All the Projection That's Fit to Print

"Not at the New York Times, apparently. A recent headline in that newspaper declared that"For Republicans, 'Crisis" is the Message as the Outrage Machine Ramps Up." The article proceeds to list the various areas in which the Republican outrage machine is manipulating the appearance of crisis for political reasons: the "Economic crisis" caused by what conservatives see as "Overly generous employment benefits"; "a national security crisis, a border security crisis ... [a] humanitarian crisis, and public health crisis; and a separate energy crisis."

Of course, a skeptic reading the New York Times during the Trump administration and then during the pandemic would not have been surprised to see a slightly altered headline appear more convincingly in another newspaper: "For Democrats, 'Crisis' is the Message as the Outrage Machine Ramps Up." For every Tweet, every syllable, practically every breath that Donald Trump took as president served the media, and especially the Times, as the occasion for predictions of imminent catastrophe.

"The Great Depression is Coming," "The Market Partied Like It Was 1932," "Trump is Following in Herbert Hoover's Footsteps," "The New Great Depression is Coming," "This Stimulus Bill Will Not Save the Economy From Collapse"-those were just a few of the many pieces in the New York Times during the pandemic that predicted an economic catastrophe that would last for years.

Reading the Times over the last four years, you could be forgiven at times for thinking that the paper's longtime motto, "All the news that's fit to print," had been replaced by the Trotskyist slogan: "The worse, the better." "If it bleeds, it leads" has been the guiding imperative for the news business since its inception, but the combination of fear of being outpaced by social media, sinking profits, and generational conflict in the newsroom taking the form of an ideological putsch transformed the Times from a genial, if sometimes comical Margaret Dumont, reliably huffing in outrage and indignation, into a shrieking Cassandra.

For months, as infection rates plummeted in my New Jersey county, the Times declared on its home page that the risk of getting infected with Covid in my county was "Extremely high." It took the paper weeks to add that if you were vaccinated, your chance of getting infected was low.

Within the space of a few weeks last spring, the Times ran an article claiming that New York hospitals were facing an "Apocalyptic" surge, then a second article reporting that even as one hospital in Elmhurst, Queens faced "Apocalyptic" conditions, "3,500 beds were free in other New York hospitals." First, the paper told us, black students were being ruined by remote learning.

In January, the Times cried, Proud Boys were poised to overthrow the government-a former Times employee told me that many younger people at the newspaper were refusing to return to work in the Times building because they were convinced that it was about to be assaulted by right-wing commandos.

https://www.city-journal.org/on-the-new-york-times-blindness-to-what-it-has-become?wallit_nosession=1