Fmr NYT Editor Says Paper's Credibilty Damaged By Being 'Unmistakably Anti-Trump'

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Jan. 03, 2019

When you're in the propaganda business, you're not supposed to give the game away by blatantly taking one side.

The New York Times lost sight of this in the Trump-era and it's cost them their credibility, as former NY Times editor Jill Abramson reportedly explains in her new book, "Merchants of Truth."

From Fox News, "Former NY Times editor rips Trump coverage as biased":
A former executive editor of the New York Times says the paper’s news pages, the home of its straight-news coverage, have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.”

Jill Abramson, the veteran journalist who led the newspaper from 2011 to 2014, says the Times has a financial incentive to bash the president and that the imbalance is helping to erode its credibility.

In a soon-to-be published book, “Merchants of Truth,” that casts a skeptical eye on the news business, Abramson defends the Times in some ways but offers some harsh words for her successor, Dean Baquet. And Abramson, who was the paper’s only female executive editor until her firing, invoked Steve Bannon’s slam that in the Trump era the mainstream media have become the “opposition party.”

“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson writes, adding that she believes the same is true of the Washington Post. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”

What’s more, she says, citing legendary 20th century publisher Adolph Ochs, “the more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased. Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear or favor sounded like an impossible promise in such a polarized environment.”

Abramson describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” she writes.
Trump claims he is keeping the “failing” Times in business—an obvious exaggeration—but the former editor acknowledges a “Trump bump” that saw digital subscriptions during his first six months in office jump by 600,000, to more than 2 million.

“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.”
"Smear Merchants" is a more appropriate title.

Regardless, the reason the NY Times and every other major news publication -- without exception -- went all-in against Trump is because that's what their owners and their readers wanted them to do.

As Google and Facebook hadn't yet rigged the entire internet in their favor, hyper-partisan, far-left sites like Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox and Mic were simply taking all "their" traffic and making a killing. Since the rigging was put in place, those "new media" sites are all either downsizing or going bankrupt.



The Democratic Party tried to make a similar pivot after the election to try and win back the rural white voters they lost to Trump. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi dragged themselves out to small-town Berryville, Virginia and unveiled some Trump-like platform talking about cracking down on Chinese currency manipulation and other stuff directly lifted from Trump.



They called it "A Better Deal."

As the AP reported at the time:
The phrase played off the full title of the Democratic platform -- "A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future" -- which some have mockingly compared to the Papa John’s pizza slogan, "Better Ingredients, Better Pizza."
That lasted around two days as their base completely rejected it. Instead, they decided to go all-in on anti-white identity politics. It worked well enough for them in the midterms so they've already decided to do the same in 2020.


As Danielle Moodie-Mills told MSNBC host Chris Hayes in November, Democrats need to "stop pandering to the white working class" which is demographically becoming a minority because they're not "the future of this country."


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