On the case! pic.twitter.com/oOUttR6zge— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 4, 2016
At the risk of pushing this post into the painfully obvious and this thread into the death of a thousand cuts...
If this were simply an isolated instance of the New York Times failing to cover a major election story, it would just be an embarrassing oversight, but that's not what we have.
Among independent voices who follow the story closely, there is a growing consensus that the New York Times has a long-standing personal issue with Hillary Clinton driven by some combination of institutional culture, declining standards, and an overly close symbiotic relationship with well-placed but unreliable sources. Not coincidentally, the same charges were leveled during the paper's coverage of Whitewater, the Bush-Gore election, and the build-up to the Iraq war.
Obviously, the smart play on the part of the New York Times at this point would be to spend a little time playing up stories like this and the Trump/Mafia connection (as noted in Politico which – – God help me – – is actually passing the New York Times in quality of coverage here). The topics are extremely newsworthy and just a few articles would go along way toward undercutting the paper's critics. Unfortunately, the old gray lady has always been notably weak when it came to acknowledging criticism and now that the previously mentioned roar of cognitive dissonance has cranked up to 11, any kind of course correction will be particularly painful.
[note -- typos corrected and link added.]
No comments:
Post a Comment