Arthur Brisbane has often been too much of a fan of the New York Times to cause all that much trouble during his two-year tenure as its public editor. That comes through even in his swan song column published today. But give Brisbane credit for the ability to recognize the paper’s obvious liberal bias. That is praiseworthy but though the column is another benchmark in the confirmation of the Times’s ideological tilt, it is probably even more interesting that those who are in charge of the institution are still in a state of denial about it.
Even before copies of the paper with Brisbane’s column in it were delivered to newsstands, Times executive editor Jill Abramson was publicly disputing Brisbane’s unexceptionable statement to the media claiming that the paper’s coverage of issues was as “straight” as her predecessor Abe Rosenthal demanded of his staff in the past. If anything, Abramson’s claim tells us all we needed to know about the smug, self-satisfied culture of the Times that Brisbane wrote about. There is no hope of correcting the corrosive and all-pervasive liberal bias in the Grey Lady on her watch. Indeed, if Abramson’s comments about her expectations for Brisbane’s successor to Politico’s Dylan Byers are any indication, Times editors and reporters should expect even less guff from new public editor Margaret Sullivan than they got from Brisbane.
While lauding the professionalism of its staff and questioning whether its standards can withstand the gravitational pull of social media, the departing ombudsman was willing to face up to the reality of Times group-think about important issues:
As for humility, well, The Times is Lake Wobegon on steroids (everybody’s way above average). I don’t remember many autopsies in which, as we assembled over the body, anyone conceded that maybe this could have been done differently. …
I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.
When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.
As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.
This conclusion should come as no surprise to anyone who reads the paper. Conservatives may take exception to his contention that the Times’s political coverage is as fair as he states. I will concede that the paper has certainly not been quite as biased in 2012 as it was in 2008 when the historic candidacy of Barack Obama was treated in much the same way that he diagnosed the coverage of Occupy and other liberal causes. But that is to damn the paper with faint praise. Nevertheless, Brisbane has made an important point about the way liberal bias is about more than skewing the news to the advantage of the Democrats.
We can only hope that his successor will follow up on this insight and spend her time the paper trying to highlight the problem. However, the paper has said it plans “to shift the job’s focus toward more engagement with the reader online and through social media.” Presumably that means less time flaying the Times’s staff for its obvious failings and more time on mollifying and entertaining the paper’s core liberal readership. If so, the public editor post will become as irrelevant as Abramson’s lame denials of bias.
Maybe stop referring to it as the grey lady.
n nI say we call it the Pink Lady. n nBut seriously, I have progressed from a time 5 years ago when it was my homepage, to never, ever bothering to go there, unless something of interest is linked, which is almost never. n n
Pink all right, but it ain't no lady…
I don't know how anyone can even call the New York Times a newspaper anymore, its more of political mouth piece for the Left.
Are those anti-Semitic nuts still in business? I hear it mentioned from time to time and assume that it something historic.
For some odd reason some people – mostly journalists it seems – believe that the personal views of journalists doesn't affect, consciously or not, their reporting. We all recognize that if 65-75% of the judges in this country voted Republican that we would have a Republican-oriented judiciary. Or if 65-75% of doctors voted Republican that they would represent a conservative-oriented medical profession. n nBut somehow, someway if 65-75% of reporters (as documented through numerous studies) vote Democrat every four years in election after election that that somehow doesn't mean that we have a liberal-oriented press. n nThis is nonsensical. They're reporters. They can't escape their skins. How they see the world influences, again consciously or not, how they report on it. How could it not? n nIf you have liberal reporters with liberal worldviews being edited by liberal editors with liberal worldviews you're going to get, no surprise, liberal reporting. n nSubstitution conservative for liberal and you'll have the same problem. n nSometimes life is difficult to figure out. This isn't one of those times.
It's even worse. n nJournalism does not generally attract the top tier of students. n nThat alone would make the attempt on the parts of these journos to hide their bias even less successful, as they are not particularly good at things.. n n n
There are no more reporters, only leftwing political hacks.
Grey Lady, Pink Lady … I'm thinking "The Watermelon News" fits best. n nWhat Brisbane is noticing is a cultural psychosis wherein members are so enamored of the identity conferred by membership that they close their minds to the world of ideas outside their own. n nAppealing to this psychosis is their Fearless Leader who declares that Romney & Ryan are extremists.
But when you point this out to leftists and Obamatrons, they cheer. They see bias as a victory they see the complete abandonment of facts, fairness or reality to be a great and good thing.
And if you dare to actually report reality you are to be demonized and legal means perverted to intimidate you as illustrated by the periodic sallies to shut down Fox commentators or shut down Fox itself via a revived "Fairness Doctrine".
Indeed! That behavior of the Left press goes hand by hand with the bolchevik spririt! Conquering (or trying to) the readers, with lies, half-lies, distortion and inducing a pinch of hate
Tne incoming CEO of All-that-Fits-We-Print has been the Executive Director signing off on the BBC's long running fight to block release of its own internal report on BBC anti-Israel bias. He'll be right at home.
Critiquing the NYT is almopst as pointless as reading it.
Well, I guess if one subscribes to both The Times and The Wall Strret Journal, somewhere in the middle comes closest to neutral reporting.
Skapp wrote that "Well, I guess if one subscribes to both The Times and The Wall Street Journal, somewhere in the middle comes closest to neutral reporting." n nI very rarely read either the news or opinion pages of the NY Times, but I am a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal's news pages and opinion pages. I really haven't seen any biases in WSJ news pages. (Of course, that may merely reflect my own biases.) n nA majority of the op-eds in the WSJ's opinion pages definitely are conservative in outlook, but more liberal viewpoints, e.g. from Princeton econ professor Alan S. Blinder, often appear. And the editorials often have criticized not only the Obama administration proposals and actions, but also Congressional Republican proposals and actions, and also Mitt Romney's campaign strategies and tactics. n nRNFolsom
I grew up in NYC reading this paper as the Herald Tribune had folded. I stopped reading it about 20 years ago. They one decent reporter named Vinocur and old man AM Rosenthal was ok. n nSince then it has become awful. Everone knew the paper was liberalback then but they could report a story straight. Not anymore. It is today like the Volkischer Beobachter, Rude Paravo or Pravda. Aliberal fascist party newspaper
Can any of you dudes name a superior paper ? The WSJ ?
Bias also affects editorial decisions on what news to report and what to exclude, and books to be reviewed, and those to be ignored. My kids read it and miss many breaking stories–ex: fast & furious fiasco
Hah, Commentary calling the NYT biased is a little like calling the pot calling the kettle black. I've yet to see an article here that even pretends to be objective.
Elias Goldstein nFor many years I was an officer in a company that was one of the main distriutors to the news stands of the NY Times and I felt that it was an honor to be connected to it; however, years after I retired the Times ran an article in 1998 listing all of the terrorist attacks that had occurred around the world starting as I remember sometime in the 1970's or earlier. I realized then that something had happened to the Times to destroy its integrity because in that extensive list there was not one act of terrrorism listed as having occurred in the State of Israel, even though there had been repeated bombings of public buses and restaurants, etc. Since that time I wouldn't read anything printed in the NY Times because I wouldn't be sure if I could believe the facts to be completely true. That was a very sad day for me.
You got that right Mark and Fox News is "Fair and Balanced". Biased people complaining about other people's biases – amusing at best. I guess it irks them because most of the writers at the NY Times are somewhat intelligent and their writing reflects that. I don't always agree with the Times but it is written well. n n
What, Krugman and St. Thomas?
The Times is predominated by the mindset of place. New York city is a self-referential, provincial, dysfunctional dystopia. Because of its monuments and history, New York's inhabitants, like those of England, are seized by delusions of grandeur, which have the effect of validating to themselves their respective endeavors to make lemonade out of a lemon. To be sure, there is a marvelous, albeit often perverse, cultural life, which makes living in New York, for all its corrosiveness, not a dull experience. But as an old friend once told me, "New York is the most exciting city in the world, and I'm glad as hell to be out of it." The upshot is, that the imposition of New York values — multi-culturalism, moral relativism and æsthetical deconstruction — on the rest of the country as universal values, via such channels as The Times, is no more than boosterism. n nI get tired of people pontificating about how reporters are human beings and as such can't escape bias. That's claptrap. It's called being a professional, whose job is to know his biases and filter them from the reporting. This is NOT a difficult task. You don't like your subject? Fine, just stick to the facts. You are emotionally touched by a tragedy? Fine, but stick to the facts. Involved in the story personally? You have no business in it. Recuse yourself! n nAnd there lies the corruption of today's journalism. Thanks to something called Gonzo, made fashionable by Hemingway wannabe, Hunter S. Thompson, the story is not by the reporter but about the reporter. Hollywood has much to do with this. Journalists aren't content just to be reporters — flies on the wall taking notes — they want to be stars in their own right. In the old days it was the quest for a byline, something to be earned. Nowadays, a byline is an entitlement. n nWhat's despicable about The Times and their broadcast equivalent NPR is that, while maintaining their facade of objectiveness, they engage in the most blatant forms of dishonesty. The devices of the dishonesty are . . . n nLanguage: the subject isn't about "abortion" but about "reproductive freedom". It's not about gay marriage but about "marriage equality" or gay rights. It's not about terrorists or mass murders but about "militants". Palestinians are not aggressors but victims. Muslims are victims of "Islamophobia". Islamists are insurgents. n nThe Times and NPR cherry-pick what news they cover and who gets a podium, as interviewees or as op-ed writers. n nEven in opinion, The Times's Roger Cohen and Nicholas Kristof are effete apologists for murderers and anti-Semites. NPR does sentimental reports of families, not of victims of terrorism but of the suicide bombers who murder them. Imagine the kind of audience to whom they pander! n nAt the end of the day, The Times is indeed as Brisbane suggests, not about some impersonal monolith but about people, about individuals and their group-think, who, consciously or not, insinuate their left-wing bias into what they peddle as the news. It's not about bias per se, nor even the nature of the particular bias — it's about rank dishonesty. The Times is a chronic liar.
I subscribed to Commentary for years. I read it cover to cover, but I started always with its spectacular letters section. Now I just get this daily tabloid email version. Both the former journal Commentary & the National Review are now utterly predictable and without intellectual merit. Yes, now you, Fox, & the New York Post are in the company you deserve. And your readership shows it. As for the Times, the patience and tolerance it has for the outrageous lies and deceit of the Right is its greatest sin of all: It grants the Radical Right Wing a dignity, respect, and gravitas that the Right simply does not deserve.
This once great journal, Commentary, is now a joke. Worse, its predictability comes not because its values are rock solid, but because they are free floating and utterly cynical. Commentary will say whatever is convenient for the moment however damning to the interests of the country, its people, or the world, and the same holds true for the Radical Right Wing in general, and they are seizing control of the Republican Party which was never a Radical Right Wing party.
This magazine has nothing to do with Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Lord Acton, or Conservatism for that matter. Barry Goldwater, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan would shun it., however much they may have set the ball rolling for its creation. It is yet another Frankenstein monster: An anti-intellectual party par excellence supported by what was once the leading intellectual magazine in the country that is now both a lightweight cheerleader and a sophistic propagandist for a party it should, if it truly held to any kind of fundamental values, have despised as unworthy of a great country such as ours. The New York Times, whatever its faults–not Commentary–nor the New York Post, nor Fox, is far more worthy of this country than any of these Right Wing Radical anti-Conservative rags and trashy propaganda vehicles can ever hope to be.