Precisely. It's not "YouTube's shifting algorithms" that are killing independent media, it's the wave of bad publicity in publications like the New York Times that lead to advertisers pulling out and made allowing ads on anything even vaguely political or controversial an existential danger to YouTube. The algorithms didn't do this by itself. And the clear-cut line between "videos that espoused extremism and hate speech" and "video makers who bear no resemblance to terrorist sympathizers and racists" that the NYT is attacking YouTube for not recognising doesn't exist. There are definitely loud, vocal, media-connected groups who classify The David Pakman Show under the former category, for example, because of his choice of guests.

Terrorist sympathizers are equivalent to racists now?

Hell, Google themselves celebrated a terrorist sympathizer with a special custom doodle.

- http://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama

- https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/CSW...

It really tells us a lot about their values and priorities when they celebrate (by making doodles) people like that instead of, for example, Easter.

Media plays both sides of the coin because they don't care about what happens to other media sources, they care about the ad revenue from clicks to their site. Playing both sides of the coin only increases clicks since both perspectives are engaged.

Or enough of the legacy media sees the clicks as a zero-sum game, and seeks to strangle the competition before it gets too powerful.

It's sort of weird to blame the New York Times when the articles that prompted the change in YouTube advertising were not published by the NYT. They were published by the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London.