The New York Times is one of the newspapers of record for the United States. However, it’s history of running stories with poor sourcing, insufficient evidence, and finding journalists with conflicts of interest undermines it’s credibility when reporting on international issues and matters of foreign policy.
Late last year, the NYT ran a story titled ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7. Recently, outlets like The Intercept, Jacobin, Democracy Now! , Mondoweiss, and others have revealed the implicit and explicit bias against Palestine that’s apparent both in the aforementioned NYT story and in the NYT’s reporting at large. By obfuscating poor sources, running stories without evidence, and using an ex-IDF officer with no journalism experience as the author, the NYT demonstrates their disregard for common journalistic practice. This has led to inaccurate and demonstrably false reporting on critical issues in today’s world, which has been used to justify the lack of American pressure against Israel to the American public.
This journalistic malpractice is not unusual from the NYT. One of the keystone stories since the turn of the century was the NYT’s reporting on Iraq’s pursuit of WMDs: U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS, Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say, Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert. These reports were later revealed to be false, and the NYT later apologized, but not before the reporting was used as justification to launch the War on Iraq, directly leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and indirectly causing millions of death while also destabilizing the region for decades.
These landmark stories have had a massive influence on US foreign policy, but they’re founded on lies. While stories published in the NYT do accurately reflect foreign policy aims of the US government, they are not founded in fact. The NYT uses lies to drum up public support for otherwise unpopular foreign policy decisions. In most places, we call that “government propaganda.”
I think reading and understanding propaganda is an important element of media literacy, and so I’m not calling for the ban of NYT articles in this community. However, I am calling for an honest discussion on media literacy and it’s relation to the New York Times.
Topically, CNN did an article on that whole New York Times scandal, and they kept saying how there’s definitely a lot of evidence for that mass rape story. They just wish the NYT would report it better. And then they linked back to their own piece and The Guardian’s copy-paste job of the same hoax the NYT made up. 🤡
I’m not American and I almost never read the Times, so I don’t have first hand experience. But I hear the same rhetoric about outlets here in Canada.
My take is that yes, outlets can have bias on certain issues, but that doesn’t mean we should write them off completely. Trust in media is at an all time low, journalism is struggling to survive. There’s no media outlet in the world that doesn’t make the kinds of mistakes that you outline here. The key is how do they respond to them after the fact. Do they issue corrections? How quickly? Where do they put them?
Some of your ‘evidence’ also doesn’t seem like journalistic malpractice. For example, are they obfuscating poor sources, or not revealing an anonymous source? The latter is not malpractice. The former doesn’t sound bad either… Who decides if a source is poor? Maybe the source didn’t have much to contribute so that’s why there wasn’t much detail on their background. I’m not arguing that you’re wrong, just that as an outside observer that point doesn’t seem very bad.
Anyway, I do think it’s important to be aware of any biases in the media we consume, so conversations like this are important. But my fear is that if the conclusion is to wholesale stop trusting the media anytime they make a mistake or a bias is revealed (I.e all media outlets), we’re going to be even more fucked than we already are.
After the fact, it’s being revealed that their “sources” are consistently wrong and consistently in line with US foreign policy objectives.
You can say it’s a coincidence, but…
“Consistently” and “in-these-specific-cases” are different things.
These are some of the most important and impactful stories since 2000. If the NYT can’t keep their journalism robust for these, what does it say about everything else?
Oh wait, we already know: “Palestinian family collides with bullet discharged from Israeli weapon”
Nobody and no system should be expected to be perfect all the time, I would anticipate some mistakes over a course of decades.
Have you checked for any times they were critical of US foreign policy within the same timeframe?
These mistakes led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. How much more genocide apologism do you want to do?
I don’t think the invasion of Iraq can be blamed on the NYT. I think the Bush administration and Al Qaeda get the credit for that one.
However much is necessary to arrive at the truth.
You think the NYT played no role in drumming up public support for an otherwise incredibly unpopular foreign policy decision? Here’s a report by FAIR: https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its-iraq-war-shame/
Regarding the WMD thing, was it proven the Times was aware of the mistakes and published anyway? Or were they also deceived by the government like everyone else?
Not everyone fell for the lies. It’s a re-writing of history to suggest that everyone was all aboard with the war in Iraq. That war was preceded by the largest protests ever to occur up until that point. I personally recall Hans Blix, the UN official responsible for weapons inspections in Iraq at that time, repeatedly telling us that there was no evidence of such weapons programs. The New York Times should presumably be at least as questioning as my, at the time, 18 year old self. Particularly since I turned out to be right.
