The New York Times Is ‘Unmistakably Anti-Trump,’ Says…
The paper’s former executive editor calls out the rag for its lack of journalistic integrity.
Just how bad has The New York Times’s leftist bias gotten? Well, to quote the Gray Lady’s former executive editor, “I’ve resisted critiquing the place publicly, but this [expletive] is bad. It’s making horrible mistakes left and right.”
According to Jill Abramson, the Times’s executive editor from 2011 to 2014, it has become “unmistakably anti-Trump.” In her upcoming book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, Abramson slams the NYT’s unapologetic leftist bias. She writes, “Though [Dean] Baquet [her successor and current executive editor] said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump. Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
Now, the fact that the Times espouses a leftist bias certainly isn’t news. In fact, that sort of bias among mainstream media outlets is the very thing that inspired the creation of The Patriot Post in 1996. What is significant, however, is the source of the criticism. Abramson, who was the first female executive editor of the Times, is far from a conservative, and yet even she can’t tolerate the leftist propaganda it is passing off as journalism. Abramson faults the Times for its lack of journalistic integrity and its failure to follow the directive of its one-time owner, Adolph Ochs, who vowed at the turn of the 20th century “to cover the news without fear or favor.”
In her book, Abramson points to two factors that explain the paper’s descent into the realm of tabloids and propaganda. The first is young versus old. She writes, “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards.” The new leftist belief is that all the old values are actually only expressions of oppression.
The second factor is financial incentives. “Given its mostly liberal audience,” Abramson explains, “there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.” In other words, instead of reporting the truth irrespective of the financial considerations, the Times compromised its journalistic integrity in pursuit of the almighty dollar. That’s why it’s laughable and profoundly disingenuous when Leftmedia outfits like the Times complain and blame Trump for the American public’s loss of trust in the nation’s major news outlets.
(Edited.)