NYTimes said itin their own words -and now apologizes for it:
http://nypost.com/2016/11/11/new-york-times-we-blew-it-on-trump/
Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. admitted the paper failed to appreciate Donald Trump’s appeal.
“After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?”
While insisting his staff had “reported on both candidates fairly,”
he also vowed that the paper would “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor.”
A
h, there’s the rub. Had the paper actually been fair to both candidates, it wouldn’t need to rededicate itself to honest reporting. And it wouldn’t have been totally blindsided by Trump’s victory.
Instead, because it demonized Trump from start to finish, it failed to realize he was onto something. And because
the paper decided that Trump’s supporters were a rabble of racist rednecks and homophobes, it didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the lives of the Americans who elected the new president.
Sulzberger’s letter alludes to this, promising that the paper will “striv[e] always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.”
But bad or sloppy journalism doesn’t fully capture the Times’ sins.
Not after it announced that it was breaking its rules of coverage because Trump didn’t deserve fairness.
As media columnist Jim Rutenberg put it in August, most Times reporters saw Trump “as an abnormal and potentially dangerous candidate” and thus couldn’t be even-handed.
That wasn’t one reporter talking — it was policy. The standards, developed over decades to force reporters and editors to be fair and to build public trust, were effectively eliminated as too restrictive for the Trump phenomenon.
The man responsible for that rash decision, top editor Dean Baquet, later said the Rutenberg piece “nailed” his thinking, and went on to insist that Trump “challenged our language” and that “He will have changed journalism.”
Baquet also said of the struggle for fairness, “I think that Trump has ended that struggle,” adding: “we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it’s false.”
Baquet was wrong. Trump indeed was challenging, but it was Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be broken without consequence.
After that, the floodgates opened, and virtually every so-called news article reflected a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton. Stories, photos, headlines, placement in the paper — all the tools were used to pick a president, the facts be damned.
Now the bill is coming due.
Shocked by Trump’s victory and mocked even by liberals for its bias, the paper is also apparently bleeding readers — and money.
I’ve gotten letters from people who say they canceled their Times subscriptions and, to judge from a cryptic line in a Thursday article, the problem is more than anecdotal.
Citing reader anger over election coverage, Rutenberg wrote, “Most ominously, it came in the form of canceled subscriptions.”
