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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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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.
Yep, they see which way the wind is blowing, and they'd rather be the one interviewing the fuhrer than be dismantled for unflattering words during his ascent.
I'm sure they genuinely, self-masturbatorily believe they are the peak of journalism, but in abandoning the journalistic cornerstone of informing and serving the public trust, they're anything but.
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.
Well said. Their reflexive need to “both-sides” even the most one-sided issues ultimately helps normalize the most extreme viewpoints. It’s what made me lose faith in them.
Also their headlines are consistently absurd, to the point of often being inaccurate. Remember around the 1 million mark, when they said Covid had caused countless deaths and then proceeded to tell us how they counted the deaths? Words mean certain things, and their meanings matter. Don’t use “countless” if the thing is countable.
Exactly.
objectivity ≠ equivocation
A murderer and their victim don't both have a valid point.
not to nit pick but COVID deaths happened by way of COVID exacerbating other illnesses, so saying someone died of COVID is difficult when they really died of COVID exacerbated Pneumonia. So saying "Countless" deaths, and then giving a number of COVID associated deaths isn't entirely inaccurate.
It's even simpler than that. The paper is class aligned. It's something run by something like a 4th generation rich kid.
For sure. They're pretty open about prioritizing access over truth.
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.
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.
We're not going to agree on whether it's understandable to be a self-identified journalistic organization that prioritizes self-preservation over journalism.
I at some point tagged you as an apologist for capitalism, so we just have 2 very different world views and ethics on most issues. Have a good one.
How do you tag people on Lemmy?
I use Connect for lemmy on android, it's on the Play store. It lets you add user notes that appear next to their name quickly and easily.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kuroneko.lemmy_connect
It's a feature of the app, not lemmy. Works perfectly though.
Thank you, I'll check it out.
Do you feel the same way about the judges who are clearly responding to being threatened by giving reduced sentences? Because I don’t. Being a judge is sometimes a dangerous job. It’s a job that you should be aware may cost you your life to do right and people get to demand you do it right anyway. Just like a soldier.
Journalism is similar. You accepted a high risk high ideal career. It’s a wonderful calling, but part of the reason we respect it is this.
Like the soldiers who actively noped out of protecting Congress and the Vice President from the President? Or law enforcement who will actively refuse to enforce laws they don't like?
Like anything, it is a social contract. Journalists are meant to serve The People. The "dream" is that a corrupt government arrests a journalist and The People protest until they are released. The reality is that the journalist will be disappeared. The article they spent years of their life in hiding to write will be immediately copied and posted across social media. People will say they are liars who write clickbait and blah blah blah. And they won't even know because they are being beaten in a windowless room. And their friends and family will, at best, be harassed for the rest of their life.
I have MASSIVE respect for the people who fight the good fight regardless of how little support they have. I would like to think I am more on that direction than not but I also fully acknowledge that I am taking advantage of my privilege (that may not exist in a few months but...). But I am not going to be overly harsh on someone who doesn't want to sacrifice their friends and family to stand alone and accomplish nothing.
Buddy, the soldiers went the second they were ordered to by the Civilians. Believe me, you do not want the military deciding to "protect" the capital all on it's own. That's the express route to dictatorship.
Buddy, the outging president of the united states, who had already refused to follow the law and uphold democracy, was openly supporting "good people" who were trying to lynch Congress. And the Vice President, who also had the authority to call them in, was cowering in fear because he had every reason to believe that Secret Service agents would murder him.
Rolling up and stopping the armed lunatics attacking the US Capitol Building is very much something the military can and should do.
This is the equivalent of saying "Well. Russia/China/whoever attacked us. But they blocked the cell phone jammers and might have murdered the POTUS and VPOTUS. So... I guess we just wait until someone tells us we can fight them off?"
But actively refusing to stop the outgoing POTUS from taking over the country with an armed mob because... the outgoing POTUS didn't ask them to stop him? Hmmm. Why does THAT sound more like a route to a dictatorship?
There's more than one person who can authorize that. In fact, Trump never authorized it. It was a DOD political appointee.
You could make the same argument about Soldiers. Or firefighters. Or cops. Or electric linemen. Or North Sea fishermen.
The job of journalism is to go find the truth and report it. Sometimes that's dangerous. Just like any dangerous public good it does not mean they're a sacrificial lamb.
Tell me the Times lost credibility without telling me the Times lost credibility
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.
Reporting the truth is their job though. When the UN weapons inspectors are making the rounds telling everyone that the Bush administration is lying they should have run strongly worded articles.
When no evidence of a functional WMD program of any kind showed up they should have gone after Bush with a bucket of tar.
Instead the myth of chemical weapons is so pervasive that even now you hedge your post. But the only thing we ever found were some rounds so old and decrepit they were more likely to fall apart the second they were moved than anything else.
They completely abrogated their duty to bring truth to the people for the Iraq war. And then coverage turned so hard on the Iraq war people ignore the fact that the main thing was a success. The government and democracy there endures to this day.
Even in your comment you get annoyed that people are acknowledging the facts, rather than just the narrative you wanted. it is not "hedg(ing)" to acknowledge that: By the strict definition of the term, there actually were WMDs. And we would have known the scale if inspectors were allowed to do their job. They just weren't the WMDs that were used to sell people on the war. That is nuance. That is Truth.
People don't want Truth. They want people to fight their battles for them under the guise of "Truth". Journalists are great right up until they say something we don't like, at which point they are "just as bad as the rest".
It is not journalism's job to tear down a government. It is their job to provide The People with the information they need to make those decisions. Instead, republicans insisted that any journalist who acknowledged how much of a liar the bush administration was are traitors. And most of the left decided the thing they hate the most is sensationalist headlines/24 hour news/clickbait/whatever. And... after a few people got fire bombed and had to go into hiding, it just wasn't worth the fight.
I have friends in journalism who literally had to go into hiding or flee the country. I have had to help one of my best friends store some data because one of the tech giants was pissed at them and they genuinely feared for their life.
And I've seen the outcome. The story they spent years writing and researching gets turned into a single editorialized headline on social media and the few people who even claimed to read it are arguing that it is toothless and was written by a boot licker. With the more common response being people who are genuinely proud of NOT reading it because it is "too long".
Lmao, "we were technically correct" is not a basis for war. People fucking died. That's not the time for edgy bullshit.
And nobody got firebombed for going against the Iraq war. Stop trying to conflate things. In fact journalists being killed in the US is extremely rare.
And it's absolutely the job of journalists to expose the lies of a government. That's literally why they're the fourth estate.
You're going so hard to defend stuff not even the journalists want to defend. Do you work at NYT or something?
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.