The mere fact that people prattle about the "corporate"
New York Times (as if all major newspapers weren't corporate) while giving the
New York Post a free pass suggests a deeper bias that is political in nature. Defaming liberals (such as those presumed to run the
NYT) has its source in the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society. The whole intimation that the
NYT has a higher place in the corporate echelon than, say, ABC or Clear Channel derives its cold-war resonance from the Birch Society's insane idea that Jewish liberals control the world.
The
NYT is just another newspaper. The main difference is that it publishes a disproportionate number of acclaimed and talented writers, particularly in
The New York Times Book Review. Practically every review of a competent novelist in the
NYTBR is written by another competent novelist. That beats the dungarees off the usual review for
The North Grundy Sun by some clueless opiner who knows how to grind old axes but not how to offer new insights.
Like every other national paper, this one has a corporate agenda which involves lying on a regular basis. Many of the people who write for it might be liberal, but the people who own it are not. Like other corporate owners, they make their agenda known. Which is why no one who wants to understand world events relies on this or any other standard U.S. paper to tell them the whole story.
You have to wonder why our friends are so invested in trashing the
NYT. They never go after the
New York Post, which has far worse writers, is ten times more evil in the corporate sense and has a noticeably more arrogant attitude about New York's place in the world. They never talk about the corporate stranglehold of Clear Channel, the owners of which
do lobby for their own politicians,
do stage astroturfed counter-demonstrations against spontaneous ones, and
are those zealous John Birch Society members, the Koch Brothers, who effected a massive countrywide takeover of local radio to further an anti-environmental agenda to do away with whatever laws cost them money and don't allow them to drill where they please.
Nor do you ever hear the people who hate the
NYT trashing their own states' corporate-manipulated newspapers, which are usually at least as bad. If these people were really interested in escaping corporate domination, they'd be getting their news about this country from sources outside it, where journalists and media owners don't have quite as much of a vested interest in making one side or the other of a U.S-specific issue look good.
They'd be too busy lamenting the decline of less screamingly biased news to care about the
NYT in particular. They'd be telling you how vile most news sources were instead of asserting that the
truly awful reporting comes from arrogant and pushy New Yorkers who are also elitists and keep trying to control the world (now what ethnic group does it sound like our friends are maligning)?
As to assertions that
The New York Times is only popular in New York and
doesn't publish important writers:
(Wikipedia)
List of Pulitzer Prizes won by writers for The New York Times (many of which were awarded in the past ten years)
Besides which, if you're going to hate the corporate slant which is supposedly unique to the
NYT but which cracks the whip in every other American mainstream news source you're likely to prefer, then you'd better hate the other 18 papers owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty, which include the
Florence Times Daily in
Alabama, the
International Herald Tribune in
France, and
The Boston Globe, the
West Boylston Banner and the
Worcester Telegram & Gazette in
guess where. While you're at it, you'd better hate About, Inc., the Boston Red Sox and the New England Sports Network, all of which are owned by the very same people.
No, the
NYT isn't the most accurate publication, but neither are most of the rest, and notice that no one has said a word about them.
Just admit it: You hate this paper not because
it's more biased than the others but because
you're more biased about
it than you are the others.