How can anyone take the New York Times seriously anymore as an objective source of commentary, reporting and analysis?
Here is a hilarious section from today’s editorial celebrating the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Matal v. Tam as a victory for free speech:
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the law violates a “bedrock First Amendment principle: Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.” That’s the right call. The First Amendment bars the government from discriminating among speakers based on their viewpoints. In this case, the Trademark Office did that by blocking only registrations for trademarks it determined to have negative connotations. …The decision is likely to help the Washington Redskins, who lost their trademark protections in 2014 after years of complaints from Native American groups. At the time, this page supported the Trademark Office’s decision, and we still regard the Redskins name as offensive. Based on this case, however, we’ve since reconsidered our underlying position.
Really? When did the Times reconsider that “underlying position”? It reconsidered it only when the Supreme Court made it crystal clear that the government’s attempt to bully the Redskins into changing their name was a neon-bright, obvious First Amendment breach that any non-partisanship-addled person of moderate intelligence should be able to discern, thus constituting an embarrassment for a renowned First Amendment-protected entity—the Times—that couldn’t discern it, or that didn’t have the integrity to oppose its ideological allies by stating the inconvenient truth.
The Times endorsed the underlying position that the government could dictate what was “acceptable” speech because Harry Reid’s Democrats and the Obama Administration were doing the dictating on behalf of a core Democratic Party constituency and the progressives that constitute the Times’s readership.
What a cynical, biased, dishonest, corrupt and untrustworthy news source the New York Times has become.
Ethics Alarms 
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/2016-election-demise-journalistic-standards/
The New York Times has been reliably liberal since at least 1960. The last time it endorsed a Republican for President was Dwight D. Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson in 1956, and it’s endorsed the straight Democratic ticket since then, including George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984, both of whom went on to get BURIED, political lightweights like Michael Dukakis, and bumblers like Jimmy Carter and John Kerry. It’s consistently pushed liberal positions since then, on Vietnam, on the Cold War, on every social issue.
It’s contradicted itself more than a few times depending on who was in and out of power, including lambasting the Republican Senate for shooting down the Garland nomination while reporting quite favorably on Chuck Schumer’s speech that recommended accepting no further nominations from GWB in the last two years of his presidency. It’s been pretty consistently against American military action, starting with Pinch Sulzberger’s dumb response that “I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country,” although it’s gone somewhat quiet during Clinton’s wag-the-dog adventures in the Balkans and Obama’s lead-from-behind action in Libya. It’s also bent over backwards to argue for Bill Clinton even after his adultery with Monica Lewinsky.
It only lost the last scrap of credibility last year, when it traded any vestige of objectivity for a “Hillary for President” button, and lost, but it had been headed that way for a long, long time. No one should see it as anything other than a full-on liberal rag now. I automatically discount its articles when I see where they came from, because I know where the writers are coming from. I don’t trust them, I don’t trust it, and I will NEVER trust either again as long as I live.
heh. Living in Texas and starting to pay attention in the early ’80s, I never trusted them They hated America, Texas, Southerners, and poor whites even then, so they were not my cup of tea
Jack, what could the New York Times have written to convince you that their change of position on this matter was genuine, rather than cynical?
“Mark Levin is right, we ARE the Slimes!”
“We have fired every journalist and editor who has written anything about the GOP or Trump in the past two years. We are looking for more objective journalists, but our usual sources have no qualified applicants. We are reaching out to China and Malaysia in hopes of finding objective employees.
Well, as a threshold matter, it could have reconsidered its opinion before the unanimous decision, like, say, after the oral argument. It had more than a year. The editorial linked to its original approval of the effort to take the right of a football team’s owner to name his own team away from him. Not to it’s “reconsideration,” though. Dan Abrams is 100% right: if this had been a 5-4 split, the Times wouldn’t have reconsidered.
It could have also specified what was wrong with its original position.
I see.
I still think the headline here is unfair. The Times never implied that they “didn’t mean” their original position; only that they have since changed it. You’re right that they could have been more forceful and persuasive in explaining why they’ve reconsidered.
The question is going to be: Have they really reconsidered? Remember that The Times, like every other organisation, is made up of individuals, and the entity that is “The Times” holds no positions and has no thoughts independent of the people that operate it. What I think will be telling is the future writings of the authors that penned the pieces surrounding this issue. Was their reconsideration a convenient fiction for PR, or a genuinely held position? Ask me the next time the Redskins are doing well close to the end of a season.
I guess they were made to “evolve.”
I think this is one of the few times I agree with you Chris. I imagine they had to write this with a little bit of egg on their face or else they would have just ignored it.
They have had egg on their faces since they wrote the original endorsement of a manifestly illegal ruling. They couldn’t “ignore it.” People like me are keeping score.
“Didn’t mean it” is my headline is tongue in cheek, which should be obvious. Like when kids say “they didn’t mean it” after they were caught doing something wrong. Of course they meant it. They would be still saying it, too, if the SCOTUS decisions hadn’t made their position look as foolsih as it was.
Look: I’m a lawyer. I know my Constitution. I don’t like the name. I detest Dan Snyder. But you could have hit me over the head with a frying pan repeatedly and I would have been able to tell you or anyone that the trademark decision was politically motivated bullshit and wouldn’t stand.
Why wasn’t the Times able to do this? Because they are biased, are progressive hacks, and have no integrity. And they still are, and still don’t.
I think when someone errs, but not the kind of error that causes harm and requires an apology, but an error in judgment, if they do recognize their error and supposedly change their mind, one key step, which is analogous to an apology for harmful conduct, is to explain how they weighed their value system before, how they weigh their value system now, and how their previous evaluation system was not appropriate.
That demonstration would seem to go a long way to demonstrating a genuine change of mind. Lacking that, we can only assume they really haven’t changed their mind but are engaging in mere expediency fully prepared to completely change their mind back.
Very well-reasoned.
Thanks.
And come to think of it, I think an apology for harmful conduct is actually just a specific application of the abstract formula I tried to define.
“We are now recruiting to hire friends of Donald Trump in Russia to write the most prominent articles in this newspaper. We recognize that for the best product to serve the American public, even journalism in America now must be outsourced to competent and competitive foreign producers.”
I like mine better, but this is funny too.
I like yours better, too. Thanks for the inspiration.
I know this requires a ton of speculation, but what do you think the Times’ reaction would have been if it had been narrow 5-3 with the iconic liberal justices is the minority, or 4-4 on a straight ideological breakdown (Kennedy included in the conservative)?
There is no doubt in my mind that a single dissent would have been enough for the Times to stick to its guns. None.
Maybe if it were the right Justice. I can’t imagine a Roberts/Alito/Thomas dissent would have inspired them. A Ginsburg dissent probably would have made them think twice. Fortunately, for all their flaws, Ginsburg and the “liberal/progressive” justices remain fairly staunch defenders of the freedom of speech, with the obvious exception of Citizens United.
Jacks right. A single dissent would have been enough for them to hold on.
I doubt the NYT would have changed its position had it been a 5-4 decision with an impassioned Kagan dissent. A unanimous decision has a certain power to make even reliably partisan people re-calibrate their positions.
At least they know the bruising they would get to continue that particular narrative.
“A unanimous decision has a certain power to make even reliably partisan people re-calibrate their positions.”
Given this country’s culture, and given the apparent culture of the NY Times, I will believe that only when I see evidence of it.
What I mean is, the Times has not re-calibrated. Nor will it, ever.
It has merely re-denied. Look for doubling-down in three, two, one…
They’re all whores. Go after Trump and all the Republicans because they can get away with it. When it comes to SCOTUS, they have no option but to recant their previous position. Alert to all the anti-Trump-at-all-costs group: doesn’t this show just one example of the NYT and other media outlets that they can’t be trusted, that they print what they like, and only when they are smashed by the highest court in the country will they come up with a pathetic, transparent excuse for their previous position? I know that all newspapers (and electronic media) have their own bent politically, but this example is beyond the pale. Interesting that that the NYT is so ego-centric that they honestly think we are stupid enough to believe them.