Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

What is the point of the New York Times?

Picture credit: Getty

Earlier today, Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times and published a devastating letter of resignation on her website (also available here). There will be those who try to pretend that this is no big deal, or that it is just a storm in a journalistic tea-cup: they would be wrong.

For several generations now the New York Times has been seen as America’s ‘paper of record’. You might have appreciated some aspects of it more than others, and it may have been a little dull, but it was reliable; even necessary. A sort of journalistic fibre. Then at some stage in recent decades, it started to exemplify a rot which has wormed its way through much of the legacy media. Its reporting became unreliable and its comment pages monotone. The paper became increasingly unreadable. If there was one reason above all, it was that it became untrustworthy.

It stopped being a newspaper and became an organ of opinion for one set of political positions

It first passed through a stage of appearing to believe that its job was to stand equidistant between the facts and the public. Then – and never more so than in the era of its nemesis, Donald Trump – it just came out for a particular side on issue after issue. It stopped being a newspaper and became an organ of opinion for one set of political positions.

Some time ago I became aware that I no longer trusted it even on issues that I didn’t know about. Because on every issue I did know about, I discovered that the paper was spreading untruths and lies. Take the bizarre animus against Britain (which I have written about a number of times here). It appears that the NYT at some stage made a decision that Brexit had something to do with Trump, and since the NYT hated Trump, it must not just report negatively against Brexit Britain, but campaign against it. Its

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