I also think it is really obvious that it would be this way. There is hardly any money in selling newspapers, even well before the internet completely obliterated that business. But shaping public opinion? That is valuable beyond measure, for the right (moneyed) interest groups.
In fact the article closes:
Since then, the Times has been much more willing to stand up to the government and refuse to go along with White House demands to hold or kill stories.
I think the major takeaway is really the erosion of journalistic protections which has occurred over the last decade+.
Not really though. One has to look at the articles and values espoused by the newspaper and not an individual's assertions to determine where the newspaper stands. A news paper that espoused the establishment's line of Saddam Hussien possessing weapons of mass destruction which factually was wrong cannot claim to be resilient to political pressure. Look at its coverage on plethora of issues from labour movements, civil rights, Cuban missile crisis, interventions in South America, financing of Contras , coverage of China, and middle east. It has always supported and validated the establishment's position even though now we know that the establishment was wrong in every single of this.
Risen should have been fired for the Wen-Ho Lee with hunt alone, where the Federal judge in charge of the case apologized on behalf of the judicial branch of the Federal government to Mr. Lee for the way he was mistreated, with Risen acting as a cheerleader for the notorious Notra Trulock.
He does have a point about the Plame affair, but there is a big difference between journalists helping cover up malfeasance in public office and those protecting whistleblowers. This could be addressed by extending the whistleblower statutes to cover journalists.
It could also be taking on a rival powerful establishment interests, like in Democrats vs Republican type bickering.
Chomsky in his famous Andrew Marr interview addressed Marr's example of Watergate scandal as one part of the establishment defending itself against another part of the establishment, thus allowing the story to be broken. He compared Watergate, which everybody knows about, to a much bigger scandal of the same time, COINTELPRO, which relatively few people have even heard about.
The entire interview is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow
It's as Chesterton said, "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."
I think that's misleading, bordering on libel. Even this article cited cases (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy...) where the NYT ran stories that challenged powerful interests and the status quo, directly against the personally stated wishes of a conservative president.
The truth is that things are more complicated than black and white. Some might be disappointed that the NYT doesn't always gleefully poke at the eyes of a particular power whenever it can, but like every human and human organization, it doesn't always live up to its own ideals or the ideals that have been applied to it.
That depends on what he's selling, and also on what his allies in government or elsewhere want him to publish.
Do you deny the issues I listed are issues where the right wing has lost ground in the past 50-100 years? If so, what do you even mean by "right wing"?
If not, then your position is that the elites have been losing on those positions for the past 50-100 years. Is that what you think?
You could start with answering the questions that I asked.
To a large extent, the right wing policies of decades past have worked incredibly well to focus authoritarian force where it is most useful to right wing goals:
- Suppression of the black population, the crack epidemic, and destruction of the black power movement.
- Massive increases in the number of people in prison, but most notable is the successful campaign to make Americans view prisoners as subhuman and deserving of extremely cruel and unusual treatment.
- The dramatic increase in the ideas of American Exceptionalism and the associated force projection after the cold war. It was not certain this was possible, but it has been achieved thanks to successful fear mongering PR about terrorism and militant Islam.
- Dramatic increases in social inequality. There are many reasons for this, but foremost among them is a loss of social power by the have nots relative to the haves, and the resulting shift in wealth patterns.
- Low voter turnout rates. Americans have been made to feel absurdly proud to live in a democracy, yet only around half see any value in casting a vote. This is akin to convincing the people that pine needle tea is delicious and contains many essential nutrients.
- Broad support for unprecedentedly generous corporate welfare. More and more industries are viewed as too important to fail, and significant societal resources are allocated to the preservation of the status quo. Chieftains in those industries have captured massive upside gains while successfully foisting downside risks onto society as a whole. There is no serious consideration among regulators or officials that the incentive system is remotely unjust, and we are told to be grateful that the industries were saved.
- Widespread hero worship of cops, military, and other projections of authoritarian force. The NFL is sponsored by and heavily promotes the US military, and police departments use aggressive PR stories about kitten rescues, etc., to help whitewash their image in the face of more and more examples of profound misconduct. Further, there are rarely any investigations into such misconduct (abuse of power, etc.) that reach beyond low level participants.
Those are just a few examples, but most of the increasing trends are broadly right-wing in their nature and are supported by various groups. Consider the example of US military intervention in foreign lands. Some support it because the "evil" regime oppresses women, some support it because the regime is brown-skinned, some support it to help "ensure stability" in the region, etc. There is now a grab bag of reasons to support American Exceptionalism and glorification of military force projection, which is broadly right wing, yet the options appeal to people across the entire American political spectrum, including the so-called left that seemingly believes that smart bombs are the best way to improve womens' rights worldwide.
Consider the rhetoric around gentrification for a host of other examples of the built-in right wing bias in American culture.
In other words, right wing views have become so utterly dominant in American culture that there is no longer any real need to add oxygen to it, so the political right wing appears to be losing ground.
Consider all the laws that prohibit employees from accepting jobs in the same industry, laws that extent patent protection to absurd time durations, the general public complacency about unauthorized wiretapping and more broadly the Snowden revelations. Nobody cares about this stuff because the right wing view considers it normal and appropriate/acceptable.
Even something as gut wrenching as the ICE camps for children was a major issue only because it offered partisan benefit. Obama took no heat for doing essentially the same kind of detention system. Then magically a few months later everyone has forgotten about it now that it's no longer politically useful.
The illusion of left vs right makes people feel that there is actually dissent in the US. There is very little.
At the same time it was surprising to see for once, Trump and everyone else back the recent prison reform bill:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/18/trump-sign-p...
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The package, which would immediately release 4,000 federal prisoners according to some advocates, passed the House judiciary committee last week and is likely to be brought up for a vote early next week. The bill would also expand compassionate release, giving elderly and terminally ill inmates a path home, and invest tens of millions in re-entry programs. It would also end the shackling of women giving birth behind bars and provide them with necessary hygiene items at no charge.
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A large influx of economic migrants is in the interest of the elites, not the bulk of the people who make up the right wing. It is the elites who have pushed for and benefited from those policies, and they have been wildly successful.
Equality among the sexes not a right wing goal, and that is the direction society has moved over the past 100 years.
Sexual liberation, and the related disappearance of Christianity from popular culture, is not a right wing goal.
Social inequality and corporate welfare are goals of the elite, not the right wing, which primarily consists of rural working class white men who are victims of the policies meant to bring about those goals as much as anyone else.
Military intervention is a project of the elite and transcends political parties in the US. Working class Republicans would never have dreamed up going to Iraq or Libya or Syria to oust a dictator, any more than working class Democrats would have. Either side can be made to support such a conflict as we have seen by taking advantage of in-group out-group tendencies, but they'd never come up with it themselves. They have no reason to. But the elites do, so it happened.
You're right that there is little real dissent in the US. The reason is that real dissent is suppressed by the elites, not protected by them. It's harassed and deliberately targeted by government officials. It's kicked off of platforms run by the elites. It's viciously attacked at every turn by the elite-owned corporate media. If you want to know where the real dissent is, look for the ideas that the elites actually try to stop.
It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force.
It's no accident that the paper ran the Judith Miller work selling the Iraq war, or that it was an early participant in the smear campaign against Assange, or that it is a thought leader on the threat posed by China. Sure there are stories about CSAs and the homeless, but ultimately it's a big budget right wing PR operation, intent on preserving the status quo.
For even more obvious evidence, just look at the people whose weddings are covered in the paper's nuptials section -- predominantly children of powerful elites who the paper wishes to flatter with its coverage.
If one were to ask "what kind of coverage might we expect from a paper controlled by a billionaire industrialist?", we might actually predict a right-wing perspective. But due to the Times' history as a progressive paper (most notably the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted which fueled the abolitionist movement), the paper is uncritically viewed by many in the present day as a voice that opposes the right wing, authoritarian social goals held by powerful elites.