The NYT Strikes me as an organization that would rather attempt to continue to exist under Trump than try to fight the rising fascist tide he’s riding.
They’ve always been that high on themselves, and they’ve always been pragmatists to the point of standing for nothing except their own gravitas.
They’re sort of like the old Italian man in Catch-22:
“I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I am an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American.”
The only difference is that, as you note, NYT’s focus is on their own gravitas. Their goal isn’t merely survival, but to maintain their image as an authoritative voice in national affairs. And they do that in large part simply by currying favor with whoever currently has the biggest coattails.
Back when the stories broke that the CIA helped to fund itself for their Contra operations by smuggling cocaine into America they helped protect the CIA because they were angry that a small time paper and Gary Web broke the story instead of mainstream media.
There are declassified CIA documents talking about how helpful the LA Times and New York Times were on helping them cover up the scandal. They were worried about the continued existence of the CIA with everything coming out but mainstream media came to their defense unprompted.
I’m old enough that for me the NYT lost a lot of credibility with their cheerleading of the Iraq war and WMDs and serving as a tool for Cheney to get revenge on a whistleblower and all that shit. The same organization that is now writing haikus to avoid saying Isreal massacred starving civilians in their headline, “As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll”.
The simple fact is a second Trump term is good for the NYT. Trump does crazy shit, people are outraged, they buy newspaper subscriptions to read about it. The NYT monetizes doom scrollers, and Trump is a endless supply of doom.
So is it money, or is the NYT always just been a mouthpiece of neocons? Or both.
It has less to do with “being (…) high on themselves” and more to do with the reality.
We have a former president who led a violent insurrection against the government in an attempt to lynch the vice president and anyone in congress who he didn’t like. The military actively ignored it and significant parts of the government are protecting him for it.
pretty much the next time republicans have power (trump or no trump), heads will roll: Literally. And if nobody is going to protect organization X on the way to that, why should organization X “fight the good fight” and paint a bullseye on their foreheads?
We see the same with a lot of branches of the government. When the best you can hope for is to have your career torpedoed (and the more likely outcome being you and your family literally getting torpedoed), why are you going to fight a losing battle?
Journalism is more important than any journalistic organization. The NYT has clearly forgotten that reality. The best journalists often put themselves in harm’s way to shine light on ugly realities, and their country doesn’t usually need to be falling to fascism to do so.
The NYT is good at protecting themselves at the cost of good journalism. Better to survive as a shiny brand than burn out as as journalists at a journalistic organization, I suppose.
Yes, the ideal is that Truth matters. And plenty of journalists still firmly believe that and are targeted by corporations and hate groups for it.
And you know what they get for it? Their employers have to lay them off because nobody is willing to pay for news and the response is usually “Fuck that, I refuse to look at anything with a paywall”. Or people start chomping at the bit to attack them for “being high on themselves”. And so forth. Anti-intellectualism is rampant throughout the world and journalism has been a target of that since long before fascists realized they could weaponize it.
In a perfect world? Yeah. Fight the good fight. And plenty of outlets still do that (often at great personal cost). But I have a real hard time getting pissy that people are deciding that they want to have a job, or a life, after November.
pretty much the next time republicans have power (trump or no trump), heads will roll: Literally. And if nobody is going to protect organization X on the way to that, why should organization X “fight the good fight” and paint a bullseye on their foreheads?
In theory, we all hang together or we all hang separately.
The gamble that execs at the NYT appear to make is that they can ingratiate themselves to Trump for the six months to two years of his relevancy, and he won’t hold any grudges or notice the knife they’ve got waiting for him the moment his approval rating falters.
Maybe they’re right. Trump is notoriously easy to distract. But he’s increasingly surrounded by folks with better political playbooks, deeper pockets, and a longer memory.
The problem is that we have already made it clear that “nobody cares” if journalists hang. hell, the other guy outright thinks journalists should line up to die on our behalf. All while we condemn them for running a banner ad or having an annoying headline on the article that is the result of three years of investigative journalism.
Personally? I think all media is even more fucked. But it is the difference between being part of mass layoffs and literally being lined up against a wall and shot.
Personally? I think all media is even more fucked.
As a vector for advertising, they’ve never been more lucrative. But I suspect we’re headed for a future of “Oops! All Ads!” wherein the NYT is - cover to cover - just another commodity plutocrats buy and sell. The WaPo is functionally already there.
NYT has been going to shit long before anything scary was happening politically. Deference to the political status quo has been their guiding light since at least the Iraq War.
I have a LOT of issues with the NYT. Not least of which is their ability to turn ANYTHING into “and this is why it is bad for Democrats”
But I think you, like many others, are very much forgetting just how strong bipartisan support was for the 2000s Iraq War at the start. And how it was actually moderately strong even for Desert Storm.
Politicians and pundits (and influencers) like to talk about how they were always above it all because nothing is worse than a flip flopper (rape? Boys will be boys. CHANGING YOUR MIND UPON RECEIVING MORE INFORMATION??? FUCK YOU AND DIE!!!). But in the late 80s/early 90s? There were a LOT of reasons to support military intervention in Iraq or, more specifically, Kuwait. Basically the exact same reasons to support military intervention in Ukraine.
And while we (rightfully) focus on the complete fabrication of WMDs*, there were still a LOT of humanitarian reasons to have intervened when we went back in the 2000s. Of course, we refused to do anything meaningful and mostly just created a power vacuum and plunged the region into chaos all while tricking people into cooperating with us and then leaving them to be murdered when we left but… we are talking about the start of the war. And that also ignores the nationalistic fervor after 9-11.
*: That actually gets a lot more complicated if you go by the actual definition of WMDs. But we were sold on nukes rather than “just” chemical weapons and the mechanisms to create nukes. Which were very much not believed to be there.
Being a good reporter does not mean deferring to whatever is popular at the time.
All those risks and flaws were evident in the build up for war (Bush Jr.'s). Maybe many people believed the bullshit, but that’s not an excuse for the people who are supposed to be calling bullshit bullshit rather than cheerleading the march to war. I am very much not forgetting the bipartisan support for war. I was there marching against it and calling it bullshit at the time, along with many more diligent reporters than the NYT. People rightfully didn’t trust the Bush Jr. administration.
When institutions fail in big world altering ways that kill a lot of innocent people, hold them to it, don’t pretend they did the best they could and no one could possibly expect better.
The NYT Strikes me as an organization that would rather attempt to continue to exist under Trump than try to fight the rising fascist tide he’s riding.
They’ve always been that high on themselves, and they’ve always been pragmatists to the point of standing for nothing except their own gravitas.
They’re sort of like the old Italian man in Catch-22:
The only difference is that, as you note, NYT’s focus is on their own gravitas. Their goal isn’t merely survival, but to maintain their image as an authoritative voice in national affairs. And they do that in large part simply by currying favor with whoever currently has the biggest coattails.
Back when the stories broke that the CIA helped to fund itself for their Contra operations by smuggling cocaine into America they helped protect the CIA because they were angry that a small time paper and Gary Web broke the story instead of mainstream media.
There are declassified CIA documents talking about how helpful the LA Times and New York Times were on helping them cover up the scandal. They were worried about the continued existence of the CIA with everything coming out but mainstream media came to their defense unprompted.
Imagine how many lives would have been saved if we shutdown the CIA.
I’m old enough that for me the NYT lost a lot of credibility with their cheerleading of the Iraq war and WMDs and serving as a tool for Cheney to get revenge on a whistleblower and all that shit. The same organization that is now writing haikus to avoid saying Isreal massacred starving civilians in their headline, “As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll”.
The simple fact is a second Trump term is good for the NYT. Trump does crazy shit, people are outraged, they buy newspaper subscriptions to read about it. The NYT monetizes doom scrollers, and Trump is a endless supply of doom.
So is it money, or is the NYT always just been a mouthpiece of neocons? Or both.
It has less to do with “being (…) high on themselves” and more to do with the reality.
We have a former president who led a violent insurrection against the government in an attempt to lynch the vice president and anyone in congress who he didn’t like. The military actively ignored it and significant parts of the government are protecting him for it.
pretty much the next time republicans have power (trump or no trump), heads will roll: Literally. And if nobody is going to protect organization X on the way to that, why should organization X “fight the good fight” and paint a bullseye on their foreheads?
We see the same with a lot of branches of the government. When the best you can hope for is to have your career torpedoed (and the more likely outcome being you and your family literally getting torpedoed), why are you going to fight a losing battle?
Journalism is more important than any journalistic organization. The NYT has clearly forgotten that reality. The best journalists often put themselves in harm’s way to shine light on ugly realities, and their country doesn’t usually need to be falling to fascism to do so.
The NYT is good at protecting themselves at the cost of good journalism. Better to survive as a shiny brand than burn out as as journalists at a journalistic organization, I suppose.
So its their job to suffer and die for you?
Yes, the ideal is that Truth matters. And plenty of journalists still firmly believe that and are targeted by corporations and hate groups for it.
And you know what they get for it? Their employers have to lay them off because nobody is willing to pay for news and the response is usually “Fuck that, I refuse to look at anything with a paywall”. Or people start chomping at the bit to attack them for “being high on themselves”. And so forth. Anti-intellectualism is rampant throughout the world and journalism has been a target of that since long before fascists realized they could weaponize it.
In a perfect world? Yeah. Fight the good fight. And plenty of outlets still do that (often at great personal cost). But I have a real hard time getting pissy that people are deciding that they want to have a job, or a life, after November.
In theory, we all hang together or we all hang separately.
The gamble that execs at the NYT appear to make is that they can ingratiate themselves to Trump for the six months to two years of his relevancy, and he won’t hold any grudges or notice the knife they’ve got waiting for him the moment his approval rating falters.
Maybe they’re right. Trump is notoriously easy to distract. But he’s increasingly surrounded by folks with better political playbooks, deeper pockets, and a longer memory.
The problem is that we have already made it clear that “nobody cares” if journalists hang. hell, the other guy outright thinks journalists should line up to die on our behalf. All while we condemn them for running a banner ad or having an annoying headline on the article that is the result of three years of investigative journalism.
Personally? I think all media is even more fucked. But it is the difference between being part of mass layoffs and literally being lined up against a wall and shot.
As a vector for advertising, they’ve never been more lucrative. But I suspect we’re headed for a future of “Oops! All Ads!” wherein the NYT is - cover to cover - just another commodity plutocrats buy and sell. The WaPo is functionally already there.
NYT has been going to shit long before anything scary was happening politically. Deference to the political status quo has been their guiding light since at least the Iraq War.
I have a LOT of issues with the NYT. Not least of which is their ability to turn ANYTHING into “and this is why it is bad for Democrats”
But I think you, like many others, are very much forgetting just how strong bipartisan support was for the 2000s Iraq War at the start. And how it was actually moderately strong even for Desert Storm.
Politicians and pundits (and influencers) like to talk about how they were always above it all because nothing is worse than a flip flopper (rape? Boys will be boys. CHANGING YOUR MIND UPON RECEIVING MORE INFORMATION??? FUCK YOU AND DIE!!!). But in the late 80s/early 90s? There were a LOT of reasons to support military intervention in Iraq or, more specifically, Kuwait. Basically the exact same reasons to support military intervention in Ukraine.
And while we (rightfully) focus on the complete fabrication of WMDs*, there were still a LOT of humanitarian reasons to have intervened when we went back in the 2000s. Of course, we refused to do anything meaningful and mostly just created a power vacuum and plunged the region into chaos all while tricking people into cooperating with us and then leaving them to be murdered when we left but… we are talking about the start of the war. And that also ignores the nationalistic fervor after 9-11.
*: That actually gets a lot more complicated if you go by the actual definition of WMDs. But we were sold on nukes rather than “just” chemical weapons and the mechanisms to create nukes. Which were very much not believed to be there.
Being a good reporter does not mean deferring to whatever is popular at the time.
All those risks and flaws were evident in the build up for war (Bush Jr.'s). Maybe many people believed the bullshit, but that’s not an excuse for the people who are supposed to be calling bullshit bullshit rather than cheerleading the march to war. I am very much not forgetting the bipartisan support for war. I was there marching against it and calling it bullshit at the time, along with many more diligent reporters than the NYT. People rightfully didn’t trust the Bush Jr. administration.
When institutions fail in big world altering ways that kill a lot of innocent people, hold them to it, don’t pretend they did the best they could and no one could possibly expect better.