The New York Times is one of the newspapers of record for the United States. However, it’s history of running stories with poor sourcing, insufficient evidence, and finding journalists with conflicts of interest undermines it’s credibility when reporting on international issues and matters of foreign policy.
Late last year, the NYT ran a story titled ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7. Recently, outlets like The Intercept, Jacobin, Democracy Now! , Mondoweiss, and others have revealed the implicit and explicit bias against Palestine that’s apparent both in the aforementioned NYT story and in the NYT’s reporting at large. By obfuscating poor sources, running stories without evidence, and using an ex-IDF officer with no journalism experience as the author, the NYT demonstrates their disregard for common journalistic practice. This has led to inaccurate and demonstrably false reporting on critical issues in today’s world, which has been used to justify the lack of American pressure against Israel to the American public.
This journalistic malpractice is not unusual from the NYT. One of the keystone stories since the turn of the century was the NYT’s reporting on Iraq’s pursuit of WMDs: U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS, Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say, Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert. These reports were later revealed to be false, and the NYT later apologized, but not before the reporting was used as justification to launch the War on Iraq, directly leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and indirectly causing millions of death while also destabilizing the region for decades.
These landmark stories have had a massive influence on US foreign policy, but they’re founded on lies. While stories published in the NYT do accurately reflect foreign policy aims of the US government, they are not founded in fact. The NYT uses lies to drum up public support for otherwise unpopular foreign policy decisions. In most places, we call that “government propaganda.”
I think reading and understanding propaganda is an important element of media literacy, and so I’m not calling for the ban of NYT articles in this community. However, I am calling for an honest discussion on media literacy and it’s relation to the New York Times.
I don’t read the Times anymore. I get my news elsewhere. That said, there are a few things to consider here, when it comes to the relative shittiness of the NYT vs other major papers. We have this notion, unfounded, that the NYT “used to be” better, or more progressive, or what have you. Certainly compared to the other two “papers of record” for the country (Washington Post and Wall Street Journal), it’s a raging pinko rag. But the fact remains that it was founded as a conservative-leaning paper, continued to be a conservative-leaning paper in the 20th century and, surprise surprise, remains a conservative-leaning paper. The lean is more Tower of Pisa than Man Vomiting on Sidewalk, but it’s still conservative.
Many of its bad takes (and there are many) are squarely in line with mainstream views. At worst, its views lag behind the country by a few years. And like all major news corporations, it is incentivized to maximize its visibility (and therefore revenue). Given the options of 1) publishing something incendiary that will put the paper in the public eye and help in creating more news to print or 2) doing additional work with the anticipated result of the truth not being nearly as interesting and therefore not nearly as attention-grabbing, they’re going to do the less work option.
Next, the NYT is a victim of the news cycle just as much as the TV networks, if not more so. While the website updates fairly regularly throughout the day, the paper comes out once every 24 hours, and must be prepped hours in advance. This means that breaking news suffers from two issues: 1) it has to be investigated at a speed faster than the TV networks because they paradoxically don’t have the luxury of time and 2) they can’t afford to be tentative when they don’t know something. CNN and Fox especially can get away with saying “we’ll report back when we know more” because that “back” is maybe 30 minutes from now. “Developing stories” exist on news networks. They do not exist for print papers. If you publish, you have to claim to be definitive, or people will stop reading. (“Why should I read the NYT when they just keep saying they don’t know shit?”)
Finally, and we should take some solace from this, it should be noted that the NYT, despite being one of the “papers of record” for the country, is basically screaming into the void. Almost no one reads it. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, they’re not conservative enough for the people who can throw money at a news organization when there are free alternatives available, and they’re not progressive enough for the rest of us to care. The number of eyeballs scanning the NYT is vanishingly small compared to the eyeballs staring at Fox News - or even CNN, for that matter. Basically, the NYT just doesn’t matter anymore. They can say whatever the fuck they want. They’re not influencing anyone who isn’t already on the same (sorry) page.
I certainly wouldn’t fault anyone for giving up on the NYT because of its journalistic errors. I certainly have. But we should neither be surprised nor shocked. This behavior is baked into the cake, and it has been since 1851, and got even worse after 1980 when CNN first went on the air. They didn’t suddenly get stupid, and they never betrayed us. We have simply never been their intended audience.