Has The New York Times Become a Democratic Party Newspaper?

Townhall.com ^ | February 20, 2016 | John C. Goodman

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Is this question being asked 75 years too late? This ship sailed long ago.

[TBP]

No, the New York Times has not become a Democratic Party newspaper.

It always was one.

[Kaslin]

Actually not always. Here is a link from Freeper Popman to

To the New York Slimes Endorsements Through the Ages

[TBP]

I grew up in New York. The Times has been that way all my life, at least. The old Herald Tribune used to be just as liberal, but it was liberal Republican. The Trib would endorse Rockefeller, and the Times would endorse his Democrat opponent.

[JimRed]

BECOME? When was it NOT?

[Kaslin]

See Post# 43

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

When you think about it, there really is no unbiased journalism these days. (yes that includes Fox News). There really never has been an era of unbiased, straight down the middle journalism. However the populace has to rely on its own critical thinking abilities in order to figure out the truth and see past the hyperbole. For the most part, that hasn’t happened for decades.

My analysis is that

1. Nobody can know that they themselves are objective.

2. Anyone who cannot know that he himself is objective cannot know that anyone else is objective, either. Thus, joining a mutual admiration society is no proof of your own objectivity.

3. Journalists are notoriously inclined to what it pleases them to call “liberalism;” there has to be a reason for that, and IMHO it lies in the fact that journalists are critics, and critics (who are not doers) are infatuated with the idea that criticism is superior to performance. It is their livelihood.

4. This makes journalists - and other critics such as teachers, union leaders, and in short, “liberals” generally - hostile to T. Roosevelt’s formulation that

   It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

5. The precise opposite of the T.R. quote above is therefore congenial to journalists and other “liberals.” Namely,

   You did’t build that.

6. “the populace has to rely on its own critical thinking abilities in order to figure out the truth and see past the hyperbole. For the most part, that hasn’t happened for decades” is only too true. The socialist tendency of journalism is masked by the propaganda - the greatest propaganda campaign in American history, in terms of scope and persistence - to the effect that journalists are objective. Adam Smith warned that

   People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

   Do journalists “meet together” regularly? Most certainly they do, in the virtual sense. Of course they read each other’s publications, but that falls far short of saying the half of it. The wire services are nothing other than virtual meetings of journalists, not for “merriment and diversion,” but precisely over the conduct of business. This applies to each and every wire service, and if possible to the Associated Press with double emphasis. In the dolorous tendencies Adam Smith projected, the wire services do not compete with each other but are only mutually reinforcing.

7. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 has been applied to the Associated Press, in a 1945 case. But the AP was “too big to fail” in the sense that its mission - the conservation of scarce bandwidth in the dissemination of the news nationwide and worldwide - was seen to be of overriding importance. The modern reality, however, is that worldwide data transmission bandwidth is cheap, as the existence of the Internet itself indicates. Abuses such as the broadcast of mendaciously edited “911” tape of George Zimmerman’s call regarding Trayvon Martin without provoking withering scorn within wire service journalism - and the incessant credulousness toward the mendacious prosecution of the Duke Lacrosse 3, and innumerable other examples, cry out for a lawsuit which would demand the dissolution of the wire services.