NYT hired Walter Duranty to cover up Stalin’s crimes, but their affiliation with communism didn’t start there.
Karl Marx himself was an international correspondent for one of the forebears of the NYT.
Marx wrote for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Greeley was a founder of the Republican Party and the Tribune its mouthpiece. It lasted into the ‘60s as the NY Herald Tribune, unrelated to the NY Times.