Malice of The New York Times

Every morning I read the New York Times to absorb current worldly events, and every morning it’s only a matter of time before I encounter something that makes my head rock with exasperation. It could be the notoriously influential front page headline dripping with a westernised sanctimonious global order sentiment. It could be the dreaded ‘News Analysis’ with facts and opinions intertwined broadcasted as objective. Or if the leading literature is reasonably tolerable I inevitably wind up at the ‘Opinion’ section where out-of-touch pseudo-intellectualists blather into the void while purposefully drawing on divisively woke narratives.

The malice of The New York Times is rooted in its self-characterization of being a non-partisan voice of reason while deliberately advancing a status quoist left-of-centre world-view. The publication is a paradigm of Legacy Media that is based solely in crafting the narrative their audience is craving. And the key fault of The New York Times is convincing itself and its readers that their principal ideal is impartial, unbiased reporting- this isn’t true. Rather, it’s moralist aristocrats with a veneer of credibility attempting to speak on behalf of the masses in advancement of social liberalism and neoconservative values.  

Yesterday I was reading NYT’s coverage on the Ukraine-Russia conflict (which they cover religiously) and there was a piece on the Chief Justice of the Ukrainian Supreme Court being stripped of his position and detained for accepting a $2.7 million USD bribe. The article was practically hidden and contained an especially misleading line: “Corruption, and Ukraine’s long struggle against it…” This moronic and deceitful sentence structure expressly reveals NYT’s attempt to mask Ukrainian corruption and present Ukraine as a beacon of integrity and democracy (which it isn’t). A more accurate version would’ve read “Ukrainian politics, long plagued by corruption,” but this wouldn’t corroborate with their holier-than-thou portrayal of Ukraine. 

So I hold such irate opinions against The New York Times and yet I remain needlessly indentured to the publication. In part this is due to The New York Times providing readers (myself included) with the lure of applicable daily knowledge and high-mindedness that is an addictive and comforting security blanket. My resentment of indulging in the publication is cognitive dissonance expressing the longing for this blanket while knowing that any comfort offered is faulty and misguided. 

This security blanket of a singular news source is hazardous, especially if the source is held in sanctity. Currently in America this is prevalent and it’s led to the hyper-polarisation of markedly different realities. This creates a vicious cycle of the media spoon-feeding narratives to their target audience and the same audience depending on their preferred media to be spoon fed. The New York Times isn’t the only guilty party- all media is skewed- but its deceitful journalism has led liberals (just like conservatives) to become unrelentingly confident in their worldview. With no room to compromise, patrons of Fox News and The New York Times sit alone on divergent sinking ships, and both believe the other has caused the leak.