Thursday, January 3, 2019

Anti-Trump Bias at the New York Times


True enough, Jill Abramson has a book to sell. You can be certain that her criticism of The New York Times will attract attention. It already has.

You see, Abramson was Executive Editor of the Times, until she was unceremoniously fired by publisher Arthur Sulzberger. At the Times, the Executive Editor is the Editor-in-Chief. Now, in a story reported by HowardKurtz for Fox News and the Zero Hedge blog (via Maggie’s Farm) we have Abramson’s position.

In short, she takes the paper to task for showing a manifest anti-Trump bias in its news reporting. I am sure that you do not think that it’s news, but… consider the source. She argues that becoming part of the Resistance has helped the paper to gin up its online subscriber base. That is, it’s all business. But, she also adds that younger more woke staffers have no interest in the objective reporting of the facts; they are all-in with the Resistance.

Apparently, Donald Trump is not alone in playing fast and loose with facts. Today’s millennial generation has been brainwashed to the point where they do not believe in facts.

Zero Hedge reports:

"Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump," writes Abramson - who says the Washington Post is no different. "Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis."

Citing legendary 20th century publisher Adolph Ochs, Abramson said "the more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased. Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear or favor sounded like an impossible promise in such a polarized environment."

And also:

"Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated," she writes. 

When the wall between news and opinion breaks down, and where every news story about Trump is slanted to make the president look bad, the paper risks compromising its own credibility. Assuming that it still has any.

Howard Kurtz explains the generational divide at Fox News:

Abramson describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” she writes.

Trump claims he is keeping the “failing” Times in business—an obvious exaggeration—but the former editor acknowledges a “Trump bump” that saw digital subscriptions during his first six months in office jump by 600,000, to more than 2 million. –

A jump from 1,400,000 to 2,000,000 subscriptions is much more than a bump.

2 comments:

Sam L. said...

" Apparently, Donald Trump is not alone in playing fast and loose with facts. The enemedia plays fast and loose with non-facts, as well.

Baquet may not want to be the opposition party, but he's clearly happy to be working for it.

Sam L. said...

Also, it's not JUST the NYT. It's most of the newspapers, nearly all of the networks, and most of the rest of the print media.