Tag Archives: New York Times

An Open Letter to The New York Times


Dear The New York Times,

You are the one publication I fancied working for and never did, so these may be sour grapes. They’re most certainly fermented.

However, you did run blurbs from my reviews and covered my last day at USA Today fairly and accurately, so I consider us even.

But you’re dead wrong about Donald Trump’s presidential run, particularly the headline. Another Trump run is EXACTLY what America deserves.

What did you think you were watching the past six years? Downton Flabby? You have always flouted privilege as an option, from real estate to vegan food to theater tickets.

Yet you seem to think the privilege to choose extends to politics. It does not. Politics is like health: You make dumb choices early, you pay for them later. There’s no skirting consequence.

But all America has done in the 21st century is skirt, hem and haw. When it comes to inconvenient facts, the U.S. has proven itself Jim Crow backward. We’re competing with superpowers and oil barons over who can rot fastest.

Did you not watch the January 6th 2021 attempted overthrow of the United States government? It was in all the papers. Half our nation thought that was no big deal. How long does an American sit in the corner for trying to impose white make rule on everyone else in the room?

Under Trump, we became a nation of denial. Deny science. Deny equality.Deny data. Deny counting. Deny choice. Deny assistance.

He sprung a new dunce confederacy on the electorate (though Republicans gave him a mile head start), including Elon Musk, a Trump III mini-dunce. He made surgical masks look like political oppression. Dumbass stares at the sun: Do we even want to know how many yokels now do the same thing while driving?

Probably not. But do we deserve to have that idiot — who represents half of our union — on public display to reveal what we look like as a nation? Hell yes. We broke it, we bought it.

I didn’t deserve diabetes. But I did — and do — deserve every complication that comes from my mismanagement of it. Cleanup, Aisle Me. Try it sometime.

We’ve had political cancer for a while. The chemo may work, but we don’t get to decide when it’s over.

All The News That’s First To Print

I love the New York Times.

It is the talisman of American journalism, full stop. Slackwits will bray that it’s like any other liberal media outlet. Stockwits will caw against investment. And bitterwits will grumble that their product is so similar as to be indistinguishable from the New York Times. All bullshit.

I worked for its only ”competitor,” The Washington Post, and even we knew: The Times was where you wanted to go to, if not come from. Post reporters went to the Times, not the other way around. If the Times had a story cold, your only option was to confirm it. Because you were never going to upstage or outdo a Times story. The Times was truth. Is truth.

Which made it so heartbreaking to be a fully-engaged online subscriber for less than 24 hours.

I began the subscription quite by chance. I subscribe to the Times’ free Southern California newsletter, a curation of Times stories throughout the West. A story about covid mask safety lead me to the primary site, nytimes.com.

When I learned I had reached the limit of free stories, I considered subscription. I’ve always felt public information should be public, free and funded, like the public library system or PBS. But that’s another column. At $4 a month, the NYT was a screaming deal. And the industry buckles. So I took it.

When you subscribe to the New York Times online — as I’m guessing happens when you subscribe to any online news outlet — you’re greeted with an array of options on the news menu, all offered a la carte: sports stories; international reports; business pieces; cooking articles. My inbox was full enough, so I just clicked ”Breaking News.” I figured if Russia invaded Flint, I’d wanna have my day interrupted.

Within that day, I got an alert: The president had Covid. Ok, all systems working.

But later that day, I got another alert: Witnesses had been finalized for upcoming Jan. 6 hearings.

Uh oh.

At the end of the day, alert again: Pence staff called families to say tearful goodbyes, Jan. 6 witness testifies.

For one of the few times in my life, I went to bed with buyer’s remorse.

The next morning, this alert (always in red, always in caps) awaited me: President Biden’s Covid symptoms improved after his first full day of taking an antiviral drug, according to the White House physician.

Ok, now I’m pissed. That is not breaking news. Breaking news would have been if the president’s condition had worsened.

And I realized: The New York Times was still the talisman of journalism. But journalism itself had changed, and the Times was a dark reflection of that shift.

People who are not in the news business — and a frightening number who claim to be — have often misunderstood what journalism does. Journalism doesn’t cover reality. It covers exceptions to reality. That’s why it’s called news. It is something new and worth sharing. And the journalistic ethos states, quite chillingly: It’s not news if the school bus didn’t crash.

And in Biden’s case, the bus did not crash. At best, Biden’s Day One recovery was a day two story. It was a box score. But that urgent, breathless delivery of all news has made the conveyance actual news flaccid, impotent, forgettable. School Shooting! Trump Stupid! Abortion Overturned! Biden Aging! AMERICA WINS SHOUTING CONTEST!!!

The Times used to silently carry the big stick of truth. Now it screams it has a gun. That the Times can’t distinguish between breaking news and not-yet-reported news is heart-piercing and inevitably tied to journalism’s larger wayward drift:

We have forgotten the power of understatement.

So I canceled all emails. I’ll still keep the subscription; their stories remain unrivaled and the closest thing to that unattainable oxymoron of objective journalism. They’re still the truth.

But I’ll decide what breaks my day.

How The New York Times Ate Its Young

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Let’s get one thing straight, right out of the gate: I consider The New York Times the God of Journalism. Their numerous Pulitzers notwithstanding, their reporting of our world, writ large and small, is the standard by which all news outlets should aspire. Plus Trump hate them. So there’s that.

But the NYT did journalism a disservice this week with its co-endorsement of Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for Democratic presidential nominee.

The Times editorial board acknowledged in its editorial, which appears in Monday’s paper, that there is a fight going on for the soul of the Democratic Party—a struggle they suggest pits a “radical” vision for taking on President Trump and the challenges facing the nation against a “realist” one. On that metric, the NYT opined, Warren would be its more leftist vote, Klobuchar its centrist.

Excuse me? Are we ordering a fucking pizza? With that as a template, you could cook-to-order any candidate. Socialist leanings with conservative fiscal policy? Try Bernie Sanders! In the mood for Obama -.5? Heeeeeeere’s Joey B!Image result for democratic candidates

Already, the paper has been taken to the woodshed; many of the critics charge that the Times’ placing Klobuchar in the “Moderate” camp was inaccurate — thus plunging the paper’s very process into the kind of liberal branding that already freights the party’s hopes in 2020. Why board that overweight liner anyway? A gutsy, straightforward   endorsement would have avoided the dickering. And yeah, an editorial can be ballsy, and someone with balls can endorse a woman. Stop being such bitches.

The NYT call is troubling on two fronts. One, the other half of the job — the one the NYT forgot — in endorsing a candidate is to explain why the country needs said candidate. Do we need a centrist right now? Is a leftist the corrective steering? The Times is steeped in institutional political memory. To name a double ticket (Should voters check both boxes if they’re uncertain where they fall on the spectrum?) is to flush that collective knowledge down the crapper.

More troubling, this is how the Left eats its young in ravenous Wokeness. We are so afraid of being exclusive of any offendable reader/voter demographic we’ve forgotten how to take a stand. Be guided by an apolitical compass here, and stand behind your choice. But do we really doubt that this editorial didn’t suffer from the very same in-fighting that clearly compromised the process?

Leave the waffling to IHOP. In just a year, we’ll be offered a more binary choice. Hopefully, my esteemed colleagues, you will have chosen a path a more clear path, worthy of the fight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWtn4Kt05_Y