I am about to cancel my subscription to the New York Times, which has become a propaganda organ for the left. I know that most conservatives cancelled theirs years ago, but you gotta understand how emotionally wrenching this is for me. No, not because I spent 45 years teaching at Yale and living in New Haven, Connecticut, the Congressional district that has sent progressive caucus member Rosa DeLauro to Congress for the last 35 years, and by a comfortable 8 percent margin of victory in the last election. Yeah, she’s the one with the blue hair who had never heard of the Loper Bright Supreme Court case that took back the power of courts, rather than administrative agencies, to interpret ambiguous statutes.
No, my irrational affinity for what used to be called “The Good Gray Lady” goes back to my childhood. When I was in nursery school, we moved from Chicago, where my family went back generations, to a comparatively small town in southern Indiana. No New York Times for sale there. My Mother (along with two other inhabitants of Evansville) had theirs flown in every day on the morning plane from New York. It was Mom’s connection to “civilization,” as she saw it.
But no more. Today, the folks at the New York Times hate Donald Trump and Republicans in general so intensely that their biases routinely overcome their commitment to the old-fashioned journalistic ideal to cover both sides fairly. Trump Derangement Syndrome is particularly rampant among the Times’ headline writers. Their headlines rarely reflect the story’s content fairly, and headlines are all that many people read. Moreover, if one takes the time to go back and read the primary documents, the stories themselves often ignore Trump’s actual meaning and spin the story by placing the most unfavorable interpretation possible on his words. A good example is what Trump actually said about “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville. (RELATED: Bullet Points and Blind Spots)
To be sure, President Trump is partially to blame. He often speaks extemporaneously and uses figures of speech that are technically called hyperboles. For example, he once said at a campaign event that “Starting on Day 1, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.” Of course, he meant that reducing the rate of inflation was a high priority and that his administration would begin working to bring the rate of price increases down as soon as possible. Any sensible listener with even a rudimentary understanding of economics would understand that was what his words meant, particularly because he said “starting on” Day 1. But no, the New York Times chose to interpret his words literally and loudly proclaimed that the massive price increases caused by four years of reckless spending under Biden had not magically reversed on Trump’s first day in office: “President Trump pledged to lower costs on ‘Day 1’ as a candidate. His administration now acknowledges it will take more time.” (RELATED: The New York Times’s Resident Catastrophist Delivers Another Subscription to the End of the World)
This technique is one any trial lawyer would recognize: first exaggerate or misinterpret what the other side actually said, and then show why that misinterpretation isn’t true — sometimes called “beating a straw man” or “the strawman fallacy.” This technique goes back to the Greek sophists, and no trial judge that I know would allow it in his or her courtroom. The New York Times and other leftwing media have turned it into an art form. Note how in the passage quoted above, they put “Day 1” in quotation marks to give it credibility but conveniently omit the rest of the sentence, including the words “starting on,” thereby changing the meaning; partial quotes are usually a dead giveaway — that’s another fallacy sometimes called “quoting out of context.” (RELATED: Californicating Virginia: Democrats’ Misleading Appeal to ‘Fairness’)
I used to find it entertaining as a student of fallacies to read the Times every day just to identify their fallacies, biases, and distortions.
Lest they sue me, I am not claiming that the Times is lying outright; that would be potentially libelous; rather, I am pointing out their pervasive biases and distortions of clearly intended meanings.
Like the “hypothetical news” that posits something “might happen” and thereby creates indelible impressions in the brain, these distortions of the intended meaning nonetheless shape how we view events and people. The lasting impression is created in most readers’ minds that Trump is failing to combat inflation as he promised, even though his policies in his first year in office have brought down the rate of inflation significantly. Today the rate of inflation is 3.2 percent versus an average of 4.9 percent under Biden, and a high of 9.1 percent under Biden, the highest rate in four decades — but I bet you never saw that fact in the Times! (RELATED: What’s Worse Than Fake News?)
Today, Democrats and their supporters in the media are screaming about an “affordability crisis” under Trump, but not a peep about affordability during the higher rates of inflation under Biden. Republicans often say that the voters are smart and won’t fall for rhetorical tricks like these. I hope they are right, but I am not so sure.
The last straw for me was this article in the Times that appeared on May 4. Check it out and see how many biases, half-truths, and distortions you can find. Here’s a hint to get you started: under a big headline “Stocks Drop,” the Times cites a 0.3 percent decrease in Sunday’s stock futures, and then quietly confesses later that “The [S&P] index notched its fifth straight week of gains on Friday,” the last day of actual trading. And of course, no mention that stock market indexes have set over 50 new record highs under Trump.
Time to say goodbye to the no longer good, but still gray, New York Times.
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