politics

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.

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.

they've always been pragmatists to the point of standing for nothing except their own gravitas

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.

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.

Games like that are a key part of how they pay to run the news outlet.

I save my hate for Joel and whoever does Connections.

Lmao it's pretty good too as long as you remember it's class aligned to the wealthy.

The one thing that communists and conservatives have in common is that everyone they don't like is a liberal

Weird. I'm a paid user and I've never once been encouraged to upgrade anything.

I've got just about the lowest pay option too, so you'd think I'd be a prime target.

I use the app and a desktop browser (but with adblock). Where do you see them?

There's a reason for that:

The only polling I even partially trust is aggregated and adjusted for quality (like 538). And only a month (...or a week) before the election. Polling is broken and only getting worse, for many reasons. But I guess there is money in it, so it continues until it's worthless.

Don’t worry, the democrats are going to turn this around by telling you it’s your fault for being unhappy with them! 🫠

Yeah. They are the news of the New York coastal elites. That’s not to imply that New Yorkers are elitists, they are, but this isn’t the random New Yorker who thinks they’re better than some bitch in Cleveland. They’re the newspaper of the sort of people who the left hates having to share a party with. The ones who would rather discuss “the trans issue” with “respected academics” like Janice “eradication” Raymond and Ray “doesn’t believe in bisexuality” Blanchard than with actual trans people even philosophers and academics like Natalie Wynn, Janet Mock, Julia Serrano, or even the late Leslie Feinberg. These are the people who get whipped up into frenzy and go to war because capital was attacked and still are uncomfortable praising John Brown’s methods. They’re the ones who will say they resisted all they could while kissing asses and risking nothing, but occasionally wagging a finger and tutting, but if it comes to socialism or barbarism they will always choose barbarism and blame the socialists for their choice.

The problem is that they have huge distribution and much of what they publish is in fact an honest attempt to get things right

I don't think there's a conspiracy at the NYT, at least because they're never going to pass as a conservative organization. Pessimism about Biden won't change that.

The New York Times is absolutely a conservative organization. They supported the Iraq War including with an infamous series of articles that included, more or less, outright fabrications. They along with the rest of the mainstream press shit relentlessly on people like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders whose wild popularity among voters is due to him being much better-aligned with their political views, in opposition to either the center-right or the far-right-sorta-Nazis that are the two choices that exists in modern Washington. I haven't looked at their coverage of Gaza but I'm sure the viewpoint it begins at is horrifying.

I like Biden and I like the New York Times. But in most places in the world they'd be a conservative paper. It's only because the Overton window has shifted so, so far in this country that they're considered as some kind of liberal bastion because they occasionally report the truth instead of slavishly fawning over the leader like some kind of Belarusian hack.

It's a nickname for the New York Times.