What's the Point of The New York Times?
Legacy media has no one to blame for its decline but itself.
A leading phenomenon of the 21st century is the sharp decrease in the public’s trust of traditional media. As the internet gave birth to alternative news outlets and creators, more and more Americans began to get their information from podcasts, Twitch, Substack, and other nonconventional platforms. While this downward trend had been in place since the dawn of the millennium, it accelerated in recent years. The Washington Post, which once provided crucial reporting such as the Pentagon Papers and Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate investigation, has seen its readership decline by 90% in less than four years.1 Once-lauded cable networks, such as MSNBC and CNN, have experienced similar drop-offs, losing 53% and 47% of their audiences in the last few months.2 As predicted, the response to the public leaving traditional news sources has been a never-ending lecture from those in elitist institutions that believe they alone should control the public discourse.
However, what these media and political figures fail to realize is that independent, audience-funded news outlets, blogs, and podcasts didn’t pull audiences away from legacy media. Legacy media pushed audiences away with elitist tendencies, outright fabrications, close ties to intelligence agencies, obsessive “both sidesism”, and the prioritization of profit and Washington-approved respectability over objective reporting. This is not a new phenomenon, and it’s not the first time Americans have been dissatisfied with established newspapers and cable channels. The only difference is that in the 21st century, audiences have somewhere else to go.
While previously I thought there was still a place for legacy media that could relay unfolding developments to its readers, even this simple task has fallen by the wayside. Given the shoddy nature of its handling of recent events, I find myself wondering, “What is even the point of reading The New York Times?”
You Had One Job
Despite receiving my political coverage from independent outlets for most of my adult life, previously, I saw outlets such as The New York Times and its peers (Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, etc) as fulfilling a crucial role. While I trusted The Majority Report and National Review’s The Editors for a cross-aisle understanding of current events and the political horserace, I recognized they would never be able to provide the in-depth reporting that a credentialed, well-funded outlet like The New York Times could. Independent media rarely attends White House briefings, and they lack the international reporters who can cover breaking news through their global networks of correspondents and station chiefs. But more and more, even these once-important functions of The Times’ are being laundered through the corporate bullshit machine to the point readers are less-informed about political reality than they would be had they never logged on. Take the NYT’s coverage of the new White House Press Secretary as an example.
When Blonde Ex-Sorority President With A Cross On Her Neck #2189 was introduced as the Press Secretary for Donald Trump’s second administration, The New York Times described her debut as “Steely and Unflinching.”3
Their article glorifies Karoline Leavitt as a no-holds-barred fighter, attacking the traditional media and refusing to back down from the far-right politics her boss is known for. One could read the Times’s coverage and think, “Wow. This new press person runs a tight ship.” But that picture is very different from what happened in the briefing room.
On the very first day of her new job, Leavitt proved she was just as unserious as the rest of Trump’s sycophants. Not only did she not know if the administration was ending payments to Medicaid— which is something a press secretary should absolutely know — but Leavitt either straight up lied to the press or showed herself to be yet-another bootlicking fool. In a response to a question asking for clarity on which government spending programs were being cut in Elon Musk’s “cut everything that doesn’t benefit me” rampage, Leavitt insisted the Trump Administration was only combatting waste. She stated, “No more funding for the Green New Deal Scam, which has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.” Of course, the Green New Deal is a loose collection of policy proposals by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey. Neither house of Congress has passed it, so it has not cost Americans one dollar, let alone “tens of billions.” That’s something The New York Times should clarify for its readers.
At the very end of the above clip (4:19), Leavitt says the following:
“DOGE and OMB (Office of Management and Budget) found there was $50 million going out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money. That’s what this [funding] pause is focused on, being good stewards of tax dollars.”
President Trump repeated this claim not long after, adding that “Hamas was using the condoms to make bombs.”
Not only is there no evidence of this claim (the most recent report from USAID on contraception states $0 worth was sent to the entire Middle East4), but it appears the entire Trump team was talking about the wrong Gaza. According to the Health and Human Services grant database, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Mozambique has received $83 million in anti-AIDs and contraception funding since 2021. This organization operates in two provinces: Inhambane, and (you guessed it) Gaza.
To recap, Karoline Leavitt spent her first press conference either:
Lying about what her boss was doing, or
Talking about the wrong continent.
From a politically neutral, objective observer, Karoline Leavitt is bad at her job. That’s something the American public should know, not only so they can temper expectations on what to expect from her, but as an indicator of the capability of Donald Trump’s presidency. There are many words to describe this absurdity, but for some reason, The New York Times chose “steely.” And they wonder why they’re losing readers.
A similar dynamic appeared in the Times’ coverage of Trump’s tariff curfuffle with Canada and Mexico.
On the campaign trail, Trump positioned tariffs as his healthcare, childcare, and foreign policy. During a Q&A at the Economic Club of New York, he told a questioner that tariffs would bring in “so much money” they would pay for childcare.
Once in office, Trump threatened Mexico and Canada with tariffs, then backed down when Claudia Sheinbaum promised to put 10,000 troops on the U.S.-Mexico border (there are already 15,000 there) and Justin Trudeau found a random staffer to name fentanyl czar. The story of a President scrapping the backbone of his entire domestic and foreign policy agenda during the first week of his presidency in exchange for photo op is a massive story. Had a Democratic president tossed their campaign corporate tax plan for a photo with the Morgan Stanley CEO and a promise to “end inequality,” it would rightfully be a massive scandal covered on the front page. But when Trump did it, NYT went with this:5
Positioned as “Mr. Trump, master deal maker,” the article fawns over Trump as a genius who seldom shows his cards. The Times writes:
“The ambiguity over the details of Mr. Trump’s demands appears to be as much a part of his strategy as the threat of tariffs themselves. Leaving his demands something of a mystery allows him to decide when to end the negotiation.”
There is no “ambiguity” about Trump’s plan — he doesn’t have one. Trump said a bunch of bullshit on the campaign trail, but when he got into office and his capitalist owners told him tariffs on our three largest trading partners would tank the economy, he backed down. This undermines everything he promised Americans about funding healthcare and other domestic programs. Trump is eating the chess pieces and vomiting on the board while The New York Times reports he’s “keeping his opponent guessing in a game of 5D chess.” The story is not “Trump is keeping America’s allies on their toes,” it’s that Donald Trump sacrificed his entire economic plan two weeks into his administration.
While the erroneous instinct to make the rising tide of fascism more palpable for a paying readership is one thing, the Time’s loose abandonment of journalistic practices is another. Even when it has been proven to be factually wrong, the leading newspaper refuses to acknowledge its mistakes or course correct to do better in the future.
In December of 2023, The New York Times published its now-famous Screams Without Words piece, alleging sexual violence committed by Palestinian militants on October 7th attack. They claimed:
A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
As this was the first non-Israeli claim that mass-rape was a pre-determined weapon, the story quickly spread throughout the global media eco system. However, Screams Without Words was a fabrication.
When the NYT podcast “The Daily” prepared an episode on the story, the producers began to question the veracity of the reporting. According to internal leaks provided to The Intercept, the NYT Slack was rife with staffers’ criticism of the story, to the point the Times had to scrap the episode.6 The Times staffers’ concerns were soon validated. Closer investigation revealed the story’s descriptions of sexual assault came from ZAKKA, a hard-right Israeli medical group that spread lies about October 7th atrocities to support the Israeli genocide. (You might remember the “Forty decapitated babies” claim, which ZAKKA put out.) It was later learned the Times published ZAKKA’s accounts based only on their word and without photographic evidence. The extent to which The New York Times went to bolster public support for Israel’s genocide was fully exposed last month, when the Israeli prosecutor for crimes related to October 7th stated that her team still had not found credible allegations of sexual violence.
"In the end, we don’t have any [sexual assault] complainants. What was presented in the media compared to what will eventually come together will be entirely different. We approached women’s rights organizations and asked for cooperation. They told us that no one had approached them [with complaints].” - Moran Gaz, former head of the security cases division at the Southern District Prosecutor’s Office in Israel.
Even more troubling than the abandonment of verification was who NYT editors commissioned to write the story. One of the writers was Anat Schwartz, an Israeli food critic with no prior war coverage experience. It was quickly discovered Schwartz was openly discussing media manipulation to help the Israeli Army on Twitter, leading people to wonder why The New York Times was allowed propagandist food bloggers to shape its coverage.
Not only did The New York Times not retract the Screams Without Words story, but they defended it as "rigorously reported, sourced and edited.” If this is what they consider “rigorous” journalism, they have no right to be surprised when readers abandon them.
While I’m not a proponent of only consuming media from your ideological allies, and I’m highly critical of the idea independent media is inherently better than traditional platforms, I struggle to find a single reason to continue giving my attention to The New York Times. While no publication is immune from mistakes, the Times newsroom has shredded every last bit of credibility over the last few years. I’m sure the election and re-election of Donald Trump was a difficult thing for newspapers to objectively cover, but The Times doesn’t even seem to be trying. Based on its absurdly pro-Israel coverage of the “Israel-Hamas War” (I reject that framing, but that’s how NYT puts it), it’s clear its willing to sacrifice journalistic principles to meet its goals, whether they’re profit from sensationalist stories or serving the propaganda interests of the American Empire. For a while I could ignore all that in favor of the matter-of-fact reporting from White House press briefings and similar minute-by-minute coverage of dynamic events, but even in this regard, the NYT has shown it will do politicians’ jobs for them, sanding down the rough edges and misrepresenting events to help the second Trump administration portray itself as anything but a bunch of wannabe NewsMax hosts propped up by large donor capitalists and conservative lawyers. This problem certainly isn’t unique to The New York Times, but given it positions itself as the leading voice of truth, it’s the most egregious offender.
As I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, it’s important to restate that The New York Times did this to themselves. The internet didn’t “kill” legacy media outlets. They committed suicide by continuously prioritizing editorializing of basic facts and sensationalism over journalistic integrity. When the 21st century offered Americans different outlets to hear the news, they jumped at the chance.
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Thank you! In Solidarity — Joe
https://readlion.com/the-washington-post-has-reportedly-shed-nearly-90-of-digital-readership-in-only-4-years/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cnn-msnbc-ratings-plunge-half-203017149.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/karoline-leavitt-debut.html
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/29/2299985/-Trump-press-secretary-caught-in-ridiculous-lie-about-condoms
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/trump-canada-mexico.html
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/28/new-york-times-daily-podcast-camera/
Oh you’ve barely scratched the surface of their depravity. Remember when they described Trump’s open, explicit racism as a “long-held fascination with genetics”?
This is why when I received a gift subscription for my birthday this year I didn't even keep the email with the activation link. It's so unnecessarily difficult to cancel subscriptions from them (which I'd already done about a year prior) that there was no net positive for me to bother using it. I feel bad because they don't provide refunds for gift subscriptions for any reason but that's not enough to guilt me into reading propaganda. Hopefully they don't send more reminder emails to the gift giver than they do to the gift recipient.