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?
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".
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes. It should.
Fantastic critique Sam. Now I’ve got to go play Spelling Bee. 😕
Enjoyed this so much! Wish I could get it together to write my own critique of the Times. I have so much to add.
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.
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.
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.