The New York Times is the partisan mouthpiece you thought it was
Conn Carroll
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Sometimes, you read a news story that challenges how you see the world and changes your mind.
Other times, you read a story that confirms everything you thought about a particular institution.
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James Bennet’s 17,000-word tome on his time at the New York Times is the latter. If you thought what little objectivity the New York Times ever had has completely disappeared over the last decade, this article confirms your view.
The meat of the story is, of course, Bennet’s decision to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) that called for then-President Donald Trump to use the Insurrection Act and authorize the military to save cities from the looting and arson of 2020’s Black Lives Matter riots. Bennet was eventually fired for that decision. But in this new article, he explains how he noticed a shift at the New York Times much earlier.
After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the New York Times did a profile of one of the participants that was not entirely unsympathetic. The New York Times noted that the man regularly listened to NPR and was at one point a “vaguely leftist rock musician.”
The article was, in Bennet’s words, “in keeping with the Times’s tradition of confronting readers with the confounding reality of the world around them.” But New York Times readers hated it, complaining that Bennet “was providing a platform for terrorists.”
Bennet experienced a similar reaction later when he decided to publish letters from Trump voters explaining why they voted for Trump. By this time, Bennet was expecting the backlash from readers, but he wasn’t prepared for the backlash from his New York Times colleagues, who accused Bennet of “normalizing Nazism and white nationalism.”
Bennet admits, “In my experience, reporters overwhelmingly support Democratic policies and candidates.” But in the past, these reporters at least tried to “equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments.” “The journalist’s role,” Bennet continued, “was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury.”
But that is not the case with younger New York Times reporters. The new generation is “not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on,” Bennet explains. “The term ‘objectivity’ to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cozying up to power, as journalists often have done.”
This new generation has produced a newsroom that only repeats the politically correct Democratic Party line. Any scrap of evidence that is inconvenient for the narrative of the Democratic Party is downplayed or outright ignored.
As a result, Bennet writes, “The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that COVID came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.”
“The reality is,” Bennet writes toward the end, “that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
The New York Times’s response to Bennet’s article has been underwhelming. New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger released a statement that used the words “independent” or “independence” three times.
“Independence” from what exactly?
There has been no effort to hire any reporters skeptical of the Democratic Party narrative. If you polled every New York Times reporter today, what percentage voted Democratic in 2020? Ninety-nine percent? The only ones who didn’t probably voted for some further left.
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The New York Times has become completely closed off from at least half of the country. It isn’t even trying to understand how conservatives think, let alone investigate if their nonconforming views have any factual merit. There simply isn’t time for that. Trump is a dictator in waiting. The stakes are too high.
It’s hard to see how the New York Times can turn things around, especially when it won’t even admit Bennet is right about what the institution has become. But at least more people outside now know the truth.