Don’t Let the New York Times Do Your Thinking

 

My father would not live any place where the New York Times couldn’t be delivered before 7:00 a.m.

To him, the Times was “the newspaper of record,” the keeper of the first drafts of history. It had the reach and the resources to be anywhere history was being made, and the skills to report it accurately. He trusted it more than any other news source, including Walter Cronkite.

Like my dad, I grew to associate the Times with serious journalism, the first place one goes for the straight story. Their news was always assumed to be objectively presented, with the facts front-and-center. Their op-ed writers were well-reasoned and erudite, even when I thought they were full of shit.

But there was more. The Times became — for me, at least — a sort of guide to critical thinking. It helped teach me, at an impressionable age, to weigh the facts before forming an opinion. And many of my opinions — including deeply-held ones — were formed around facts I might have read there.

I am hardly alone. Millions of smart, well-educated people have grown up believing, as did I, that if you read it in the Times, it’s probably true. Beyond that, whole generations of other journalists grew up believing much the same thing, and they’ve looked to the Times to show them how to search out the good stories, and work them.

So when I say that the Times has betrayed a public trust, I’m coming from personal pain. Their cynical approach to this most stressful of elections is as intellectually dishonest as it is civically irresponsible.

The Times’ management and editorial board understand full well the stakes in November. Yet they’ve clearly decided to go all-in on the meaningless horserace narrative. They’ll bend any story to conform to it, and they’ll ignore any story that doesn’t. If democracy dies in the process, so be it. Clicks are more important.

And now they’ve taken down Joe Biden.

Actually, they didn’t. Biden took himself down. We all felt it during that horrifying debate, but it took him, and us, some time to realize it.

But be that as it may, there’s no question that the Times is guilty of piling on. Their reporting of the fallout from the debate was an ugly vendetta, a swarm of Democrats-in-Disarray stories that took the both-sides narrative to new heights of hypocrisy.

They kicked Joe Biden when he was down. Over seven days, they published 142 news articles and 50 opinion pieces about it. All on the website homepage, all “above the fold.” It was a long scroll before you came to anything else.

It was relentless. Endless speculation about Biden’s health, endless calls for him to drop out, endless semi-credible stories of Democrats pressuring him. A steady din of disingenuous hogwash.

When the Times works any story that hard, it sets the tone for the rest of the media. It has a multiplier effect that amplifies the stories far beyond their actual news value, taking them to the level of propaganda. Virtually indistinguishable from Fox News.

The only thing that finally upstaged this frenzy was the supposed shooting of Trump’s ear, which has still not been confirmed by any source. As of this writing, nobody — not the Secret Service, not the local cops on the scene, not the doctors who attended the wounded, not even Trump himself — has gone on the record saying that he was actually hit by a bullet.

You would think the Times would be all over this. But instead, we get breathless reportage about how Trump is now a “changed” person, which is such laugh-out-loud bullshit you wonder how anyone could write it with a straight face, let alone take a paycheck for it.

Last week, reporter Peter Baker, long reviled for his both-sides narratives, “broke” the story of the neurologist “caught on video” entering the White House. The strong implication — never stated — was that here was the smoking gun, the conclusive evidence of Biden’s supposed cognitive decline.

Had Baker dug just an inch deeper into the story, he’d have known that this doctor is a regular visitor at the White House, that he tends to a variety of health issues among the hundreds of people who work there, and that Biden was out of town that day.

In other words, Baker reported the story much as Fox News would have.

And it’s not just what Baker and his ilk are reporting, it’s what they’re not reporting as well. Trump’s incipient dementia gets nary a mention, though every slur in Biden’s speech was a stop-the-presses moment. They skip lightly over Project 2025 — a blueprint for the fascist gutting of our government — even as Trump denies having heard of it.

Do they not understand the nature of fascism? Did they not, over the last century, thoroughly document the rise and fall of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Tito, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin and other tyrants too numerous to mention? Do they not grasp the lessons of the history they themselves wrote? Do they not see what happens to members of the press when the dark side assumes control?

The Times is now using freedom of the press to bring about whatever its opposite is, and it’s hard to see their endgame. Are they angling to become the official mouthpiece of a police state, an American version of Tass? Do they think that transition will be seamless? Do they think they won’t themselves be arrested, put on trial, and executed by the same thugs they’re so foolishly enabling?

When Trump calls them “the failing New York Times” and the “enemy of the people,” do they think he’s joking?

I get that the business model for journalism has been upended, that it’s increasingly impossible to make any money simply reporting the news. And I get that the Times remains a formidable news-gathering operation, and is still capable of excellent journalism.

But there’s no denying a sense of loss, and some of it is our own fault. Even dedicated critical thinkers can get lazy, and to some extent, everyone outsources their thinking. I am no exception.

But in casting aside responsible journalism, they leave a serious vacuum. Where do we go when our go-to source of political information is too biased to be useful? Those sources are dwindling by the day.

The Times still has the chops to help us through this dangerous moment. It’s not too late to start using them.