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.
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?
Even NYT op-eds have to condemn Hamas in order to get printed. The range of allowable viewpoints is only as wide as the Overton window allows.
opeds are different. If the NYT framed the original article as an oped, fine, but it didn’t.
Even if they do, will people treat it differently? It’s hard to differentiate those things in your head even when conscious of the difference. The insidious nature of your own bias towards trusting or not trusting what you read from them is why opens are effective at shifting narratives and opinions.
If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it.
Do you want a list of better sources in English, because I feel like you are asking for one. I’m too tired to be the one to give them now, but maybe later or someone else will provide some for me?
The NYT directly contributed to the US invasion of Iraq based on VERIFIABLY FALSE information. Despite this egregious lack of journalistic integrity also known as “doing your fucking job”, they are still held up as a relatively unbiased and reliable source for reporting on war and geopolitical issues that relate to wars that the US elite has interests in.
No. This is your own bias and you have not looked at them critically. You want to trust them and I get it, I even AGREE with you that they do have some use as a news source on other topics, but you’re also playing into the very game they are playing with our heads.
The NYT has had troubling biases that have had a material effect on our world since at least the 1970s.
Just a few to follow if you want alternatives. Note that ALL sources have a bias. It is unavoidable. Even scientists writing in scientific journals. It’s not about their bias so much as being able to recognize their bias and see how it affects their reporting. This is how openly biased media can be a breath of fresh air in comparison to the “unbiased” media.
- Geopolitical Economy Report
- Novara Media
- FAIR.org (a media watchdog)
- Glenn Greenwald (I don’t even particularly like him and he’s had a bit of a bias in favor of Israel, but he still does good work).
The core of your argument seems to be 2 separate incidents that are 20 years apart. The WMD article series is one of many series that were released by different outlets at the time because the Whitehouse did make such claims.
I don’t know enough about the most recent article to form a serious opinion, but I did read the intercept link you posted and it appears to be entirely sourced by an interview with somebody who was fired for expressing bias outside of work. I also clicked the democracy now link and its just a paragraph stating that the intercept wrote the article in the first link but doesn’t provide anything else.
I’m not sure these two incidents are enough of an indictment against the NYT to sway me at all. News outlets get it wrong sometimes. The question is how they handle it afterwards and 2 incidents in 20 years is hardly a pattern. The NYT is definitely leaning slightly left but is generally considered to be highly factual by most fact checkers that I’ve seen.
Most fact checkers don’t know shit. Fact is, these two stories have been used to justify conflicts where hundreds of thousands of people have died.
I think fact checkers are more reliable that the intercept article you posted, myself.
Surely, then, your fact checkers will mention the NYT’s failure of reporting on Iraq’s WMDs in their fact checks?
Oh. They don’t? I wonder why.
You’ve also got their coverage of the 2016 election, where it’s a matter of settled fact that they slept on an FBI investigation of Trump for things we now know actually happened while putting Clinton’s emails on the front page at every opportunity.
You’ve also got them giving a platform to dreck like this - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/immigration-stephen-miller.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur - which includes lovely bits like “The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is near a record high, and increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics.”
I’m not one of those people who has accumulated an entire drawer full of examples and is able to provide you with 400 bullet points of what’s wrong with the NYT, but maybe two more will help push you to investigate a bit more? The NYT may publish left-leaning content sometimes, but they are not an actual ally of the Democrats, let alone the progressive or far left. They routinely publish Republican lies uncritically, and their perception as left-leaning is one of their best weapons.
There is also the whole Transphobia thing where they do things like consistently interview people who run organizations classified as hate groups as “concerned parents” and who’s front page stories have been cited in Texas courts as evidence that allowing trans kids gender affirming care is seen by medical professionals as child abuse.
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…
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”
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.)
Any western media outlet writing a pro israel or anti Palestine article citing “anonymous sources” or not providing evidence should instantly be deleted.
Or a largely reliable news source with certain red flag issues
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.
I think it’s naive to believe either the Israelis or Hamas haven’t engaged in sexual violence given its prevalence in warzones
The story wasn’t that there was sexual violence, but that it was systematic. The point being that it was ordered and encouraged from above.
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.
Then don’t call it that?
If the bar is “never made a mistake or published a questionable article in the entire history of the institution”, then there’s no such thing as a “newspaper of record” and I’m fine with that. Frankly, I never liked that idea as no one, no institution, no media outlet, no person, is totally free from bias, and no one should treat any one paper as universally authoritative.
But claiming the NYT is “unreliable” now, today, based on the actions of people who, if not dead are almost certainly retired today, is ridiculous.
Cope harder. NYT has had CIA inside it’s operations for decades.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0277939083900833
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_controversies
You are confused when you think of media companies as free standing independent entrepreneurial phenomena that might be temporarily corrupted by the government.
The press was originally a function of the government, an extension of writing originally being a function of the government-religion complex. By the time the colonies were being established in the Western hemisphere, the press was controlled mostly by the merchant class in England to influence public opinion towards their own enrichment, including inciting the public to demand military adventures and giving the military cover (see the Opium Wars).
The press has, for centuries, been a part of the ruling class’s governance suite because of both it’s historical basis and it’s function in society. It’s terribly easy for the government to destroy anyone publishing against them, especially in the early days of the newly formed American state, by using accusations of sedition and direct violent confrontation. After the initial violence of the revolution, the methods of control became a blend of fiscal and grassroots violence (e.g. the KKK). As the contradictions of capitalism continued to drive the emergency of liberatory ideologies into seats of power (like the media) control needed to become more subtle, so it grew to include military intelligence, culminating (to our knowledge) in COINTELPRO, but very obviously continuing with the establishment of the Five Eyes framework and the revelations of WikiLeaks, Manning, and Snowden.
The citizens of the USA are the most propagandized people in the entire world, and the NYT is part of that propaganda network.
Joseph Kahn, the managing editor of the Times, is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as are the CEOs of NPR & PBS. And those are the ones I know off the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Foreign_Relations
The Council of Foreign Relations is a place where the government and the capitalist class hash out the media’s agenda. On its founding, Walter Lippman was its head of research. The title of Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent came from a quote in Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion.
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.
