If you count averages, I agree, but I would argue that the bulk of what makes the NYT nominally left wing is very safe signaling on almost stereotypically caviar gauche issues, while they're not left wing when it could actually matter or is hard.

According to Media Bias Fact Check, CNN is left-bias and NYT is left-center bias. That's as close as you can get to an impartial judgement.

You really can't model this on a single axis.

Any political labeling system, regardless of number of axes, is going to drop details and fail to capture all the ways in which political opinions can vary. That doesn't mean that all labeling systems are equally informative, but it also means that you can indeed model political leaning on a single axis. If you do that, you will absolutely miss details bout the bias of the NYT, but you will also find that the NYT bias tends toward the left.

It is also true that while the NYT generally is biased to the left, some of its articles and editorials can still be biased to the right.

I think the argument would be to not simplify judgement of things.

But left/right is a single axis. If you’re measuring left/right bias then you’re going to have a single axis.

A different argument is only the quality or usefulness of a media outlet. That’s definitely more dimensions and one would be left/right bias.

Another data point from Pew polling: People who identify the NYT as their main source of news also identify as Democrats 91% of the time and Republicans only 7%.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m...