NYTimes Launders Its Own Agency
After having scolded the President that he “should leave the race” that Democratic primary voters elected him to run.
And having ordered the Democratic Party to “speak the [NYT’s] plain truth to Biden,
And having ignored Trump’s own actions in the meanwhile (for example, NYT has no report yet on Viktor Orbán’s latest shenanigans, and they’ve only just reported on Trump’s attempts to disavow Project 2025, which they put in a both-sides frame and don’t cite NYT’s long focus on his Project 2025 aligned plans; Update, 10:09AM ET: NYT has now posted a cursory 7¶¶ 3-byline piece on Orbán.), NYT has now weighed in against Trump.
At least in its headline, the NYT doesn’t scold Trump. It doesn’t order the GOP to do anything.
It observes.
Once you click through to their actual op-ed, however, NYT does something else.
It launders agency it has been exercising all over its front page.
“The Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate,” the paper that has supplanted every other kind of news to frame that debate says.
“The debate is so intense,” NYT says, not because reporters have engaged in conspiracy theorizing, lied, and (as Nancy Pelosi said of NYT’s overreading of her attempt to be subtle, “ma[d]e stories up.”
After which, NYT has relabled as “analysis” and done significant massaging of their story — though not without labeling Biden “defiant” again.
No.
The debate is so intense because, NYT says, “a compelling Democratic alternative is the only thing that will prevent [Trump’s] return to power.”
Which is to suggest that Joe Biden’s historic success — the policy stuff that, at NYT, always takes the backseat to Biden’s age — is not compelling at all.
Meanwhile, rather than bossing the Republican Party around like NYT did Democrats, NYT wrings its journalistic hands: “It is a national tragedy that the Republicans have failed to have a similar debate,” like the one NYT has forced down Democrats’ throats.
Rather than scolding about what Trump “should” do or ordering what Republicans “must” do, NYT simply “urges” voters here.
This is the op-ed page. It’s where NYT is supposed to exercise the omniscient narrator they’ve sicced on a non-stop flood of Joe Biden stories.
But it would be really nice if elsewhere, off the op-ed page, NYT would focus on reporting, including on the guy they claim is unfit to lead.