Tag: nyt

NY Times Moves to ‘Ensure Alignment’ Between News and Opinion Divisions

Well before Trump ran for president, the New York Times was making overtures to critics to improve their tattered reputation. They added a public editor in 2003 who would be a conduit of sorts between readers and reporters. This was in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair scandal and also at a time when more people were pointing out how it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the op/ed departments and the various news divisions (local, national, international, etc).

But in mid-2017, they eliminated the position. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. justified it at the time by saying the situation had become outdated and that social media users had effectively become their “watchdogs” instead:

Mr. Sulzberger, in a newsroom memo, said the public editor’s role had become outdated.

“Our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be,” he wrote. “Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.”

Four years later, and the Twitterization of the New York Times newsroom and its emphasis on catering to “woke” reporters and left-wing social media mobs with an angle to push has proved disastrous, as we’ve documented here on many occasions.

With all of that in mind, you would think that the paper would maybe put on some pretense of trying to make sure the various opinions that get churned out on the op/ed side do not bleed over to the straight news side.

But that’s not happening at all. Instead, the paper is now actively seeking a director of opinion strategy, where one of the key responsibilities will be “connecting and ensuring alignment between efforts in Opinion and around the wider newsroom and company”:

Your job, in brief, will be to:

-Collaborate with The Times’s Opinion Editor, Managing Editor and the wider Opinion leadership team in setting and executing coverage targets and operational strategy
-Help Opinion leaders shape and implement our priorities, goals and plans
-Serve as one of the key conduits connecting and ensuring alignment between efforts in Opinion and around the wider newsroom and company
-Partner closely with Opinion leadership, audience, design, video, audio, newsroom leadership and technology teams to develop and execute on the vision, strategy, and product roadmap for Opinion
-Partner with the Audience team to conduct and present analytics deep dives aimed at helping broaden the audience of Times Opinion
-As a member of the broader Newsroom Strategy and company Strategy & Development team, participate in a wide range of projects in News and across the company

The ad was the equivalent of the New York Times saying the quiet part out loud about the direction in which they were determined to go.

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New York Times Staff Admit Previously Working For Chinese Communist Party – “It Has It’s Benefits.”

Several New York Times staff have previously worked for the Chinese Communist Party’s state-run media outlet China Daily, including the publication’s current Director of Cinematography who admitted “working for the Communist Party of China.”

The news comes as the New York Times breathlessly backs big corporates opposed to Georgia’s new voting laws. The New York Times, however, seems less concerned with employing genocidal Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks.

Jonah Kessel – the current Director of Cinematography at The New York Times – served as the Creative Director of China Daily from July 2009 to November 2010 before departing work as a China-based photographer and cinematographer whose clients included People’s Republic of China Ministry of Information.

Kessel describes himself as “redesigning” China Daily – a gig he was “psyched” for and boasted about how publications such as The Economist hyped his redesign.

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New York Times Writers May Have Deceived Readers in Stories About Project Veritas: Court

Writers for the New York Times may have spread deceptive claims about the nonprofit journalism group Project Veritas, a judge ruled this week.

In stories from 2020 about Project Veritas videos, writers Maggie Astor and Tiffany Hsu inserted sentences that were opinions despite the articles being billed as news, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood said.

“If a writer interjects an opinion in a news article (and will seek to claim legal protections as opinion) it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader, including a court that may need to determine whether it is fact or opinion, that it is opinion,” Wood wrote in a 16-page decision denying the paper’s request to dismiss a lawsuit from Project Veritas.

“The Articles that are the subject of this action called the Video ‘deceptive,’ but the dictionary definitions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘deceptive’ provided by defendants’ counsel certainly apply to Astor’s and Hsu’s failure to note that they injected their opinions in news articles, as they now claim,” he added.

At issue are five articles that Project Veritas alleges contained false and defamatory information. All five were about a 2020 video report from the journalism group on alleged illegal voting practices in Minnesota.

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“Don’t Go Down The Rabbit Hole!” — NY Times Decries Critical Thinking Tells Us to Trust Google Instead

A new article from the New York Times claims that instead of engaging with someone who challenges your worldview, you should “resist the lure of Rabbit Holes” and go to more authoritative sources such as Google and Wikipedia.

The New York Times appears to have declared war on traditional critical thinking, which they say “isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation”.

Sharing the insights of “a digital literacy expert” named Michael Caulfield, the article reads as follows:

“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”

In other words: Resist the lure of rabbit holes, in part, by reimagining media literacy for the internet hellscape we occupy.

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New York Times Columnist Suggests Canceling Speedy Gonzales, Pepé Le Pew

Charles Blow, a left-wing columnist for the New York Times, has suggested canceling the popular Looney Tunes cartoon characters Speedy Gonzales and Pepé Le Pew — the former because it is “racist,” the latter for contributing to “rape culture.”

Blow made the suggestions in a column applauding the removal of several Dr. Seuss books from circulation for allegedly racist caricatures. In the column, titled, “Six Seuss Books Bore a Bias,” Blow argued: “Racism must be exorcised from culture, including, or maybe especially, from children’s culture.”

He wrote:

As a child, I was led to believe that Blackness was inferior. And I was not alone. The Black society into which I was born was riddled with these beliefs.

It wasn’t something that most if any would articulate in that way, let alone knowingly propagate. Rather, it was in the air, in the culture. We had been trained in it, bathed in it, acculturated to hate ourselves.

It happened for children in the most inconspicuous of ways: It was relayed through toys and dolls, cartoons and children’s shows, fairy tales and children’s books.

…

Some of the first cartoons I can remember included Pepé Le Pew, who normalized rape culture; Speedy Gonzales, whose friends helped popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans; and Mammy Two Shoes, a heavyset Black maid who spoke in a heavy accent.

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Social media erupts after cancel culture claims career of 47-year NYTimes journalist

Many on social media were outraged that a journalist with a celebrated 47-year career was undone by what using an racial slur in an unintentionally offensive manner.

“This reads like a confession procured by the Khmer Rouge. It’s both ridiculous and terrifying,” replied Andrew Sullivan.

“A culture that lacks grace is both punitive and miserable. Does intent matter? Does forgiveness exist?” asked David French.

“It is now official NYT policy that for some words, intent does not matter, and it only takes one strike to sink a 47-year career,” said Reason editor-at-large Matt Welch.

“This reads like a Bolshevik at his own show trial admitting he’d betrayed the revolution even though he never meant to betray the revolution because he loves the revolution,” said Peter Savodnik of Vanity Fair.

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NY Times Contributing Writer Calls For Lynching Mike Pence

Will Wilkinson, vice president for research at the Niskanen Center and a New York Times contributing opinion writer said Thursday that President Joe Biden would lynch former Vice President Mike Pence if he desires unity.

“‘Aha! Biden proposes policies I dislike. HIS CALL FOR UNITY IS A LIE!!!’ is all the forlorn conservative mind can seem to muster. Sad,” Wilkinson tweeted, according to a screenshot. 

“If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence,” Wilkinson tweeted, according to the screenshot.

The tweet, posted at 12:33 a.m. Thursday, has since been deleted.

“The Pence tweet was a tart way to drive home the exasperating irony and bad faith of right-wing pundits who have accused Biden of insincerity in his heartfelt calls for unification,” Wilkinson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“[T]heir own divisive rhetoric and willingness to spread disinformation about the election contributed to hundreds of Republicans storming the Capitol, erecting a noose, and calling for Mike Pence to be hanged.”

Wilkinson said that his agreement with Biden “that it is crucial for Americans to come together” is, in part, why he deleted the tweet.

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The New York Times Helped a Vindictive Teen Destroy a Classmate Who Uttered a Racial Slur When She Was 15

Jimmy Galligan is an 18-year-old college freshman from Leesburg, Virginia. He may also be cancel culture’s Count of Monte Cristo.

Some months ago, Galligan—who is biracial—posted a years’ old, three-second video of a white, female classmate using a racial slur. Galligan had sat on the video for a long time, waiting for the moment it would do the most damage. After the girl—a cheerleader named Mimi Groves—was accepted to the University of Tennessee, the time had come.

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” said Galligan.

The video depicted Groves, who was 15 at the time, and had just obtained her learner’s permit, saying “I can drive, [slur].” The remark was not directed at anyone in particular. The brief video clip featuring it circulated on Snapchat until it was obtained and saved by Galligan, who had grown furious at how often he heard his white classmates using the N-word.

Galligan shared it publicly in June. In response, Groves lost her spot on UT’s cheerleading squad. Then the university pressured her to withdraw from the school entirely. The admissions office had apparently received hundreds of messages from irate alumni demanding blood. Groves is now attending a community college.

This story is a powerful example of several social phenomena: the militant streak in social justice activism, the naivety of today’s teens and their not-actually-disappearing Snapchat messages, social media’s hunger for mob justice, and even the capacity for elaborate cruelty that has always existed among high schoolers. But the wildest thing about this incident is that most people will learn about it by reading The New York Times.

“A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning.” That’s the title of the Times‘s article on the subject, published the day after Christmas. Reporter Dan Levin tries to add considerable context by detailing a history of alleged unpleasantness at Heritage High School, which Groves and Galligan attended. It sits in a wealthy, predominantly white county where “slave auctions were once held on the courthouse grounds.”

“In interviews, current and former students of color described an environment rife with racial insensitivity, including casual uses of slurs,” notes Levin. “A report commissioned last year by the school district documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and teachers, fostering a ‘growing sense of despair’ among students of color, some of whom faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white students.”

Levin connects the outcry from aggrieved students to the broader Black Lives Matter movement and protests that occurred this summer following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police. But nowhere does his article reckon with a very basic fact: The New York Times has opted to assist a teenager’s desperate quest to ruin the life of a young woman who said something stupid when she was 15.

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New York Times Normalizes Racist Eugenics Supported by Woke Doctors

When it comes to deciding who will receive the coronavirus vaccine, the far-left New York Times is normalizing the idea that skin color is more important than need, risk, and vulnerability.

Yep, the Times is perfectly comfortable arguing that it is okay to sacrifice your grandparents on the altar of social justice.

Feel free to accuse me of hyperbole, but the truth is the truth, and the truth is that not since Nazi Germany have we seen something like what the New York Times is guilty of, which is an establishment news organization openly normalizing the idea of choosing who lives and who dies, not on need, but on race and skin color.

Wither the Hippocratic Oath.

An article published by the Times this month examined the dilemma of the Trump vaccine. “The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?” the headline read, which is a perfectly legitimate moral dilemma for a newspaper to look into. We can’t vaccinate everyone at once, so who goes first and why?

So dummy me, because I sometimes forget how far gone the media are, how morally illiterate the children who run organizations such as the Times are, I’m expecting a thoughtful debate over who is more at risk and how tough decisions sometimes have to be made. I’m even willing to accept a look at something like, “Well, if we vaccinate grandma and not Dr. Happy and Dr. Happy dies or gets sick, more people might die with Dr. Happy out of action.”

Hey, I’m an adult. I get nuance and thinking out loud. I can handle that.

I’ll tell you what I didn’t expect…

I did not expect the New York Times to normalize the openly racist practice of eugenics. I’m going to quote fully below what the New York Times published as an acceptable line of thought, and since you may not believe me, you can look for yourself right here.

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