source: official newsletter preview, archived 13 Feb 2025 01:18:24 UTC
I’m curious what happened to the NYT.
They’ve had basically no integrity at all for years now, just kissing whichever ass they had to kiss to keep their access. Even as recently as the campaign, they kissed Trump’s ass until Harris got her initial groundswell, then they kissed her ass for a while, then when she faded they went back to kissing Trump’s ass.
But lately they’ve been more critical of Trump and Musk than almost any other legacy media outlet, and even lost their all-important access as a result and are still critical.
So what happened between then and now? Why did they finally grow a backbone at this late stage?
Just a guess, but maybe they found out that kissing Trump’s ass wasn’t enough by itself when he tried to strongarm $100 million out of them like he did with Zuckerberg, and they told him to fuck off?
I don’t know, but something sure changed, and not a moment too soon…
I really do not get why everyone thinks that NYT has been sleeping with Trump. They published an editorial board editorial declaring him unfit (which was also the headline on May 30 about Trump’s felons tatus) days before the PA assassination attempt and thus weeks before Biden suspended, and their Harris endorsement was on Sep 30, way after this wave you speak of.
Because a tremendous amount of their coverage sanewashed his most egregious transgressions, all while torpedoing Biden.
Searching it up, there’s one specific incident where NYT did cover Trump’s performance at an Economic Club involving an incoherent tirade very badly, but I believe that is more than canceled out with articles such as the Oct 6 frontpage “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age” and “If You Think Biden and Harris Were Weak on the Border, Think Again”, the NYT’s attempt at a late October surprise. Other than that, the only concerns I found were about headlines, which never were that good (though NYT usually had the more representative headlines, I’ll admit), I never trusted and Wikipedia never trusted, a prohibition on citing which alone formalized in 2020: “Headlines are written to grab readers’ attention quickly and briefly; they may be overstated or lack context […] They are often written by copy editors instead of the researchers and journalists who wrote the articles.”
Keep fooling yourself.
I don’t understand what you mean. Even the blurb all but spells it out here, not to mention I remember the image caption saying “forced relocation” and scholars calling it an ethnic cleansing.
Do you have the impression that I’m denying that the headlines are problematic? If so, please re-read my reply on the 13th, specifically the part on headlines never being much good. Look at “Father Slays New York Girl, 14, in TikTok ‘Honor Killing’” (a real headline) and tell me if NYT has any reason to sanewash a murder by e.g. using the word “slay” instead of “slaughter” or “kill”. This is an institutional problem unrelated to the quality of their journalism and a problem of management, advertising, and their perceived “palatability” in using copy writers for headlines, none of which perceptibly affects the quality of their actual articles.
I was asking for examples of article content that slept with Trump. Plus Biden deserved to step down IMO; he torpedoed himself with that debate performance.
They had a change in leadership some years ago.
Probably just following the money. Right now, shitting on the two kings is trending.
I think that this is a positive. My quick skim of the material here is that it is not hysterical, and it avoids the “we’re buying Greenland” sort of distractions. It’s talking about real policy, and trying to suss out the actual impact, including digging up numbers.
We’ll see where this goes, but my initial take is that this is more-or-less what I’d like to see from media.
