Looks Like Conservatives Were Right About The NY Times All Along

But this time it's a Times insider unloading on the "newspaper of record."

Wishing you a year so bright, even the stars will be asking for sunglasses! Happy New Year to each and every one of you.

—Bernie Goldberg

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When I was a correspondent at CBS News I told a few colleagues that if the New York Times went on strike tomorrow morning we wouldn’t know what to put on the Evening News tomorrow night. The line got a few laughs, but it was no joke.

At CBS, and at the other networks, we got a lot of our story ideas right out of the Times — and not only from its news pages. When the Times took a position on its editorial page — almost always a liberal position — that gave us permission to slant our stories in that direction too.

The Times had influence — a lot of influence — on TV network news people. Almost all of my colleagues were liberal and so it wasn’t a stretch for them to believe what the Times told us. The slant at the Times wasn’t bias — at least not as they saw it — it was simply the truth. The Times was our Bible, it published the gospel, it had earned the title of “the newspaper of record.” At least that’s what a lot of my colleagues thought.

In 1996 I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about liberal bias in the mainstream media. Let’s just say I didn’t win the employee of the month award. Colleagues didn’t want to be in the same zip code as me fearing that higher ups at CBS News might think they actually agreed with me.

In 2000, I quit after 28 years at the network to write a book — it was called Bias, also about liberal bias in the media. It became the biggest non-fiction book in the country, hitting number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Conservatives loved it and liberals trashed it.

But now the charge that the New York Times is guilty of the very kind of bias conservatives had been yelling about for years, which was dismissed out of hand by liberal journalists — a charge that the Times blurs the line between hard news and opinion and is hostile to conservatives — now that charge is coming from someone on the inside. And not just any someone — but a major editor formerly employed by the Times.

In a 17,000 word essay in the British magazine the Economist, James Bennet, the Opinion editor at the Times who was forced out in 2020 (essentially given a choice to leave on his own or be fired), says that instead of embracing a variety of views, the Times shuts down views it doesn’t approve of — views, that is, coming from conservatives. The Times, Bennet writes, has “fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.”

The column — a cover story in the Economist — has received some coverage, but not a lot. I’m not surprised. Journalists like to look down everybody else’s throat and examine their shortcomings but don’t like it when someone — especially someone on the inside — looks down theirs. Trust me, I know of what I speak.

Bennet was forced out after he had the audacity to publish an op-ed column by Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who made a case for bringing in the U.S. military if local police needed help in ending urban riots over the murder of George Floyd.

What happened next is telling. Woke staffers at the Times led an in-house revolution.  They said the op-ed made them feel “unsafe.”

“The publisher [Arthur Sulzberger] called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history,” Bennet writes. “People were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting.”

Not long after that, Bennet was gone.

This is a paper that published an op-ed by a leader of the Taliban, a decision that Sulzberger was openly proud of. In his Economist essay, Bennet asks just the right question. “In what moral universe can it be a point of pride to publish a piece by an enemy who may have American blood on his hands, and a matter of shame to publish a piece by an American senator arguing for American troops to protect Americans?”

Bennet says the Times has lost its way, that the atmosphere at the paper was no longer simply liberal. “The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.”

He writes that “Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work ‘without fear or favour.” .That is not true of the institution today,” he writes – “it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise. As preoccupied as it is with the question of why so many Americans have lost trust in it, the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.”

The New York Times, Bennet believes, has become a publication put out by elites for elites. He writes that, “The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”

Bennet believes that journalists at the Times so despised President Trump that they played up stories that would hurt him and played down stories that would help him. If Trump believed something, the inclination at the Times was to not believe it.

Here’s what Bennet says about that: “The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.”

Reading Bennet’s analysis of what goes on at the most important newspaper on the planet, an expression comes to mind: Fish don’t know he’s wet. Maybe the Times reporters aren’t aware of their biases because bias had become the norm at the paper of record — just as water is the norm for fish.

Roger Ailes, who created Fox News, once told me that, “You can’t have a free country without a free press — but you can’t have a free country without a fair press either, not for long anyway.”

In his own way, I think, that’s essentially what James Bennet is telling us now, that journalism plays a vital role in our democracy, and that’s why the work journalists do has to be trusted. And that the once noble New York Times has squandered the trust it once had — and now is a publication put out by liberal and progressive journalists to satisfy liberal and progressives subscribers, and of course, to satisfy themselves.

That may be good for business, but it’s not good for journalism.

Arthur Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher, says Bennet is way off base. “I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he [Bennet] has constructed about The Times,” was his response to Bennet’s analysis. So it’s a safe bet that Bennet’s take-down of his former paper won’t have much influence on Sulzberger or the many woke journalists at the Times.

And so let’s end where we began: It Looks Like conservatives were right about the New York Times all along.