Tuesday, June 30, 2020

The So-called Newspaper of Record

It took a very long time to earn credibility and the moniker "the newspaper of record", but a very short time to flush it down the drain.  Just a few recent examples:
Beginning their 2017 pieces praising the glories of capital-C Communism on the anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union, the “1619 Project” last year, and more recently, meltdowns over Tom Cotton and Bari Weiss, endorsement of statue toppling, attempted doxxing of the Slate Star Codex blogger and now the glorification of Andy Warhol’s would-be assassin, the New York Times has descended into something resembling the student newspaper at Oberlin. (Or as one wag quipped on Facebook at the start of the month, “We are coming ever closer to the singularity where the New York Times and Teen Vogue are indistinguishable.”)  I’m worried that their young staffers are reading Rob Long’s “New York Times Autonomous Zone” article as a how-to guide, rather than satire.

1 comment:

Auntie Ann said...

How about this one:

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/282597

>> It turns out The New York Times has lower standards when it comes to those who spread anti-Semitic canards than even Britain’s controversial Labour Party. Tweeting an anti-Semitic blood libel about Israel being responsible for teaching American cops the tactics that led to the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer led to the firing of a member of parliament from the opposition party’s leadership. Yet tweeting a similar lie about Israel training American cops to commit human-rights abuses was no bar to a journalist being hired this month to be one of the American newspaper of record’s top editors.

>> The fate of the two figures in question—Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey and Charlotte Greensit, the Times’s new managing editor of its Opinion section—does indicate that Britain’s opposition party may be serious about wanting to change course after becoming a home to Jew-hatred under its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn. But it also shows that the Times, which has a lamentable history when it comes to Jewish issues, is heading down a path in which it is being bullied into taking radical stands that are antithetical to liberal values. <<