd kind of expected by now that there would be more publications on Substack and more with old-style journalistic values. Having fact-checking, etc, as well as actual reporting becomes a competitive advantage. In terms of the history of journalism, I kind of feel like we've gone back to something like the penny presses of the 1830s/1840s, with lots and lots of people churning out their opinions. And then the next step after that is consolidation and a tightening of standards within a competitive marketplace. That's all to the good if that does happen. What's most important to me at the moment is getting out of our current bottlenecked culture where a handful of newspapers, channels, and publishing houses control so much of 'acceptable opinion.'
"The Times maintains an impeccably fact-checked style of reporting — from a Journalism 101 perspective it’s always very difficult to fault any of The Times’ pieces."
Then you go on about woke capture and not reporting the news accurately but rather trying to persuade its readership.
Well, one man's schizophrenia is another's balance. I'm trying to acknowledge what The Times does well - and they do a lot of things very well - but the kind of domination The Times over acceptable opinion never comes without costs.
Familiar with the Canadian Indigenous school "mass graves" and the "remains" of children discovered? Read Johnathan Kay at Quillette or Terry Glavin at the National Post. The NYT literally wrote the "remains" of children into existence and contributed to mass arson of churches and months of self-flagellation by Canadians. The real story is complex and the actual facts are not in dispute, but the NYT stands by its reporting to this day. Are you familiar with the Cass Review? The information therein is not particularly new but the NYT has for years pushed the claim that "gender-affirming care" is evidence-based medicine. Did the NYT report the fact that WPATH commissioned its own evidence review for child sex-change procedures with Johns Hopkins, but blocked it when the results were consistent with the Cass Review? This information came out in court, emails and all, but the Times doesn't report it. Virtually any topic in the NYT touching on identity is tainted by bias and misinformation. This isn't a question of differing "opinion." You seem to acknowledge this; then you contradict yourself.
I guess I should say, one man's schizophrenia is another man's multiple valid dissenting voices. I'm aware of both of those stories and I don't disagree with you. The Times has its spin and even bias. At the same time, though, The Times is an extraordinary achievement. It's dozens of stories every day, almost all of them difficult to report, many of them containing reporting not found anywhere else. I know how difficult that is to do and have to respect the craft involved.
Journalism is a uniquely important field. We literally rely on these people to have any chance of knowing what is going on in the world. Truthful reporting is the bare minimum. The Times does not report the truth on topics related to identity. "Misinformation" is a sin unless the powers that be employ it. I prefer honest, fact-based reporting to being fed an ideological narrative. I could provide dozens more examples of blatant lies and crude distortions peddled by the NYT. Apparently the editors and reporters at the Times find basic journalism too limiting for their impulses. NPR has gone the same way. Their self-declared "North Star" is not the practice of good journalism, it is the promotion of identity diversity. If I can presume to paraphrase, you are admiring the Times because it is large and a lot goes on there, including lots of reporting on issues beyond domestic politics and policy. That is their job! The fact that they can't do it when it comes to many domestic issues is damning. The public has nowhere to turn so they just pick and choose what they want to believe unless they are willing to spend a lot of time sifting through multiple sources to deconstruct the noise.
Good point, among many, about how puzzles and food are primarily to hook subscribers (though not so different from many newspapers in the past). And it is certainly very disconcerting to see a headline about tender scones right next to one about houses being blown apart. But aren’t those features also uniting in a potentially good way? I find it kind of touching that millions of people, from many walks of life and political sentiment, think about the same word once a day. And others are busy in their kitchens trying the same recipes - and sharing their results in lively comments. The recipes are mostly not so complicated, really, and, indeed, there seems to be a mission to encourage people to understand that they really can break away from the seduction of (expensive and processed) outsourced food and find simple joy. I wonder how much the “living” sections bring people to the Times who would otherwise stay in a different political bubble. I admit I am writing as an addict, so may well be too forgiving.
Thank you Mom! I agree of course. There is something very beautiful about that unity, but everything has its shadow side as well. What I'm arguing is that the shadow side here is what Paul Bloom would talk about as tribalism. A "Times Reader" implies - as it has since the 19th century - someone of a certain cultivation, the kind of person who wouldn't want to see a four-letter word in their newspaper and can breeze through a Wednesday crossword. That's a very different readership from, say, The Post or FOX, and, partly through that sense of a cultivated sensibility, The Times is basically giving up on communicating to very large numbers of people who are also a key part of the electorate. None of these things are problematic if The Times is a company fighting for market share along with everyone else. It comes to be a problem when so many competitors disappear, when The Times becomes something close to a monopoly, and a lot of people end up feeling left out of the discourse.
I agree with that Amber. Some of these problems really only show up with scale. Once The Times becomes a national, and global, paper, then its somewhat parochial sensibility more greatly distorts the national conversation.
Broad strokes agreement with your critique, particularly of the market segments in which the NYT has sufficient market share/mindshare to be a semi-monopoly or at least the market trend mover (I suspect there is a term of art in marketing for that second, but I don't know what it is).
e.g., the Overton window of Respectable Opinion within the American bien pensant classes, a group not coeval with the chattering classes, but one with a high level of overlap.
I find the wokeness (sensu lato) in the news pieces to be far more pervasive than you do, I think, although I agree that the opinion section has climbed down a bit from the Everest that was Kendi.
I would offer, as an admittedly weak analogy, that the NYT dominates in a similar way to Apple. I can't think of who plays the role of Google in that analogy :); the remaining prestige newspapers like the Post are perhaps Microsoft?
Yeah, I think I am being a bit more gentle with the Times than I probably should be. My suspicion, though, is that more than we realize the peak-woke Times vs. the post-woke Times really comes down to a personality difference between Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn. I have a feeling that a great deal of the Times going off the rails circa 2020 had to do with Baquet's leadership style, so I wanted to stay away from indicting The Times too harshly from the experience of one particular moment in time.
One must know the New York Times inside and out in order to provide such a deep and reasonable critique. Perhaps this is a little reductive, but I think of it as the daily edition of the CIA World Factbook. The CIA World Factbooks are extremely useful and have a lot of accurate information. You're also getting one very specific point of view. Also, a small point, but you're so right about the recipes. They never taste good enough to warrant the amount of effort that you have to put into them.
Haha! I don't know enough about cooking to evaluate The Times' recipes. That would be interesting to have a chef critique the Times' food section.
heya, i would just like to say that the term "woke madness" is at best a dog whistle for conservative white supremacists and at worse, meaningless and fully open to everyone interpreting it in any way they feel is "truthy". it would be far more appropriate to unpack exactly, and i mean exactly, what you are referring to when you use that term, and instead replace the term with a description of behaviors that cannot be misinterpreted by bad actors posing as "good guys".
Anyone who does not understand what woke madness is has had their head in a bucket for the last 5 years.
When the boot you lick is laced with feces.
Hi darius/dare, I take your point, but I do find it to be a useful shorthand for a real phenomenon. There was a period in America where it was very, very difficult to say a whole variety of things in liberal society without feeling like one would immediately face career death (whether that was 'misgendering' or referring to a biological basis for gender or questioning the efficacy of vaccines, etc, etc). I know a lot of people who lost jobs or faced real social stigma for one or another of these 'thought-crimes.' These were not the kinds of instances that ever rose to media debate, but, taken together, cases like this created a pervasive sense across the society that you had to walk a very narrow line of correct-speech and correct-action or face the consequences. I really think that it would be absurd to pretend that this didn't happen - or is not happening. If you feel that "woke madness" is the wrong term, I would happily accept a substitute.
- Sam
sure, i am not disputing the behaviors of censorship, and of fascism cloaked in the skin of protection. however, the reality is that we have seen the demonization of diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race studies and all forms of critique against the white supremacist underpinnings of american culture. this demonization also stole the term woke from the very black and brown activists who had used it as internal shorthand. propaganda like this is insidious, it benefits those who pit the working class against each other. i think the term woke madness also benefits them. it puts the blame on the most marginalized, blaming them for wanting to be treated better by those in power (who, lets face it, probabaly havent earned that power).
and by the way... what is so hard about calling someone the names, or pronouns, they want to be called? the uproar about this is beyond petty, beyond insane. if a white male changed their name from bill to thor, no one bats an eye. but if bill wants to change their name to sarah...
i dont have a cute term that includes all the facets of all of these tactics. i do know/think that part of it is overcorrection, part of it is fascists, republicans and conservatives capturing (more) power by scapegoating minorities and the working class, and part of it is the rampant levels of social inequity that create stress, addiction, fear and pain on a level that is grotesque.
i think we need to be ultra careful with our language, our hyperbole, etc, when we talk about these very real issues that can and do cause harm.
like you said, people losing their jobs, because the social and national discourse is toxically impoverished. we dont seem to be good at naming behaviors without jumping to ideological abstractions.
Delightful to read, as expected, and I agree with most of what you say, as far as it goes. That said, I think you are too forgiving of the NYT (which I have read daily, for years). The elephant in the room is politics in a constitutional way, that is, is this the 4th estate in the sense that the US has relied upon since Ben Franklin ran a paper? With a monopolist serving ""heroin for our side" (as you nicely put it), then public discourse as represented by print media is not coterminous with the polity, which gets its "facts" elsewhere. Nor is the NYT nearly as scrupulous as your opening suggests, or is only about the small things. Instead, disadvantageous news is simply elided, which a monopolist can do. Anti-Israel protests in front of Sloan Kettering's cancer ward? Only after WSJ and others reported, and buried. With its near monopoly, the NYT can report (and some of its staff openly espouse reporting) only those stories it believes advances the cause, or trimming/cutting/emphasizing in order to do so. You note this. So, simply didn't report in any serious way on Biden's collapse. Harris has free pass as Barri Weiss & Co and Ross Barkan keep saying. The news will be curated. This is not the bias inevitable to being human; this is a shift in professional ethos.
At one level, we might say that the shift is from reporting to advocacy. But I think it's actually a bit deeper. As you note, "Tesla" (again, nice,) the Times has become about "lifestyle." It's more than just entertainment. It's sex and parenting and what to eat and where to travel and what to read and . . . there is something quite totalizing about this. The Times is the organ of the symbol manipulating class (I'm a law professor), that is, it articulates, reiterates, and solidifies a class identity. This is where the comparison to Pravda has bite. To think that my class is conterminous with the nation, or simply has the legitimacy to rule the nation, is a Clintonite fantasy. We've lost what another group of mandarins called the mandate of heaven, and the decline of the NYT is a big piece of that puzzle.
I see two futures, in principle, for the NYT, and one likely outcome. The Times could attempt to "go back" and become the Gray Lady, the paper of record, if perhaps with some loyalty to the Dems. But reputation is hard to recover, and it would require a wholesale turn around, probably a shift in ownership and a bloodbath. Alternatively, the NYT could really lean into this lifestyle stuff. The magazine for the class of people who love the Ivy League. (Yes, of course, and my kids too.) My guess is that nothing of either sort will happen anytime soon. Instead, the NYT will continue pretty much as it is: claiming political virtues it does not have, and articulating received opinions on just about everything, in that signature good but deadening style that you decry. The paper has never been more profitable, and if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Hi David,
Those are all good points. I agree that I am being fairly gentle with The Times. The reason is that I think The Times really is going through a period of course-correction. As much as I can understand the personalities, it's Joe Kahn playing the part of Nikita Khrushchev and David Wallace-Walls doing the rehabilitation work of revisiting stories that The Times got wrong during Peak Woke. Kahn's Semafor interview gives a very interesting glimpse of just how furious he is with the direction the Times took under Dean Baquet's watch. So I kind of feel like The Times deserves something of a pass at the moment, and a chance to get its house back in order. But I share the same reaction that you do. There are some stories that are just jaw-dropping - particularly the willingness to reprint Democratic Party campaign spin.
- Sam
Very generous to all concerned! It's worth remembering that the Great Awakening led to the "Burnt Over" country of New York . . . that may be where we are now. Keep up the good work.
Growing up in the Midwest (a Chicago suburb), I heard of the NYT only when I got to college…an Ivy League school, yes, and one whose daily newspaper i coedited/wrote/photographed for. 40+ years later I retain a fondness for the rag, mostly online/sometimes from my local 7-11, but it’s far from my only news source, even for international news in English. And I have to differ slightly on a newspaper’s place in the arts…most of which is local, but one can’t travel to NYC or overseas regularly for biennales, so it’s nice to know what’s opening in NYC/other places, and I follow up on what interests me via other theater/opera/painting friends/sources.
As for the fluff—Wirecutter especially—I let it go. Don’t mind seeing the photos of good food, but NYT charges extra for recipes (ditto crosswords), so I continue to Google whatever ingredients I have on hand and generate my own fun in the kitchen.
Hi Patricia, yeah I suffer a bit from Times-myopia because I grew up in New York City and the Times really was the home team. So there was a period that was kind of exciting to me when all these other newspapers were folding up and shrinking and a particularly New York sensibility seemed to be prevailing as the Times became this sort of supernova, but now I'm seeing the other side of it. The Times is just too powerful and has too much influence over established opinion.
The bit on lifestyle is really insightful, Sam. I'd thought about that with the games/arcade silliness (which I participate in, shamefacedly), but not with how this creeps into other areas.
One byproduct of this monopoly is that fact checking is no longer a given. Maybe there's some of that for the most prominent pieces, but there is a lot of minor material that is not fact checked at all, except by the author, which of course is not sufficient.
This is the biggest problem with Substack, too, as far as I can tell. Ted Gioia recently posted something about how many individual Substacks you can subscribe to for the cost of a single newspaper subscription, which I confess made me both sad and angry. Sure, you get more unfiltered voices, but the platform defaults to the hot takes, to Hamish and Chris and Mills riffing on live video. That might seem hip and everything, but it is not remotely comparable to journalism. Who fact checks Ted Gioia or anyone else publishing on this platform? Maybe that world is gone for good, and we're now stuck with a sea of competing facts. But I'd like to see some evidence of Substack voices that are actually doing righteous watchdog reporting and building real credibility. There's plenty of gimmicky content here, too, and the grievance hustling and the advocacy.
Hi Josh,
Yeah that's a really good point. I'd kind of expected by now that there would be more publications on Substack and more with old-style journalistic values. Having fact-checking, etc, as well as actual reporting becomes a competitive advantage. In terms of the history of journalism, I kind of feel like we've gone back to something like the penny presses of the 1830s/1840s, with lots and lots of people churning out their opinions. And then the next step after that is consolidation and a tightening of standards within a competitive marketplace. That's all to the good if that does happen. What's most important to me at the moment is getting out of our current bottlenecked culture where a handful of newspapers, channels, and publishing houses control so much of 'acceptable opinion.'
- Sam
Yes. It should.
Fantastic critique Sam. Now I’ve got to go play Spelling Bee. 😕
Lol!
Enjoyed this so much! Wish I could get it together to write my own critique of the Times. I have so much to add.
I'm sure you do! I'm really just scratching the surface with this!
Yes… and no.. they also have a historical value..
This is a schizophrenic article.
"The Times maintains an impeccably fact-checked style of reporting — from a Journalism 101 perspective it’s always very difficult to fault any of The Times’ pieces."
Then you go on about woke capture and not reporting the news accurately but rather trying to persuade its readership.
Hi Scott,
Well, one man's schizophrenia is another's balance. I'm trying to acknowledge what The Times does well - and they do a lot of things very well - but the kind of domination The Times over acceptable opinion never comes without costs.
- Sam
Familiar with the Canadian Indigenous school "mass graves" and the "remains" of children discovered? Read Johnathan Kay at Quillette or Terry Glavin at the National Post. The NYT literally wrote the "remains" of children into existence and contributed to mass arson of churches and months of self-flagellation by Canadians. The real story is complex and the actual facts are not in dispute, but the NYT stands by its reporting to this day. Are you familiar with the Cass Review? The information therein is not particularly new but the NYT has for years pushed the claim that "gender-affirming care" is evidence-based medicine. Did the NYT report the fact that WPATH commissioned its own evidence review for child sex-change procedures with Johns Hopkins, but blocked it when the results were consistent with the Cass Review? This information came out in court, emails and all, but the Times doesn't report it. Virtually any topic in the NYT touching on identity is tainted by bias and misinformation. This isn't a question of differing "opinion." You seem to acknowledge this; then you contradict yourself.
I guess I should say, one man's schizophrenia is another man's multiple valid dissenting voices. I'm aware of both of those stories and I don't disagree with you. The Times has its spin and even bias. At the same time, though, The Times is an extraordinary achievement. It's dozens of stories every day, almost all of them difficult to report, many of them containing reporting not found anywhere else. I know how difficult that is to do and have to respect the craft involved.
Journalism is a uniquely important field. We literally rely on these people to have any chance of knowing what is going on in the world. Truthful reporting is the bare minimum. The Times does not report the truth on topics related to identity. "Misinformation" is a sin unless the powers that be employ it. I prefer honest, fact-based reporting to being fed an ideological narrative. I could provide dozens more examples of blatant lies and crude distortions peddled by the NYT. Apparently the editors and reporters at the Times find basic journalism too limiting for their impulses. NPR has gone the same way. Their self-declared "North Star" is not the practice of good journalism, it is the promotion of identity diversity. If I can presume to paraphrase, you are admiring the Times because it is large and a lot goes on there, including lots of reporting on issues beyond domestic politics and policy. That is their job! The fact that they can't do it when it comes to many domestic issues is damning. The public has nowhere to turn so they just pick and choose what they want to believe unless they are willing to spend a lot of time sifting through multiple sources to deconstruct the noise.
Good point, among many, about how puzzles and food are primarily to hook subscribers (though not so different from many newspapers in the past). And it is certainly very disconcerting to see a headline about tender scones right next to one about houses being blown apart. But aren’t those features also uniting in a potentially good way? I find it kind of touching that millions of people, from many walks of life and political sentiment, think about the same word once a day. And others are busy in their kitchens trying the same recipes - and sharing their results in lively comments. The recipes are mostly not so complicated, really, and, indeed, there seems to be a mission to encourage people to understand that they really can break away from the seduction of (expensive and processed) outsourced food and find simple joy. I wonder how much the “living” sections bring people to the Times who would otherwise stay in a different political bubble. I admit I am writing as an addict, so may well be too forgiving.
Thank you Mom! I agree of course. There is something very beautiful about that unity, but everything has its shadow side as well. What I'm arguing is that the shadow side here is what Paul Bloom would talk about as tribalism. A "Times Reader" implies - as it has since the 19th century - someone of a certain cultivation, the kind of person who wouldn't want to see a four-letter word in their newspaper and can breeze through a Wednesday crossword. That's a very different readership from, say, The Post or FOX, and, partly through that sense of a cultivated sensibility, The Times is basically giving up on communicating to very large numbers of people who are also a key part of the electorate. None of these things are problematic if The Times is a company fighting for market share along with everyone else. It comes to be a problem when so many competitors disappear, when The Times becomes something close to a monopoly, and a lot of people end up feeling left out of the discourse.
I find it helpful to think of the Times as a very, very good regional paper serving a specific audience—which happens to enjoy a wide readership.
I agree with that Amber. Some of these problems really only show up with scale. Once The Times becomes a national, and global, paper, then its somewhat parochial sensibility more greatly distorts the national conversation.