I need to write the whole piece about this, but the thing to understand is that the NYT is now just Facebook. The platform dictates narrative to normies, is totally gamed by the right, and is still so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable even by those who see how broken it is. It's just Facebook.
Is there good journalism and opinion in the NYT sometimes? Of course. And sometimes there are useful items on Facebook Marketplace. But what is it _for_? It's for the same thing as Facebook, and run with the same arrogance and insularity, based on the same fictions.
It's also daytime TV...cooking, talking heads, fancy homes. A little something inoffensive and mild for everyone so you don't have to focus on the news.
It really is, isn’t it.
The watered-down both-sides presentation of “news,” your racist uncle’s loud opinion on the side, a little kvetching about inflation or “those darn kids,” your Aunt Stella’s recipes, a heartwarming human interest story about a dog, the ubiquitous homogeneity… it’s Facebook.
I'd offer a slight nuance – I think this is more true for the NYT's *web presence* than it is for the NYT. The print paper has a fairly different set of emphases.
That said... I grant you that when someone tells you who they are, believe them, etc., so it may be a distinction without a difference.
Agreed, but I'd still argue your critique is of the object in a particular form factor.
The social web makes us all worse (but still, admittedly, some significantly worse than others...)
Of course! And the medium affects the message, etc. Still worth remembering the NYT, as a newsgathering and publishing operation, is more than just its most widely consumed product.
I like this nuance and also think counting the number of stories devoted to a subject is a fair way to judge the Times coverage across platforms. Any decision to promotion a story higher on the web or lower in the paper is subjective, but when stories keep pumping out day after day there’s a reason
I have a lot of complaints about our local paper, but they cover every single climate change issue in the region and I can reliably count on a front-page headline every time our climate commission does anything.
decades ago i decided that the NYT was for people who adored gold and diamonds and 800$ fashion sweaters for children. i tried reading it for a week and ended up barfing.
What I think we saw during and after 2016 was the Times re-understanding itself as An Institution first. Institutions have different priorities around risk and survival, and that perspective explains a lot of otherwise baffling and out of character behavior.
Democracy, in this reading, isn't an Institution - It's an Ideal, and those are impractical to support too hard when you're an Important Institution like the NYT.
It does tend to come in handy when considering an unfettered tyrant has already targeted your news outlet as “enemy of the people” in rather bluntly concrete ways. OH WELL
if nothing else, the leopards will feast well and mightily.
I think it helps to elevate LA Times, Houston Chron, that tier of news much more often, especially to point up that there's nothing inevitable about the NYT's judgment. (This is absolutely not a statement about NYC.)
bsky.app/profile/sjjp...
I know it’s not a big media market, but the LA Times did manage to do the minimum yesterday.
(Please, use the NYT for fish wrap, read the LAT instead.)
I subscribed to the LA Times to try to support local journalism and avoid the NY Times and the online website was so aggresively bad it was basically un-usable.
I wish these sites had clean RSS feeds for subscribers. I understand why their sites are not great, just give me a better option if I’m willing to pay.
From a local perspective, the effort to contrast the Times also ignores that they entirely killed off their local NY coverage. The Times is not an exception, it’s part of the problem (also the WSJ on a smaller scale).
I think this is the better point, NYT hasn’t changed we just don’t as many options any more.
IMO the NYT has just always been the other side of the Wall Street Journal coin. Corporate interests with slight policy differences. Both more about drawing lines of what is acceptable than journalism.
