The New York Times is one of the newspapers of record for the United States. However, it’s history of running stories with poor sourcing, insufficient evidence, and finding journalists with conflicts of interest undermines it’s credibility when reporting on international issues and matters of foreign policy.
Late last year, the NYT ran a story titled ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7. Recently, outlets like The Intercept, Jacobin, Democracy Now! , Mondoweiss, and others have revealed the implicit and explicit bias against Palestine that’s apparent both in the aforementioned NYT story and in the NYT’s reporting at large. By obfuscating poor sources, running stories without evidence, and using an ex-IDF officer with no journalism experience as the author, the NYT demonstrates their disregard for common journalistic practice. This has led to inaccurate and demonstrably false reporting on critical issues in today’s world, which has been used to justify the lack of American pressure against Israel to the American public.
This journalistic malpractice is not unusual from the NYT. One of the keystone stories since the turn of the century was the NYT’s reporting on Iraq’s pursuit of WMDs: U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS, Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say, Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert. These reports were later revealed to be false, and the NYT later apologized, but not before the reporting was used as justification to launch the War on Iraq, directly leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and indirectly causing millions of death while also destabilizing the region for decades.
These landmark stories have had a massive influence on US foreign policy, but they’re founded on lies. While stories published in the NYT do accurately reflect foreign policy aims of the US government, they are not founded in fact. The NYT uses lies to drum up public support for otherwise unpopular foreign policy decisions. In most places, we call that “government propaganda.”
I think reading and understanding propaganda is an important element of media literacy, and so I’m not calling for the ban of NYT articles in this community. However, I am calling for an honest discussion on media literacy and it’s relation to the New York Times.
But muh Media Bias/Fact Check says it checks out!
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/contact/
Dave M. Van Zandt obtained a Communications Degree before pursuing a higher degree in the sciences. Dave currently works full time in the health care industry. Dave has spent more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence.
Van Zandt is some hobbyist who was in the right place at the right time: the “post-truth” moment of Clinton’s loss to Trump and the string of Russiagate conspiracy theories and Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts and the Cambridge Analytica hysteria.
The whole concept of the “left” or ”right“ “bias” being inversely correlated with factualness is garbage. These kinds of graphs, which try to convince us that centrism equals factualness, are garbage:
The core bias of corporate media is the bias of the capitalist class, but people like Van Zandt don’t seem to understand this.
The inner workings of corporate media were explained about forty years ago in Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent.
A five minute introduction: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media MachineHas he changed his blurb? It used to say:
This curiosity led him to pursue a Communications Degree in college; however, like most 20-year olds he didn’t know what he wanted and changed to a Physiology major midstream.
Implying that he changed to Physiology before graduating, and that his “higher degree” is a Bachelor’s.
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New York Times sold the lie that Iraq had WMDs.
That is all you need to know about the NYT.
I’m not American and I almost never read the Times, so I don’t have first hand experience. But I hear the same rhetoric about outlets here in Canada.
My take is that yes, outlets can have bias on certain issues, but that doesn’t mean we should write them off completely. Trust in media is at an all time low, journalism is struggling to survive. There’s no media outlet in the world that doesn’t make the kinds of mistakes that you outline here. The key is how do they respond to them after the fact. Do they issue corrections? How quickly? Where do they put them?
Some of your ‘evidence’ also doesn’t seem like journalistic malpractice. For example, are they obfuscating poor sources, or not revealing an anonymous source? The latter is not malpractice. The former doesn’t sound bad either… Who decides if a source is poor? Maybe the source didn’t have much to contribute so that’s why there wasn’t much detail on their background. I’m not arguing that you’re wrong, just that as an outside observer that point doesn’t seem very bad.
Anyway, I do think it’s important to be aware of any biases in the media we consume, so conversations like this are important. But my fear is that if the conclusion is to wholesale stop trusting the media anytime they make a mistake or a bias is revealed (I.e all media outlets), we’re going to be even more fucked than we already are.
After the fact, it’s being revealed that their “sources” are consistently wrong and consistently in line with US foreign policy objectives.
You can say it’s a coincidence, but…
“Consistently” and “in-these-specific-cases” are different things.
These are some of the most important and impactful stories since 2000. If the NYT can’t keep their journalism robust for these, what does it say about everything else?
Oh wait, we already know: “Palestinian family collides with bullet discharged from Israeli weapon”
Nobody and no system should be expected to be perfect all the time, I would anticipate some mistakes over a course of decades.
Have you checked for any times they were critical of US foreign policy within the same timeframe?
These mistakes led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. How much more genocide apologism do you want to do?
The NYT mistakes caused hundreds of thousands of deaths that you say are genocide? Please enlighten me on how this is the case because it sounds a lot like hyperbole.
You seem to be just a pissed-off person who wants to lash out at things/people/organizations and think that if something isn’t perfectly aligned with your views, then it’s evil/bad/etc. I’d like to suggest stepping outside and taking a deep breath.
I don’t think the invasion of Iraq can be blamed on the NYT. I think the Bush administration and Al Qaeda get the credit for that one.
However much is necessary to arrive at the truth.
You think the NYT played no role in drumming up public support for an otherwise incredibly unpopular foreign policy decision? Here’s a report by FAIR: https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its-iraq-war-shame/
NYT has always been particularly egregious. How can an editorial board whose members are not publicly accountable (or even reported), and who are obviously made up of a homogeneous, obviously wealthy group of people who regularly write on areas they have conflicts of interest in (particularly real estate in NY) be considered reliable and trustworthy? Their continuing good reputation is one of the biggest media farces that exists.
Fair warning, I am in need of sleep and what comes after is a rant partially resulting from that. I won’t know if I was coherent until after I’ve rested, so here’s hoping!
You’re right. The state of mainstream media IS abysmal, but these outlets also have a long history of towing the state line as well as that of their private owners (WaPo and Bezos have been particularly egregious in recent years). They’ve always been shit. The reason people find this scary is that they haven’t ever taken the time to take a critical look at the state of the media and make a historically materialistic assessment of how media bias has affected our world and geopolitics.
Media bias and the degradation of public trust in the media is a common problem that’s been around a long time and it just so turns out that the smaller, independently and crowd-funded media outlets are better off than they ever were before the internet. This isn’t the first time this has happened.
People distrusting mainstream sources pushes them to get their information elsewhere. This will have good and bad results, but the media sources that do good reporting have the benefit of actually having done good work that can be confirmed. As people see how poor a job the mainstream media does in their reporting, they may also learn to apply that criticism elsewhere and naturally gravitate to those who are more trustworthy, which is a good thing. The important part to note here is that we do not perform this critical analysis on our own. Discussions like these help us inform each other so we don’t all have to individually become expert fact-checkers. This is my unsubstantiated bias and not meant to downplay the damage done by shitty media sources, but overall I think this general distrust has a beneficial result. People who are passionate about the truth come out of the woodworks and help lead others away from deception.
Blind criticism of media sources from some people is unavoidable in all circumstances, so I’m just writing it off as those people being lost causes. If they weren’t critical as teenagers, what did you expect from them as adults? For others, the shiny paint on the exterior has cracked and more and more they see the piece of shit peaking out from underneath. People recognizing that they cannot blindly trust the media is a good sign…
…a good sign that those who wish to make things better are organized and prepared for the eventualities born of a crumbling state. If there’s anything to be scared of, it should be how the state of those who fight for us compares to the state of organization and strength of those who wish to further exploit and blind us.
The imperial core is crumbling. It will get much worse before it can get better and I’d say it’s unlikely that the forces of positive change for these countries will come from within. Even so, I personally hope and try to help work to make it more likely that good changes do come from within. The future is troubling, but also filled with hope.
(Note: I don’t disagree with your point that you can get some use out of a filthy rag like the NYT so long as you know how clean the results you are expected to get from it are beforehand. From criticism that takes this into account, true media literacy is born.)
Allsides is a good US based news aggregator that specializes in rating how liberal, central, or conservative biased an article is.
Topically, CNN did an article on that whole New York Times scandal, and they kept saying how there’s definitely a lot of evidence for that mass rape story. They just wish the NYT would report it better. And then they linked back to their own piece and The Guardian’s copy-paste job of the same hoax the NYT made up. 🤡
I have been reading NYT’s coverage of this conflict. Their journalists seem to have a range of viewpoints and their coverage reflects that.
Here’s a story that’s just about the level of Pro-Palestian support:
Here: “Invading Gaza Now is a Mistake”
The conflict has proved hard to cover because journalists have been targeted and killed, so there are a shortage of journalists on the ground in Gaza.
I’ve also appreciated the times when NYT has published follow-up pieces to explain when I found case where their own reporting didn’t meet their own high standards and what they are doing about it.
I agree we should hold them to a high standard, we should have a conversation about media literacy and be careful what we consume.
Regarding a possible NYT ban, I think it is both important to consider their totality of coverage behold what is seen as specific mistakes. Also consider the alternatives. What English language outlets have objectively better and less biased coverage of the conflict?
opeds are different. If the NYT framed the original article as an oped, fine, but it didn’t.
Literally any outlet that doesn’t spin bullshit sources to justify warmongering?
Any outlet that doesn’t get an ex-IDF official to write an article on Israel’s war against Palestine?
Just basic journalistic integrity.
Or a largely reliable news source with certain red flag issues
The NYT is pretty good about domestic news. In fact, I’d say they’re one of the best for reporting US news. Internationally, they’re a fuckfest.
It’s not great on domestic news, either, in that it slants in favor of the employer class and in opposition to the working class.
That’s representative of US interests domestically. The NYT is specifically slanted in favour of the financial class, which you might infer from it’s name.
Also let’s just appreciate that the two examples cited by the poster are 1) a recent story that may genuinely be problematic (though I think it’s naive to believe either the Israelis or Hamas haven’t engaged in sexual violence given its prevalence in warzones), and 2) reporting on a manufactured war that’s now nearly 30 years old.
It’s absurd to think you can hold the current NYT to account for actions done so long ago that many of their current journalists wouldn’t have been borne yet.
That’s not to say the NYT doesn’t have it’s problems. It is absolutely a both-sidesism establishment paper. But if you’re gonna criticize it, at least do so with modern examples.
It’s absurd to think you can hold the current NYT to account for actions done so long ago that many of their current journalists wouldn’t have been borne yet.
We call it a ‘newspaper of record’ based on actions done generations ago, the knife cuts both ways.
I don’t read the Times anymore. I get my news elsewhere. That said, there are a few things to consider here, when it comes to the relative shittiness of the NYT vs other major papers. We have this notion, unfounded, that the NYT “used to be” better, or more progressive, or what have you. Certainly compared to the other two “papers of record” for the country (Washington Post and Wall Street Journal), it’s a raging pinko rag. But the fact remains that it was founded as a conservative-leaning paper, continued to be a conservative-leaning paper in the 20th century and, surprise surprise, remains a conservative-leaning paper. The lean is more Tower of Pisa than Man Vomiting on Sidewalk, but it’s still conservative.
Many of its bad takes (and there are many) are squarely in line with mainstream views. At worst, its views lag behind the country by a few years. And like all major news corporations, it is incentivized to maximize its visibility (and therefore revenue). Given the options of 1) publishing something incendiary that will put the paper in the public eye and help in creating more news to print or 2) doing additional work with the anticipated result of the truth not being nearly as interesting and therefore not nearly as attention-grabbing, they’re going to do the less work option.
Next, the NYT is a victim of the news cycle just as much as the TV networks, if not more so. While the website updates fairly regularly throughout the day, the paper comes out once every 24 hours, and must be prepped hours in advance. This means that breaking news suffers from two issues: 1) it has to be investigated at a speed faster than the TV networks because they paradoxically don’t have the luxury of time and 2) they can’t afford to be tentative when they don’t know something. CNN and Fox especially can get away with saying “we’ll report back when we know more” because that “back” is maybe 30 minutes from now. “Developing stories” exist on news networks. They do not exist for print papers. If you publish, you have to claim to be definitive, or people will stop reading. (“Why should I read the NYT when they just keep saying they don’t know shit?”)
Finally, and we should take some solace from this, it should be noted that the NYT, despite being one of the “papers of record” for the country, is basically screaming into the void. Almost no one reads it. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, they’re not conservative enough for the people who can throw money at a news organization when there are free alternatives available, and they’re not progressive enough for the rest of us to care. The number of eyeballs scanning the NYT is vanishingly small compared to the eyeballs staring at Fox News - or even CNN, for that matter. Basically, the NYT just doesn’t matter anymore. They can say whatever the fuck they want. They’re not influencing anyone who isn’t already on the same (sorry) page.
I certainly wouldn’t fault anyone for giving up on the NYT because of its journalistic errors. I certainly have. But we should neither be surprised nor shocked. This behavior is baked into the cake, and it has been since 1851, and got even worse after 1980 when CNN first went on the air. They didn’t suddenly get stupid, and they never betrayed us. We have simply never been their intended audience.
The podcast You’re Wrong About reached a similar conclusion re: the Times’ coverage of trans issues: https://youtu.be/Fq5YmS1R63Q?si=e086MXq6pKfFo4ex
The New York times is highly credentialed and has more pulitzers than any other newspaper.
Sure, sometimes they don’t get it right, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a damn good source for journalism.NYT definitely has issues in their reporting. At the same time, keep in mind that Mondoweiss and Intercept have their own biases.
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A bias is not the same as hiring an IDF soldier to write propaganda articles
Regarding the WMD thing, was it proven the Times was aware of the mistakes and published anyway? Or were they also deceived by the government like everyone else?
Not everyone fell for the lies. It’s a re-writing of history to suggest that everyone was all aboard with the war in Iraq. That war was preceded by the largest protests ever to occur up until that point. I personally recall Hans Blix, the UN official responsible for weapons inspections in Iraq at that time, repeatedly telling us that there was no evidence of such weapons programs. The New York Times should presumably be at least as questioning as my, at the time, 18 year old self. Particularly since I turned out to be right.
It’s very easy to forget how powerfully and unilaterally the government acts when manufacturing consent. Every control is exerted. The mainstream media a brought to heel. Dissenters are marginalised.
Bush and Blair were ruthless in this respect, over Iraq. A British government office, David Kelly, killed himself over it .
Any western media outlet writing a pro israel or anti Palestine article citing “anonymous sources” or not providing evidence should instantly be deleted.
As much as it pains me to say this, 2003 was more than 2 decades ago.
What’s your point?
People change
