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’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…
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.
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.
I’m genuinely not sure what you’re hoping to accomplish with that argument.
The fact checkers call them on that stuff, yes. The reliability ratings are based partially on how the editors react when they get it wrong and the NYT pretty famously apologizes and publishes updates when it happens.
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.
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.
Good context to have!
I’m not commenting on this particular case because I’m uninformed, the Times very well could have completely shit the bed here.
But one difference between a news outlet and an every day citizen is that a news outlet pretty much has to report on what the government’s position is. If the white house claims there are WMD’s, that’s something the public needs to know. Of course the language around how that gets presented is everything!
It sounds like there was too much blind trust in that statement and the language didn’t leave enough room for scepticism in this particular case. But it’s worth remembering that in other cases there’s a difference between towing the line and reporting words as a statement of fact. The fact being that the words were said but not necessarily that the words are true.
I forgot the name of the specific tactic, but basically what the Bush administration did was leak unsourced information to the NYT and then after the NYT published it, the Bush administration used the NYT as source for the unproven claim. They did this multiple times. The NYT was knowingly used to launder lies that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. And they are doing it again.
Think of how many Palestinians have been brutalized as a result of these heinous accusations. The fact that they canceled the Daily episode about this piece indicates that they knew something was fishy. The NYT is complicit.
And finally does it matter if they are either comically inept, or criminally evil. It has the same effect on the world and there should be consequences for their actions.
Stovepiping
The people who own the NYT are not deceived by the government, they collude with the government. In the words of George Carlin, it’s one big club, and you ain’t in it.
The podcast You’re Wrong About reached a similar conclusion re: the Times’ coverage of trans issues: https://youtu.be/Fq5YmS1R63Q?si=e086MXq6pKfFo4ex
Alright, so while you’re totes cool with posting links to a “news agency” controlled by the Iranian government, you have a bone to pick with the NYT? C’mon man, either you need to touch grass or you’re actually on the payroll for Iran.
Gonna go ahead and label this user as “Iranian Propagandist” and move on with my life, and I suggest that others do too.
buddy read the article you’re posting
read it carefully
then ask yourself why an Iranian news agency might make sense for that news
You’re saying… A member of BRICS is an unreliable source of news for news about BRICS membership?
Edit: That Venezuela and Iran, two nations who are undoubtedly friendly with each other, make inaccurate statements about what each others’ leaders are saying? This is Iran reporting on a statement by Maduro about joining BRICS. That is the news.
It’s a simpler: don’t trust strangers on the internet.
Your lemmy memories should be preceded by: I heard through Lemmy
it’s history
This is where I stopped reading the commentary about poorly-written articles.
NYT definitely has issues in their reporting. At the same time, keep in mind that Mondoweiss and Intercept have their own biases.
A bias is not the same as hiring an IDF soldier to write propaganda articles
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.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.
I do the NY Times crossword, that Is my whole interaction with the NY Times. I find it enjoyable.