Bear with me a bit while I provide a bit of a background to my relationship with the NYT. I grew up in the 1980s-1990s the offspring of an academic family (father a professor at a prominent university, mother a teacher). Naturally, as a center-left academic family, the NYT featured prominently on our breakfast table. I used to read the paper extensively, browsing the multiple sections in the Sunday Times. "Everyone" knew the NYT was the best paper in America, it spoke intelligently to an intelligent audience. While indisputably a liberal paper, you could still enjoy columnists with differing views and the journalism itself was top notch, and the various sections (Science, Architecture/Art, Food, Travel) were largely free of moralizing opinions.
Then, around 2000, while in college, I noticed something started to change at the NYT. It wasn't a sudden change but a gradual change in the tone of the paper's articles and columnists. While my parents were your liberal academics, my larger family came from a variety of places, small town rural America, Reagan/Bush suburban professionals, working class union Democrats and I like to think close exposure with this range of Americans kept me open minded and realistic about everyday America. And while we could disagree over policy, no one ever questioned that we were all Americans and no one questioned the validity of anyone else's life experience.
Except the NYT. Sometime around 2000, I started realizing the Times was treating the rest of America outside the liberal Upper West Side echelons (and those elsewhere who allied with that mindset) as somewhat odd and foreign. It was as if the Times' journalists were viewing the rest of America, and actually, even large parts of NYC itself (the old immigrant boroughs, Long Island and so forth) the way a biologist analyses strange new bacteria through a microscope lens. And it became clearer that the NYT's journalists and columnists didn't see themselves as the same Americans as the rest of the Americans they periodically wrote about. When they wrote about various American subjects, it was written less about fellow countrymen, but a different people entirely. The irony was that the NYT itself is the weird little bacteria in the middle of America but they took the opposite attitude!
When I realized that, it ended my love affair with the NYT. It wasn't overnight, it was a gradual process that took some years. Then, of course, we have seen in the last four years the NYT frankly and openly admit it no longer regards objectivity a principle in journalism. This disease, the isolation of elite journalism from everyday America, has spread quickly and extensively to all other major mainstream papers and TV/internet news. Matt has already covered this with his echo chamber article.
An aristocracy, as the elite Americans have become, is not inherently a bad thing. There has always been an element of an aristocracy in America, a consensus among the nation's elite. The problem emerges when the aristocracy is not just out of touch with the broader swathes of its fellow population, but disdainful of the same people. The men and women who control most of the nation's media and their allies in social media and higher education and increasingly now in the corporate world are extremely disdainful of much of America, disparage their way of thinking without even bothering to try to understand it, and use their institutions to be openly hostile. I don't think the American upper classes has ever been so openly hateful of half their countrymen.
A major reason behind MAGAism and the 74 million Trump voters is that they clearly saw this hatred towards them and this widespread attempt to shunt this America out of sight.
Thank God for Matt and Glenn. I need more of this kind of writing. It doesn’t always have to be perfect. It just has to remain skeptical. Of everyone and everything.
I was such an old school liberal for so long I didn’t even notice when things changed. That is until I had a conversation with my younger cousin and it ended with him calling me a fascist. Not because I’m a fascist, but because I don’t agree with him on everything, even we agree on almost everything, and it’s because these younger people have become puritans of another stripe. And like puritans of any stripe they will attack and destroy anyone who isn’t a fervent believer. And it’s to bad because half the fun of being a liberal is being the anti-Puritan, or at least it used to be. Now it is about conformity and the press has become just another tool of the hive mind.
Just one more thought. The essence of establishing trust in any relationship is being willing to admit your mistakes rather than ignore them or explain them away.
It's not so much that the media is continuously wrong, it's that they are, largely speaking, unwilling to admit their error...if an error is "admitted," it's typically through a stealth change made in the middle of the night.
Witness the Post's latest fiasco on the Harris story. They put the original back but never admitted that taking it down was wrong.
One of the best things Trump did was reveal the mainstream press to be a lot of idiot lemmings who were hellbent on one ideological outcome. They revealed the wizard behind the curtain to be a lot of foolish people. Once the curtain is pulled back, it can never be closed again. That’s why people are seeking out authentic voices on Substack, podcasts, Rumble, Telegram and other outlets.
The media could care less. They've decided to be more open about the fact that their obvious superior grasp of the facts of the situation should be the only thing heard but the uneducated.
The reality is that I personally have arrived at the place of needing to check primary sources before I'll accept anything reported in the media.
If there aren't any to check then I'll mark it down as unknown.
MicrofiIm is the answer. The NYT could not sneak back and erase things like the Kamala Harris story when thousands of libraries had microfilms of the NYT. I began my librarian career in charge of microfilm and no one ever messed with the backfiles.
What a great and essential piece. I've talked about this on multiple other Substack threads, apologies if it's a repeat for you:
Going back to the late 90s, I used to tell my friends who took in conservative media that outright lies weren't the problem. The problems are (A) the information that they will never share with you, because it runs counter to their narrative, that would make you *fully* informed and (B) when a story turns out to be bullshit, they simply stop talking about it, rather than walking it back, which leaves most consumers believing that the story was true.
At some point in late 2017, I decided to stop following the Russia story closely, planning to review it when the Mueller report came out. Everyone here knows how that turned out. Gross abuses by both the "deep state" and the media. I had mostly been getting news from the supposedly most dependable sources, so I began looking at other stories from the previous few years. Holy hell.
My own news ecosystem had the same problems that I used to point out in conservative media, and some that were worse. Now I have to try to walk every story, from any source, back to primary sources/documents as if I were an independent news organization.
I don't know what to do other than what I *am* doing, but most of my friends believe as much nonsense as conservatives have, and their news sources are essentially terrorizing them to boot. But it's impossible to convince most of them that this is happening; you will certainly be taken asa conspiracy theorist, or "alto right" or a Trump fan. I have a couple of friends who are at the same point as me, who were always curious and independent thinkers, but it's as if we have to have conversations in secret. It's a horrible situation and I feel sure that it will only get worse.
Having pushed the country to the brink of civil war, our benighted media are victorious. The cats have eaten the canary, courtesy of the January 6 mob, the horror of the sights and beatings, and 5 deaths. For the media, it validated the last four years of insult, and just in time. Hubris? Don Lemon has the gravitas of Soupy Sales.
No amount of reason or appeal to honor will change them. When Katie Couric tries to be cool, parroting the re-education camp meme, and when re-education camp pops up too often for comfort, we're dealing with conformity. Within a month or so, three colleagues have begun using Newspeak terms and pronouns (she/her or "they") under their signatures -- this is in a business context. No one remotely wonders, has asked, or cares what their sex or gender is. When dealing with the obnoxiously closed minded ("our values") the only option is to go around them. A beginning may be Matt regularly guest lecturing at Columbia School of Journalism. Seriously. I'd pay to see it.
The group that suffers is the middle, the normals looking for the exit sign, leaving both parties in droves. That's who the Post and Times and cable are ignoring and disdaining, not QAnon nutjobs, and that is where the market is, if only there were a product and a party. I am thrilled that Trumps's assaults on wolves and wild places, cruelty regulations, and air and water will be overturned. I am not thrilled that on other matters Biden appears to have been captured by the fringe. Regardless of our personal politics, the one-sided preening that now passes for news isn't tolerable. Free speech is free speech, especially when you don't like it.
I just paid $50 to make this comment (annual subscription) so I hope Matt reads it! Just got to say, please keep in the game Matt. There are so few like you.
Thanks Matt, really great. Personally, I haven't trusted the media since I was a kid and my father, who was stationed in China during WWII, and afterwards became a lawyer for a number of media people, told me how false the media was about international politics and that if I wanted to know the truth I should look to great political thriller fiction writers like Ross Thomas and Richard Condon. Later I spent a lot of time among media people. Most of them just wanted to say the “smart” thing and get to sit at the right table. It's funny how so many Americans think that because someone has a byline in the NYT, or can wear a suit well on Meet the Press, or have an NPR voice that they're telling the truth. I always tell such believers to spend a little real time with these people and they'd be far less impressed because many are psych medicated fruitcakes who wouldn't be able to hold a working class job or run a small business if their life depended on it - which is why they have contempt for the people who can. But twenty years ago there were more people doing real reporting -like Debbie Nathan's amazing expose of the daycare witch-hunt scandals in the late 80's/early 90s. And there was a lot more fiction that told the real truth. Fortunately, there are still a few and that's why you're important Matt, even when I disagree with you, which is a good thing.
I watched CBS before the inauguration began and one of the anchors repeatedly stated "Trump leaving the White House was like an exorcism!!!" Those were his exact words -- do these people know how stupid they sound?
When asked by one intrepid reporter why the Biden Plan to administer 100 million doses of covid vaccine in 100 days wasn't more ambitious, since the daily threshold to meet that goal was achieved while Trump was still the President, Biden's response was, "Gimme a break, man," while his press secretary admitted, "We're not mathematicians."
Is there anyone out there who doesn't hear that and go, "Oh no..."
As Samuel Clemens once famously quipped, "If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you are misinformed." Regardless of how much we agree or disagree with what we read/see in the media, if we care enough about a story in these days of social media and instant online news (Facebook anyone?), we should do our due diligence and fact check on our own time.
I love you Matt, I really do. But I take sincere umbrage with your comparison of the current US corporate media to that of the USSR. Brezhnev’s media was nowhere near this toxic, this biased, this absurd! Brezhnev’s Pravda, Izvestia & Vremya were closer to Edward R. Murrow than to today’s NY Times or CNN! Yes, Stalin’s fantasy press pairs nicely with Rachel Meadow & Chris Cuomo, but please don’t sully the reputation of Brezhnev’s press with these people. It’s just not right, not fair.
Bear with me a bit while I provide a bit of a background to my relationship with the NYT. I grew up in the 1980s-1990s the offspring of an academic family (father a professor at a prominent university, mother a teacher). Naturally, as a center-left academic family, the NYT featured prominently on our breakfast table. I used to read the paper extensively, browsing the multiple sections in the Sunday Times. "Everyone" knew the NYT was the best paper in America, it spoke intelligently to an intelligent audience. While indisputably a liberal paper, you could still enjoy columnists with differing views and the journalism itself was top notch, and the various sections (Science, Architecture/Art, Food, Travel) were largely free of moralizing opinions.
Then, around 2000, while in college, I noticed something started to change at the NYT. It wasn't a sudden change but a gradual change in the tone of the paper's articles and columnists. While my parents were your liberal academics, my larger family came from a variety of places, small town rural America, Reagan/Bush suburban professionals, working class union Democrats and I like to think close exposure with this range of Americans kept me open minded and realistic about everyday America. And while we could disagree over policy, no one ever questioned that we were all Americans and no one questioned the validity of anyone else's life experience.
Except the NYT. Sometime around 2000, I started realizing the Times was treating the rest of America outside the liberal Upper West Side echelons (and those elsewhere who allied with that mindset) as somewhat odd and foreign. It was as if the Times' journalists were viewing the rest of America, and actually, even large parts of NYC itself (the old immigrant boroughs, Long Island and so forth) the way a biologist analyses strange new bacteria through a microscope lens. And it became clearer that the NYT's journalists and columnists didn't see themselves as the same Americans as the rest of the Americans they periodically wrote about. When they wrote about various American subjects, it was written less about fellow countrymen, but a different people entirely. The irony was that the NYT itself is the weird little bacteria in the middle of America but they took the opposite attitude!
When I realized that, it ended my love affair with the NYT. It wasn't overnight, it was a gradual process that took some years. Then, of course, we have seen in the last four years the NYT frankly and openly admit it no longer regards objectivity a principle in journalism. This disease, the isolation of elite journalism from everyday America, has spread quickly and extensively to all other major mainstream papers and TV/internet news. Matt has already covered this with his echo chamber article.
An aristocracy, as the elite Americans have become, is not inherently a bad thing. There has always been an element of an aristocracy in America, a consensus among the nation's elite. The problem emerges when the aristocracy is not just out of touch with the broader swathes of its fellow population, but disdainful of the same people. The men and women who control most of the nation's media and their allies in social media and higher education and increasingly now in the corporate world are extremely disdainful of much of America, disparage their way of thinking without even bothering to try to understand it, and use their institutions to be openly hostile. I don't think the American upper classes has ever been so openly hateful of half their countrymen.
A major reason behind MAGAism and the 74 million Trump voters is that they clearly saw this hatred towards them and this widespread attempt to shunt this America out of sight.
Thank God for Matt and Glenn. I need more of this kind of writing. It doesn’t always have to be perfect. It just has to remain skeptical. Of everyone and everything.
I was such an old school liberal for so long I didn’t even notice when things changed. That is until I had a conversation with my younger cousin and it ended with him calling me a fascist. Not because I’m a fascist, but because I don’t agree with him on everything, even we agree on almost everything, and it’s because these younger people have become puritans of another stripe. And like puritans of any stripe they will attack and destroy anyone who isn’t a fervent believer. And it’s to bad because half the fun of being a liberal is being the anti-Puritan, or at least it used to be. Now it is about conformity and the press has become just another tool of the hive mind.
Sorry about that, hit the wrong button initially. Comments should be open now.
Just one more thought. The essence of establishing trust in any relationship is being willing to admit your mistakes rather than ignore them or explain them away.
It's not so much that the media is continuously wrong, it's that they are, largely speaking, unwilling to admit their error...if an error is "admitted," it's typically through a stealth change made in the middle of the night.
Witness the Post's latest fiasco on the Harris story. They put the original back but never admitted that taking it down was wrong.
And that's why there's no trust.
The mainstream corporate media can keep doubling down on what they're doing and I'll keep giving my $ to Taibbi, Greenwald & Weiss
One of the best things Trump did was reveal the mainstream press to be a lot of idiot lemmings who were hellbent on one ideological outcome. They revealed the wizard behind the curtain to be a lot of foolish people. Once the curtain is pulled back, it can never be closed again. That’s why people are seeking out authentic voices on Substack, podcasts, Rumble, Telegram and other outlets.
The media could care less. They've decided to be more open about the fact that their obvious superior grasp of the facts of the situation should be the only thing heard but the uneducated.
The reality is that I personally have arrived at the place of needing to check primary sources before I'll accept anything reported in the media.
If there aren't any to check then I'll mark it down as unknown.
MicrofiIm is the answer. The NYT could not sneak back and erase things like the Kamala Harris story when thousands of libraries had microfilms of the NYT. I began my librarian career in charge of microfilm and no one ever messed with the backfiles.
What a great and essential piece. I've talked about this on multiple other Substack threads, apologies if it's a repeat for you:
Going back to the late 90s, I used to tell my friends who took in conservative media that outright lies weren't the problem. The problems are (A) the information that they will never share with you, because it runs counter to their narrative, that would make you *fully* informed and (B) when a story turns out to be bullshit, they simply stop talking about it, rather than walking it back, which leaves most consumers believing that the story was true.
At some point in late 2017, I decided to stop following the Russia story closely, planning to review it when the Mueller report came out. Everyone here knows how that turned out. Gross abuses by both the "deep state" and the media. I had mostly been getting news from the supposedly most dependable sources, so I began looking at other stories from the previous few years. Holy hell.
My own news ecosystem had the same problems that I used to point out in conservative media, and some that were worse. Now I have to try to walk every story, from any source, back to primary sources/documents as if I were an independent news organization.
I don't know what to do other than what I *am* doing, but most of my friends believe as much nonsense as conservatives have, and their news sources are essentially terrorizing them to boot. But it's impossible to convince most of them that this is happening; you will certainly be taken asa conspiracy theorist, or "alto right" or a Trump fan. I have a couple of friends who are at the same point as me, who were always curious and independent thinkers, but it's as if we have to have conversations in secret. It's a horrible situation and I feel sure that it will only get worse.
Having pushed the country to the brink of civil war, our benighted media are victorious. The cats have eaten the canary, courtesy of the January 6 mob, the horror of the sights and beatings, and 5 deaths. For the media, it validated the last four years of insult, and just in time. Hubris? Don Lemon has the gravitas of Soupy Sales.
No amount of reason or appeal to honor will change them. When Katie Couric tries to be cool, parroting the re-education camp meme, and when re-education camp pops up too often for comfort, we're dealing with conformity. Within a month or so, three colleagues have begun using Newspeak terms and pronouns (she/her or "they") under their signatures -- this is in a business context. No one remotely wonders, has asked, or cares what their sex or gender is. When dealing with the obnoxiously closed minded ("our values") the only option is to go around them. A beginning may be Matt regularly guest lecturing at Columbia School of Journalism. Seriously. I'd pay to see it.
The group that suffers is the middle, the normals looking for the exit sign, leaving both parties in droves. That's who the Post and Times and cable are ignoring and disdaining, not QAnon nutjobs, and that is where the market is, if only there were a product and a party. I am thrilled that Trumps's assaults on wolves and wild places, cruelty regulations, and air and water will be overturned. I am not thrilled that on other matters Biden appears to have been captured by the fringe. Regardless of our personal politics, the one-sided preening that now passes for news isn't tolerable. Free speech is free speech, especially when you don't like it.
I just paid $50 to make this comment (annual subscription) so I hope Matt reads it! Just got to say, please keep in the game Matt. There are so few like you.
Thanks Matt, really great. Personally, I haven't trusted the media since I was a kid and my father, who was stationed in China during WWII, and afterwards became a lawyer for a number of media people, told me how false the media was about international politics and that if I wanted to know the truth I should look to great political thriller fiction writers like Ross Thomas and Richard Condon. Later I spent a lot of time among media people. Most of them just wanted to say the “smart” thing and get to sit at the right table. It's funny how so many Americans think that because someone has a byline in the NYT, or can wear a suit well on Meet the Press, or have an NPR voice that they're telling the truth. I always tell such believers to spend a little real time with these people and they'd be far less impressed because many are psych medicated fruitcakes who wouldn't be able to hold a working class job or run a small business if their life depended on it - which is why they have contempt for the people who can. But twenty years ago there were more people doing real reporting -like Debbie Nathan's amazing expose of the daycare witch-hunt scandals in the late 80's/early 90s. And there was a lot more fiction that told the real truth. Fortunately, there are still a few and that's why you're important Matt, even when I disagree with you, which is a good thing.
I watched CBS before the inauguration began and one of the anchors repeatedly stated "Trump leaving the White House was like an exorcism!!!" Those were his exact words -- do these people know how stupid they sound?
When asked by one intrepid reporter why the Biden Plan to administer 100 million doses of covid vaccine in 100 days wasn't more ambitious, since the daily threshold to meet that goal was achieved while Trump was still the President, Biden's response was, "Gimme a break, man," while his press secretary admitted, "We're not mathematicians."
Is there anyone out there who doesn't hear that and go, "Oh no..."
As Samuel Clemens once famously quipped, "If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you are misinformed." Regardless of how much we agree or disagree with what we read/see in the media, if we care enough about a story in these days of social media and instant online news (Facebook anyone?), we should do our due diligence and fact check on our own time.
I love you Matt, I really do. But I take sincere umbrage with your comparison of the current US corporate media to that of the USSR. Brezhnev’s media was nowhere near this toxic, this biased, this absurd! Brezhnev’s Pravda, Izvestia & Vremya were closer to Edward R. Murrow than to today’s NY Times or CNN! Yes, Stalin’s fantasy press pairs nicely with Rachel Meadow & Chris Cuomo, but please don’t sully the reputation of Brezhnev’s press with these people. It’s just not right, not fair.