During the Trump boon years of media rage, Covid, and orchestrated fears, I commented publicly online to a NYT piece on Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. For years I had enjoyed commenting on editorials and with a strong track record of being rewarded with the gold banner NYT Pick for my opinions (it means little but it’s fun). Yet, on this day, something radical happened. The comment was taken down. I was perplexed, but soon realized it was removed for merely criticizing her as a candidate on policy and ideology. The monitor caved to ideologue readers, or the monitor didn’t agree.
It was the first internal ping for me as to what has happened at the New York Times. A wonderment was my first reaction. Had I changed? Or had the newspaper entered a transformative business policy that seeks a band of like-minded subscribers. This pervasive new ploy is to deliver ideology that readers like and strictly identify with. Once in place, the company sits and watches the profits roll in. I get it. Centrists like me can piss off. But I’m not leaving without dumping some of the hard facts I’ve experienced.
Fox News has become the business model for the NYT. Embracing this contradiction to their romantic 125-year-old catch line, All the News That’s Fit to Print, the Times would also have to crush dissent. There is an extreme intolerance for opposing points of view when presented in a a microscopic hair right of woke ideology. The staff are woke and young. They would revolt, as they have just a couple of years back when protesting an editorial opinion by Senator Tom Cotton, a sitting, democratically elected U.S. Senator. Who’s taking away freedom? These young rebels often write stories about women. Fair enough. The staff is overwhelmingly female. Yet portraying women as complete and perpetually helpless victims who bear no responsibility for anything in their lives, that is misogyny. It is an embarrassing infantilization of a gender that bears no resemblance to any of the self-respecting, extraordinarily smart women I know. The writers simultaneously push a ubiquitous anti-white male agenda in every section. Try finding a photograph of a white male scientist or broadly featured writer, artist or a man with expertise or a positive story. Movie stars and unavoidable white male cultural figures don’t count here, as the staff has little choice but to occasionally include them. For white men, despite being the majority in nearly every field, this demographic has pretty much been banned from the NYT. Inclusion for more than white males should be a priority. It gives fair access to everyone and introduces new perspectives. But when inclusion is used as the excuse to totally exclude white men, the honor of the movement collapses. Merit must come first, or everything will become propaganda. We each will erode trust in every institution of all varieties if we are ordered to say something is brilliant when it barely hits mediocrity. This has become a common experience.
The newspaper has dug into a deep trench of anti-capitalism, antisemitism, and anti-western dogma. I presume the young staff learned this from professors steeped in a hatred of America. They impart scare tactics with partial truths at the heart of every story. I like history. I know about history and I like to improve my knowledge of facts by listening to wiser people who know more than I. That sensible approach is no longer pervasive amongst young people. Theirs is a system of tribal warfare. Believe as I do or you will be shunned, eradicated or canceled. It’s what conspiracists do. They capitalize on collective anxiety and uncertainty, spread doubt with a thread of an obscure truth, then weave it all into a bigger narrative to win over weak minds. Even with the recent university protests, a topic with endless potential opinions, the Times focuses more heavily on an obscure single anti-Muslim incident. When the writers are confronted by an inescapable ugly truth by some of the protesters, they switch gears and begin a broadly worded opinion on the history of protests, as if this current one isn’t a more nuanced and uglier movement. They do anything to avoid a direct criticism against some of the behavior of the protesters and hate speech towards Jewish students. Despite journalism degrees, much of the recently hired staff at the Times also can’t write and have zero knowledge of history. They create their own narrative through what I suspect was a phalanx of their beloved masters of anti-western professors knowingly commingling social activism with active journalism.
Yet, it’s the owner of the NYT who is the architect of this stuff. Granting broad discretion to ideologically induced employees and readers within the power to approve what comments are published and which are banished is the hard evidence of caving to dark tactics of an augmented conditioning. It is however great for turning a once prestigious newspaper into a cultish newsletter. The seedling of censorship to grow subscriptions has grown into a giant sycamore tree casting shadows on merit, engagement and the love of factual reporting. The once vibrant cohesive banter over an op-ed in the Times has vanished. It’s been reduced to a cheerleading squad for one side. When a news source allows a brigade of young woke readers and newly minted Marxist employees fresh from university to judge and consummate termination to an opinion simply because they don’t like the opinion, it will of course trigger a revolt from a polar side.
This divide started on the left. Things became ugly fast. I and many other centrists are caught between the two. We exist without party, support or a place to go, that is until The Free Press came along. If you don’t believe me, check out the brilliant Bari Weiss on the topic.
I’ve recently had a few of my comments published, but for the past few years, hardly any got approved. I do wonder why my calling Warren a weak candidate with zero policy vision spreading a false ideology, would be cancelable? Or is it deemed “objectionable” based on a cadre of gatekeepers weaponizing their position to censor differing opinions that they manipulatively and broadly then call, “hateful”? If the majority likes her, then removal of an opinion that expresses no confidence in her is seen as a dangerous assault? The left despises the word mob. It’s a “trigger” and I understand why. It is behaving with absolute obedience to the ideology first as the litmus for who can join the discussion. This formula is the central component of every mob, including The Mob! Tarnish a code of honor and you pay with your life. Cancel culture is this except the victim withers away painfully. The real Mob has a faster more compassionate fix.
Isn’t the comments section designed for just that--comments? We each have people in public office whom we align with. From a basic very pure human perspective, the harsh monitoring of me and others who enjoy thoughtful debate is tragic and deeply anti-democratic. It’s a charge unfairly assigned to their bogeyman, their sick obsession, Trump every single day.
I wake each day to the NYT. I read obits first as I find them interesting. I then read a half dozen op-eds, I check out the New York section. Then I play Wordle, The Mini, Connections and Strands. I often read the cooking section. I once believed it employed the best writers and most interesting opinions. Even with a liberal slant, there had always been integrity to report the truth. This is no longer the case. Soon again it will be 100% Trump. Yet, no retractions, apologies or mention of the absolute lie of a Russian dossier or Russian collusion. That, as well as Doctor Fauci’s lie that the origins of Covid clearly came from a wet market, have chipped at the integrity of everyone in my party who repeats these lies. It is indecent and un-American to not correct oneself and state openly that you were wrong.
Many of the Times Op-Ed writers are atrociously unskilled. Some by-lines are three names, so I suppose they need “community” and support in writing a very simple and questionably valid opinion. Or maybe they just pine for former university comradery and want everyone to accommodate the transition to the stand-alone challenges of adult life that every other generation dealt with in a dignified way. They seem to be struggling. I often must reread a piece a couple of times as I’m three paragraphs into it and I am unclear of what they are talking about. This is a result of two things--killing merit of which a large swath of white males always rise to the top and the slaughtering of teaching journalistic integrity and ethics in higher education. It has been gutted for courses that glorify and conflate trained activism as journalism.
This is misleading and it is warping vulnerable young minds. To get rid of white men, develop a myriad of inclusive policies under the lie of democratic participation and “non-discriminatory” falsehoods. We are now firmly in a cultural apartheid; the majority is being ruled by and discriminated against by a small minority of radicalized SJW’s. White men voting for woke policies are not helping society and outright harming any chances for their own advancement. It reminds me of all the lectures to working class Republicans during the Obama years, the bewilderment on the left that I voted with, “Obamacare will help them more than anyone, why are they voting against their own interests?” I pose the same question to the young white men in the Northeast of now.
The radicalization of the newspaper is evident in three major ways: reporting crime, the photographs it publishes and who is given praise and positive attention and who is maligned at every chance. The new rules indicate an official policy: not too many white men, unless a white man commits a crime. Then, front page and with demands and a lot of speculation as to “hate crime” charges. The recent spate of young women being socked in the face by “men” in New York was really a violent criminally plotted hate crime. A few Black men have targeted young white women in vicious assaults. Except the media would not mention race. It’s obvious these are hate crimes, not only because of the targeted race, but also the targeted gender. Yet nothing like this is even allowed to be speculated about. Imagine if it had been white men targeting Black women. That would have been front page, federal hate charges, prison, and the Nightly National News. I’d have applauded their arrest.
My point isn’t to spark a debate about race and crime. A white criminal has zero sympathy from me and I’m happy to see him locked up just as fast as a Black one. But at the New York Times and all other mass media outlets, why the reluctance and obfuscation in reporting a fact when the suspect is Black? The Times and most other mainstream media sources give the description of violent male subjects as, “a man”. Gee, thanks for narrowing it down to four million potential suspects. Why is the media afraid of reporting facts? This until a “white gunman” is in the news. He is a white gunman for every paragraph of a 700-word report. It all feels like a deep cover for racist fears within white woke people who are uneasy with race. I’m not uneasy with race at all. I have deep and meaningful long friendships with many people of color. Does the New York Times believe most readers will develop negative and racists ideas of Black people simply because a Black man is reported for a crime? I ask, am I responsible for every white person who commits a violent act? No. Then why does the newspaper seem to apply a cover when there is a Black suspect? It becomes a high wire act of balance, omitted details and brevity. It’s disappointing and has a racist motivation behind it. May I also point out the predominance of white people setting the agenda here. A disturbing underlying question lurks; do they believe Black people are incapable of speaking for themselves? Where’s the true diversity and inclusion of others here?
No one benefits from dangerous denials. The obsession with race and gender being pushed in every situation before anything else is considered has become a weapon of the left. It has also dehumanized and divided black and white people and men, women and transgender people all of whom would mostly get along very well. This is despite the drumbeat that anyone with a differing opinion is hateful. The extremes are causing Democrats to shed voters as we burn the days toward judgment day in America. Donald Trump is beaming as he knows bogus lawsuits, brainwashed activists, protesters and political activists posing as legal stewards is helping him back to the oval office. Most Americans don’t agree with Democrats on the issues they prioritize loudly and angrily.
My tough love won’t go over well with everyone, but a party steeped in McCarthyism tactics is on the road to destruction. Change course while we still recognize the path forward. It begins with demanding that President Biden faces the scrutiny of the media and every tough question they should have. It should also be our collective demand that the media companies we get news from give it to us straight. Their job is to report facts, not exist as an arm of a candidate who is struggling to get reelected. That should be his job and problem. Truth will provide insight as to how every candidate is being received. A tragic repeat of 2016 for an entire year up until election day predicting that Hillary Clinton has a 93% chance of beating Trump was like an endless party. The lie was revealed and the hangover was brutal. Tactics that invest in wishful coherence damages public faith in the media. True for most, albeit the mob that drinks the Kool-Aid no questions asked. If we don’t correct this formula a prophecy from the right will take shape and we will once again have a President with a hardened thread of validity when he says, “fake news.” We are wrapping it up to Donald Trump with love.
This is exceptional. You set forth the beliefs that so many of us are thinking but keep silent for fear of potential cancellation. Let's hope that merit will once again prevail in a culture that has devalued it. Very well done!
Your post resonates with me, a young white man who has become increasingly disenfranchised by the left. The broader issue as you alluded to lies with the notion of how our news gets delivered to us. Many outlets have devolved into echo chambers where the loudest and most radical often trumpet above the rest and any potential dissonance is ushered away. Uri Berliner’s piece about the new NPR echos much of what you said. Race and gender is inextricably woven into many of these stories with conscious or unconscious emphasis being placed to drive certain narratives. Its is an obvious fact, but one people don’t want to hear. To anyone reading this I encourage the broad intake of many sources before opinion is formed. The lagging attention spans, headline only, radical appeasing stories do no good for the majority of decent Americans.