Glad more people are realizing this. It's harder to spot/acknowledge for people on the left since the biased coverage feeds into their worldview...in my opinion it's artificially solidified their confidence on how "correct" they feel they are about political topics.
The next step in this realization is nothing to do with one-sided reporting, it's the massive scale of what selectively gets ignored or hidden.
Maybe your opinion has more to do with how weird and dispatched from reality American politics has become and less with how the NYT wants to brainwash you, or whatever you think they're doing?
My sense is many (most?) of the commenters here are off-put by the latter category.
Edit: the reference to Krugman as significantly “left” just registered, and I don’t think that’s what people are referring to —- or even that most of NYT’s new guard would consider Krugman to be a leftist
The NYT’s views on race relations are so far from normal Europeans that Macron called them an existential threat to France.
Huh?
There was recently an attempted insurrection based on fake news, you know.
I must say though that Fox News has gotten downright rational (on all things) since then. Politically biased, sure, but they're actually news lately.
The comment doesn't say anything about people on the right being immune to it (and I would suspect there's a similar effect there in reverse, for eg Fox News).
I don't see misbehavior on the right as a justification for lazy, manipulative groupthink by the NYT, or outright bullying. Especially when they are clearly capable of good reporting.
The implied reverse therefore would be that it's easier for people on the right to see bias in the media. Not that the right dont have bias.
Yeah, that's also what I read. And as evidence to the contrary I pointed out that some people had their world view changed so much that they tried to overthrow the government.
Which tells me that they didn't see the agenda they were being pushed.
Which contradicts the comment's point.
Note that in no way do I disagree that the left has a problem too.
As in, both sides are equally bad for similar but different reasons but we only hear about a singular event that some whack jobs on the far right pulled off. Compare to my local media as an example which buried the story about the violence around a "citizen" road block until a seven year old was murdered as her family tried to go past. Even then it was buried with stories of police violence or right wing threats.
No, those of us who lean to the right know the nut jobs and there that line begins but there where that line is for my left leaning friends is beyond me to understand.
Really?
I would invite you to foxnews.com. As an example for the last week the front page has been plasted with Cuomo.
And CHAZ? A complete disaster that was absolutely not a secret.
You say that the line is clear on the right, but I think it's just that it's clear to you. The fake news that the election was stolen is actually mainstream, on the right. Trump had some ordinary people injest bleach, you don't think many more believed the other lies?
Do you think most people on the left supported the 2020 summer riots? Or defund the police? Even polling of black people had a huge majority against that nonsense. Some do. But then some on the right think Biden's about to be arrested when trump returns with the military in two weeks.
My point is that "especially on the left" has no connection in reality. "Also on the left" does.
I've noticed that national news outlets in the US tend to be better when their preferred party is in power and worse when the opposition is in power. I suspect it's because in the latter case the news outlets slant all of their coverage towards negativity and discrediting the opposition.
I thought CNN was much more tolerable during the Obama administration, but watching them over the last few years has consistently left my frustrated. Meanwhile, the reverse has been true for Fox News. That said, I don't consume much from either outlet.
But yes, they were bananas under obama too.
If anything that’s all the more reason to be very mindful of the same effect occurring in other media publications.
It shows a strong assumption that while that commenter is able to see the difference between bias and misinformation, the left cannot. And I don't buy it.
Neither people who watch Fox News nor people who watch NBC News buy it hook line and sinker.
So considering there was an attempted coup, and that many people still believe the election was rigged and that trump will come back in power (arresting biden) in the beginning of March doesn't exactly speak well for the "especially on the left".
And it’s totally true when you’re countering the real charlatans of the right like Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz (to focus on American politics) But not a valid blanket statement whatsoever.
I'm not american but reading NYT during the elections, I was astonished by how much NYT was blaming Trump for everything, and never say anything positive about him. Now I treat newspapers as propaganda.
I actually stopped reading any news at all except bloomberg a month ago and can't be happier.
I wonder who it is referring people to HN for this purpose.
I am currently struggling to come up with something about Trump that's not mostly negative. Maybe his honesty in the Woodward calls? That's stretching it a bit, and only highlights how dishonest he's been in public. His response to Covid and natural disasters? So bad it better be incompetence rather than malice. His refusal to clearly distance himself from hate groups? His refusal to pay his own lawyers? Trump University and all the other scams?
No, I'm lost, I might be missing something. Please explain what Trump did well that isn't considered morally questionable.
The guy was calling the whole thing a hoax, I don't know what credit he should get for anything.
Trump's base overwhelmingly believes it's a hoax. So is "left" wing media lying to me that he says it's a hoax, or is right wing media lying to all his supporters that it's a hoax?
The topics I understand as being pushed by the left in the US just seem so centerist to me, based on the political landscape that I'm living in.
Single payer health care, minimum wage increases, increases in social support nets... So many topics I'd love to hear the argument against from any stand point that isn't pure capitalist greed.
Moral/Immoral?
Right/Wrong?
Fair/Unfair?
If we can agree on judging policies, platforms, ideologies and beliefs on a shared set of criteria, then we can move forward, otherwise we're just shouting at each-other.
You can tell me all day long that it's fair for me to get my stuff taken away without my consent by an entity because I got born within it's "borders"; but that won't make it fair for me within my moral framework, irrespective of how much I deplore the suffering of the poor and unfortunate and want to help them.
> in my opinion it's artificially solidified their confidence on how "correct" they feel they are about political topics.
I was wondering what topics these were.
It would be perfectly centrist for a couple states to enact the policies you mention, assuming they can work out the details and balance the books. When these policies turn into wild success stories, other states might follow.
It probably makes sense to start with some small-medium sized, well-governed blue states first, like when MA implemented Romneycare.
But the left position is to enact these polcies nationally across the US, which has >10x the number of people in your country. And there are a ton of details that nobody really even wants to talk about, and no plan to adapt when things don't work out. So, we are just supposed to trust Congress with a huge amount of extra money and a lot more power because the title of the bill sounds nice?
There are also a lot of policies that seem uniquely designed to punish the "right". I am pro-choice, but I recognize that a lot of people in the US are really, really not. But a lot of people on the left don't just want it legal, they want to use taxpayer money to pay for it. Think about how that makes tens of millions of evangelical Christians feel? There are enough pro-choice organziations that they can pool money from pro-choice people to subsidize abortions. The taxpayer money isn't needed. Why force it?
The obvious answer is of course that health care is a public service and should not be reliant on charitable organizations, which would be absolutely ridiculous. (Yes reproductive care is health care, arguments made from personal feelings or believes are not a worthy retort against medical scientific consensus)
But abortion funding is not the domain of the federal government and there is not much reason for it to be. There are plenty of private citizens who are pro choice and could fund abortion subsidies. It would probably be easier to do that than fight a political battle over it, which also costs money.
A government should govern the people that are actually here, not who you wish were here. Maybe in some places nobody minds abortion, but the US is not one of those places. So, we've got to respect those tens of millions of people at least enough to not spend their money on abortion.
If we should respect the views of tens of millions of people in one area, we should do it in another. If we think that life is sacred and we shouldn’t spend federal money to end it, let’s be consistent.
there are significant gaps in funding for these services, especially in underprivileged areas.
Would you support increasing WIC and other benefits for these children? Because if not, this policy decision would increase the number of people who grow up hungry.
Not saying that's a bad thing, but I think it would qualify as left-wing in most countries.
Agreed about social safety nets and most other policies. Sometimes it feels Americans don't realize how uniquely chaotic and inefficient their system is, compared to every other western country. The healthcare system in particular.
Australia's minimum wage for people over 21 is over $15 USD for full time work, and over $19 USD for part time (you receive a 25% casual loading rate increase for part time work). [1] That comes out to about 70% of their GDP per capita (working 38 hours per week, 50 weeks a year). The US going to $15 an hour would only be 43% of GDP per capita. If the US paid its minimum wage workers according to our actual economic output per person, our minimum wage would be $24 an hour, to match Australia. I wouldn’t really call $15 an hour radical.
[1] https://blog.aigroup.com.au/australia-had-the-highest-minimu...
An increase in the minimum wage will help a little, but having affordable health care works help more.
By 2025, and only for Federal workers. The small print in that promise that only came out after the election.
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-...
I know it's a recent trend but I thought the capitalization was applied to all ethnicities.
To quote the link you posted:
>"Racial and ethnic groups are designated by proper nouns and are capitalized. Therefore, use “Black” and “White” instead of “black” and “white” (do not use colors to refer to other human groups; doing so is considered pejorative)."
However, the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
>"The Times also looked at whether to capitalize white and brown in reference to race, but both will remain lowercase. Brown has generally been used to describe a wide range of cultures, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Corbett said in their memo to staff. As a result, its meaning can be unclear to readers; white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups."
Edit. Side note. Maybe I should write to the NYT and tell them I'm a White African and they're not representing my cultural and historical identity!
The NY Times promoted an extremely suspect hypothesis about the American Revolution (that it was fought in order to preserve slavery - there's essentially no evidence for this hypothesis), and got push-back from some of the top historians of the US. The NY Times' response was essentially, "You're wrong, and we're not changing anything." Then the NY Times' own fact checker published an article in Politico pointing out that she had warned the NY Times not to claim the revolution was fought in order to preserve slavery, but that the NY Times had ignored her. That finally prompted the NY Times to issue a slight modification of their claim ("some" of the colonists fought to preserve slavery - which colonists is completely unclear, but at least the updated statement is so vague that it can't be disproven).
All around, it was clear that the NY Times had an agenda to push, and they didn't care if historians disagreed. That didn't stop the 1619 Project from winning a Pulitzer, though!
Not saying if that's the right thing to do or not but personally it's not something I'd ever pay for.
> I should reiterate that this is not a right-left thing.
This very likely is a right-left thing:
* The NYT systematically avoided the term "torture" in everything except op-eds when describing the Bush admin's post-911 torture program[1]
It's difficult to think of a more dastardly use of political correctness than a newspaper employing a euphemism for torture that effectively softens the blow in their stories about a government torture program.
Obviously if you knew about this but still subscribed to NYT anyway while now unsubscribing for problems wrt left-thing political correctness, that's a "right-left thing." (And however bad we both agree their left-thing political correctness problem is, it can't possibly be worse than systematically dressing up torture.)
But even if you didn't know about it, it's still the same problem. At best your comment makes it seem like NYT gave in to its long-standing penchant for left-leaning fashions, and that ended up actually damaging its ability to do robust reporting. That interpretation makes a special case of the entire Keller period when the most important stories were scuttled in deference to the Bush administration. That period includes refusing repeatedly to run some of the most impactful stories-- like Jim Risen's on the Bush-Cheney domestic spying program-- because the government told them not to[2]. That period is in major "never forget" territory wrt to journalistic integrity.
Edits: clarifications
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/ju...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/01/03/my-life-as-a-new-york-ti...
Giving into left-leaning fashions is bad not because of the "left-leaning" part; its bad because of the "fashions" part. It's lazy groupthink at best, and bullying people into conformity at worst.
Have you noticed how narrow and specific all of the rules for reporting have become? Do you honestly believe that leftism is defined by these narrow rules, many of which are changing rapidly?
No. Most left-leaning people don't believe this stuff (how could a normal person even change their beliefs from one day to the next?). They go along with it because either they are too scared of getting bullied themselves; or because it's mostly hurting the right, and they believe they can regain control of the discourse after the right is diminished.
But it's easy to destroy good discourse and hard to rebuild it. After the right gets marginalized, we won't go to open-minded chats over coffee among left-leaning folks. It will be these same horrible tactics over the most minor differences of opinion on the left. Proponents of socialized medicine will be doxxing proponents of Medicare for all. There will be no end to the ridiculousness.
I guess people try to be polite and come up with a reason for cancelling their subscription, and this reason could be solved by customer support. It is not being polite to try to please Tony from customer support, he is just doing his job and does not care about polite reasons for cancelling, his job is that you do not cancel. It is important to know what you *really* want before contacting them (or any other company), in case they use this kind of trick to confuse you.
First article had 12 paragraphs, and a grand total of 12 sentences. 7 of those are quotes/paraphrases of what people said/claimed. Oh and the page had 20 ad images.
60% of the article is "s/he said X". The remaining 40% are low-fat versions of something one can find on Wikipedia.
Another one:
10 paragraphs, 11 sentences. 5 are quotes/paraphrases. 15 (fifteen) ad images!
That is not journalism, that's Twitter with extra steps, masquerading as news. At this point, if I didn't know any better, I'd call Reuters a glorified ad farm!
I had heard horror stories about needing to call customer service, but they must have heard those complaints, because now their unsubscribe process is a simple form.
I'm sure they mean well, and hopefully their journalism department also has an ear to the ground. It'd be nice if they returned to centrist investigative journalism soon.
And Africa has about triple the population of Europe. So what makes Europe the default point of comparison? (More reporters having done a semester abroad at Barcelona than Lagos is not a valid answer.) Heck why restrict ourselves to the present? How about by the standards of all of human history? Even Fox News would be left wing in 1750.
The simple answer is that it’s very dumb to arbitrarily compare against a different society, with a different history and different culture. American institutions should benchmark on American mores, not grasp at politics from entirely different continents.
In the US, "left" tends to be centered around social and cultural issues, such as racism, sexism, immigrant rights, abortion rights, affirmative action, or increasingly things like white privilege - what is sometimes derisively called identity politics.
In Europe, "left" tends to be centered around the economic sense of the term, that is, socialism, communism, redistribution of wealth, social safety nets, etc.
By US standards, many European politicians are on the far right because of their social and cultural views. By European standards, most US politicians are on the right or even far right because of their economic views, whereas they're to a European perspective absolutely extreme on the social politics scale.
In general, while they're handy for bandying about in a very general sense, I don't think political axes between countries can be compared in a very meaningful way. There are all kinds of bizarre mismatches even in the same domains - for example, the VAT would be considered a very regressive tax favored only by the more extreme libertarian-conservative types in the US, but it's hardly seen that way in Europe.
It means something different to you. The US is a big country, and your understanding of the left is pretty shallow and certainly doesn't speak for the whole country.
That you say the left is centered on ID politics is evidence that you're out of touch with leftist politics. I would venture to say because there's not a loud leftist voice in the mainstream media.
Although I am leery of placing myself on a political axis for the same reason, I think most people would consider me a leftist. Certainly they would think so based on my voting record, with a couple of exceptions.
Firstly, it may be - and I think is probably - the case that the average self-described liberal or independent in the US does not prioritize most culture war issues, or identity politics issues. They might instead be more concerned about conventionally leftist economic policies, like raising the minimum wage or improving safety nets.
But that's not, by-and-large, what political campaigns, politicians, or the news media focuses on. Cultural issues and (increasingly) identity politics surrounding specific issues take up an immense amount of bandwidth in the US to a degree they do not in Europe - or if an analogous issue does, the battle lines are drawn and the conversation is framed in a totally different way. Even issues that are the 'same' are often downstream of US politics.
I don't think this is an argument that there's no loud leftist voice in the mainstream media. That is maybe true, in the conventional sense. But it's not because the media is conservative or reactionary in some sense - there's a similar problem on the right; if anything, this was strongly illustrated by Trump's success - Trump brought to the forefront issues like immigration restriction that had wide support among the voting base but very weak to no support in the conservative political and media establishment. It's because the "leftists" who are actually in power, and control large 'leftist' institutions, care more about identity politics and culture war issues than they do about conventional leftist economic policies. US politics on both sides is charged along different lines than in other countries.
There's no doubt similar phenomena in Europe - it's not as though politics as represented by politicians and in the news accurately reflects the desires of the people there, either. Nor is Europe a unified block either, so we're being a little sloppy. But this is still a substantial difference.
At any rate, there's still other issues I mentioned like VAT - VAT would never fly in the US even if the "left" took complete power because liberals would consider it horrifically regressive!
It's all relative. From a communist perspective, most of Europe is a laissez faire free market. Private control of the press!? Hah!
From Europe's mildly-socialist perspective, America is a laissez faire free market. Private control of healthcare and education!? Hah!
I'm not making value judgements. Just pointing out its a spectrum.
That’s because you’re using the term incorrectly: right-wing authoritarian states were just as perilous for those who disagreed – imagine being a left-wing business owner under Hitler or Pinochet! You’d much prefer living in “left-wing” Sweden unless you were very right-wing.
The mistake is trying to use a single term to compare multidimensional properties. The degree to which power is centralized in the state is independent from economic and social policies, and you can find examples of many combinations depending on which characteristics you’re interested in (for example, the Soviet Union was good for the perspective of opening career paths for women and terrible for gay rights while Nazi Germany was bad at both, and no single term comparison is going to cover that).
Is this true, though? With full socialism isn't control supposed to be pooled by citizens? If anything, it's more akin to libertarianism, just that instead of citizens self-organizing in groups to manage bits and pieces they self-organize in groups managing everything.
You would have a better analogy if you used "socialism" rather than "communism".
The problem is they are treating politics like fashion, where it's super specific and constantly changing. And they are bullying (or cheering it on, at least) anyone who doesn't conform.
Whether these specific fashions they promote are "left" or "right" or "center" was immaterial to my decision to cancel.
> But I can no longer do the work that you brought me here to do—the work that Adolph Ochs described in that famous 1896 statement: “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”
It's a little amusing to see liberals trying to describe this for the first time. Harper's is unequivocally further left than NYT. It's also less grating.
To me, that's because the "left-ish" bias of NYT takes the form of telling the reader to be afraid of certain people or groups of people, whether it's Tom Cotton who wants to "send in the troops" or some little-known blogger. Which stands in direct contradiction to the ideals of what most people think of as leftism.
Bias is tolerable and probably inevitable; a politics of fearmongering is not.
If I recall correctly both predict the collapse of France, like clockwork, every few years (especially because French policies are slightly more socialist and both publications are super business).
And of course, both look down on non-Anglosphere countries, in general :-)
I don't know where you get that from. Any examples?
> You have to be aware of their biases, though.
A point of view is not a bias. The Economist was founded as a pro-market liberal (classically liberal) publication. A Marxist would consider that a bias I guess?
I think it's a mostly respectable magazine with a high degree of journalistic integrity (e.g. the recent High Court case). They have some fantastic contributors. Like any publication there are some that are a bit "out there" for my tastes, Delingpole comes to mind, but they pale in comparison to some of the opinion pieces the Guardian publishes. But because of its mild association with the word "right", I know many of my peers would be unpalatable.
My complaint about the NYT and many other news sources is absurd combination of a hyper-specific and rapidly-changing set of beliefs, along with brutal enforcement of those beliefs.
My challenge to you: write down your beliefs on a controverial topic (on paper). Wait 6 months and pick up the NYT. My prediction: they will be in the process of canceling someone for those same beliefs, and you will shred the piece of paper out of fear.
OK, maybe that's an exaggeration. But I wouldn't be shocked if it was too close for comfort.
It's definitely right-of-center and doesn't mind cocking a snook at left-wing holy cows, but it's not a "reactionary troll factory".
Magazines publishing centre-right views are fine. But if what you are seeking is a news publication that doesn't push a particular agenda, then The Spectator is pretty much as far away from it as you can get outside of Pravda.
You're right, of course, that it publishes some mild centre-right commentators with uncontroversial conservative views. That doesn't really compensate, in my view, for the provision of space to writers like Liddle and Young. These particular people are reactionary trolls; their writing contains little other than disinformation deliberately intended to stoke culture-war nonsense, and they're too smart to believe what they write. This stuff does little more than make society worse for everyone.
But I'd say regardless of your views on individual commentators or the overall quality of the publication – if someone wants to avoid the NYT because it is campaigning too much, then directing them to The Spectator is laughable.
I haven't said the Guardian or NYT is better.
It's not "disagreement" -- they regularly publish easily checkable objectively false information.
Watching this thread for suggestions. I'm thinking international, as foreign outlets will be less susceptible to American fashions.
When they asked the reason, I said that political coverage was unfair. Left is OK, unfair is not.
I don't consider myself "on the left" but I really don't mind a publication being left of center or right of center. If it's good, I will pay for it (I subscribed tp The Atlantic at least twice, and the New Yorker once, and probably others in a mix of print and digital).
But the NYT has drifted too far down the path of politically-correct fashions, and away from robust debate and discussion of challenging topics and how they intersect with real events.
It feels more like they want to persuade me to hold a set of opinions (which shifts rapidly), rather than informing me and letting me form my own. "Persuade" is even the wrong word; more like "pressure" or "coerce". If it's all ads, so be it; but when I pay, I expect that I am the customer and not the product. So I don't pay as of the end of my billing cycle.
Also, the NYT cheers on, and even participates in bullying. Scott Alexander being a recent example, but there are a lot more when it comes to politically-charged topics.
I should reiterate that this is not a right-left thing. I would have remained subscribed if the NYT had simply drifted left, and concerned itself mainly with arguments betweed various left-of-center factions. Lots of worthwhile things to discuss and debate there, and lots of events to tie it to.