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.
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.
Idk, I generally just gave an eyebrow raised whenever I read a political nyt article, I’m perpetually aware that the nuances or implications in the article too be important to pay attention to.
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.
We call it a ‘newspaper of record’ based on actions done generations ago, the knife cuts both ways.
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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.
They call themselves that, they get to suffer the consequences.
That’s true: The paper’s symbiotic & collusive relationship with the capitalist class and the government is over 150 years old, so I don’t think it’s any more or less reliable now than it’s ever been.
Cope harder. NYT has had CIA inside it’s operations for decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/27/archives/cia-established-many-links-to-journalists-in-us-and-abroad-cias.html
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 story wasn’t that there was sexual violence, but that it was systematic. The point being that it was ordered and encouraged from above.
Systemic sexism is when my boss explicitly tells me to be mean to coworkers who are women.