The New York Times Building
Like it or not, the 2016 election cycle is in full swing. Numerous media outlets are well into covering the campaigns and candidates. These media organizations are also giving early clues as to the quality of their election coverage. If the last week is any indication, the New York Times has distinguished itself both for bias and inanity.
First, on Friday the Times published a hit piece on Marco Rubio and his wife that focused on — get this — traffic tickets. Rubio’s supporters quickly, and shrewdly, started a Twitter hashtag called #RubioCrimeSpree that mocked the New York Times with tweets such as “Marco Rubio once ripped a tag from a mattress” and “I heard Rubio once had 21 items in the express lane.” Now, we don’t mean to excuse unsafe driving by anybody. But delving into Marco Rubio’s driving record instead of his voting record or his lies about his family’s biography seems minor league.
Then, on Saturday, as if to make up for the Rubio piece, Times columnist Frank Bruni published an op-ed titled “Hillary the Tormentor.” Bruni’s piece attacked Bill and Hillary Clinton together (because apparently Hillary can’t stand for things on her own without Bill), saying “they’ve once again created all these ugly, obvious messses” for Democratic voters. However, the piece was woefully short on specifics. This is reminscent of the innuendo-filled 2006 Times hit piece about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage. The timing of that piece at the end of May the year before Hillary Clinton faced another election (for U.S. Senate) is eerily similar to that of Bruni’s latest piece. And all the while, Maureen Dowd has been hammering Bill and Hillary Clinton, and even their daughter Chelsea, often with catty, sex-related remarks, on the Times’ op-ed page for many years. It will take another column to try to discover the roots of the New York Times’ hatred of the Clintons.
While it’s true that the Op-Ed page by definition contains opinion, we expect the opinions of the New York Times columnists to be based in reality. That’s just not the case with Frank Bruni’s op-ed on the Clintons. In fact, Bruni’s piece was written just after Hillary Clinton had tormented the Republican presidential candidates by name on voting rights. Clinton has been running a sharp, progressive Democratic campaign thus far, promoting not just 20 days of early voting but also a higher minimum wage, as well as equal pay for women and immigration reform.
So why should we even care about the New York Times anymore? It lost gobs of credibility in the minds of many Americans with its stenographic, poorly sourced Iraq War cheerleading from Judith Miller. Perhaps it’s because the Times was once the paper of record in the U.S., and reputations can be slow to change. The Times is still considered influential among the Northeast media elite, and its credibility and reporting are better than that of, say, Rupert Murdoch‘s properties such as the New York Post and Fox News. But maybe having a major newspaper that sticks to credible reporting and good editorial judgment is now a dead business model. Maybe readers would rather be their own news editors, and cull the best information from blogs and social media. Either way, there is a limit to how long the New York Times can be influential as a newspaper when it publishes pieces that simply don’t qualify as real journalism.
Photo by sam chills, used under Creative Commons license. http://is.gd/ozdn5x
