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…
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.
Read what a media watchdog has to say about them and the problems their articles have consistently had for decades.
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.)
Allsides is a good US based news aggregator that specializes in rating how liberal, central, or conservative biased an article is.