Deeds of the Divine

Just how biased is the NYT, and in what specific ways?

The White House press secretary recently called New York Times reporter Peter Baker a “left-wing stenographer” after he questioned Trump’s decision to bar AP for not using the term “Gulf of America.” The insult implied Baker was parroting liberal views. Namely, the view that it’s wrong to violate journalists’ First Amendment rights for not parroting MAGA views.

But the Trump administration’s attack on the media is nothing new. Not to this term, nor to this president. Nixon kept an “enemies list” that included journalists and ordered wiretaps on the reporters who covered the Watergate scandal, whereas John Adams made it illegal to criticize the government, leading to the arrest of Benjamin Franklin’s journalist grandson.

But the animosity towards journalists, and the New York Times in particular, has reached a fever pitch under Trump. His supporters, many of whom uncritically watched Fox News for years, have Jedi mind-tricked themselves into believing the Times is worse than Pravda. A friend who supports Trump recently told me, “They still have good journalists but The New York Times has become deep state propaganda.”

That opinion is not as rare as it should be.

To be sure, they’re not helping themselves with pieces titled “It Turns Out the ‘Deep State’ Is Actually Kind of Awesome.” But the Grey Lady still deserves more respect than it gets from the right, and I know a lot of my readers will disagree—which is precisely why I chose to write about it.

I’ll start by saying that I do agree with the first part of my friend’s remark. For all its flaws, the Times is still one of the best papers in the world—and the gravity of that reputation alone continues to attract the best and brightest. But it’s a massive organization with almost 6,000 employees, so naturally its staff runs the gamut from truth surgeons to fog machines and from bloodhounds to blind hacks.

You find the same pattern looking at its bureaus or even entire beats, because like any other major outlet, the Times excels at certain talents more than others. To simply dismiss the paper as fake news, propaganda, or merely shoddy journalism is no wiser than to take its reporting as gospel. Both perspectives commit the fallacy of the excluded middle, which divides the world into extremes of right and wrong, black and white, often to appease the individual’s need for certainty—and dislike of nuance.

We live in a world of excluded middles. Zelenskyy is a corrupt and thin-skinned politician waging a war of survival for his people, but in the landscape of American politics, he’s either a Slavic messiah or a degenerate dictator. Other examples abound. Support BLM or you’re racist. Burn the flag and you hate America. If Trump wins, the world is doomed. The Times is our noble paper of record or best as birdcage liner.

Many Americans quite understandably think this way because unless you regularly read four or more papers every morning, you’re unlikely to spot the patterns any more than you’d be able to name the scene-stealers and scenery-chewers in popular TV shows without regularly watching. That said, let me take a second to highlight the nuance of what our major papers get right and what they get wrong.

• The Wall Street Journal (474,000 subscribers) is unrivaled for economic, financial, and tech issues but they’re weak on science and foreign affairs.

• The New York Times (250,000) excels at international coverage and the arts but they too often rely on anonymous sources and speculative reporting.

• New York Post (122,000) is good at New York City coverage and sports but tends to be sensationalist.

• The Washington Post (111,000) is good on Congress, the White House, and federal agencies but has a history of prioritizing political “scoops” over accuracy.

• Los Angeles Times (79,000) has the best coverage of Hollywood, California, and immigration but avoids critical coverage of California’s political elites.

Whatever you think of these papers, you should at least read the beats in their masthead—or follow the journalists who cover those beats on X—meaning read WSJ for Wall Street, WaPo for Washington, the Post for New York, and L.A. Times for California. But NYT is the outlier. Read them for global news such as China updates.

Point being, it’s like navigating X. It’s wise to ignore most of it, but if you follow the right people, the experience can be enlightening.

And yet the “failing New York Times” talking point gets air time primarily because Trump supporters are in the habit of using it to delegitimize critics of their hero, and because the Grey Lady has a well-known leftist bias. But in all fairness, the accuracy of the claim does go deeper than that, though not deep enough to warrant the terms “deep state” or “propaganda.”

​Trump has consistently criticized mainstream media outlets, particularly the Times, accusing them of biased reporting and unfair treatment. And he’s right on both counts. Yes, I am aware that a 2019 study found no bias against Trump at the paper, but that study only looked at coverage from a single month.

Contrary to this, former Times executive editor Jill Abramson has said the paper became “unmistakably anti-Trump” and even suggested there was a financial incentive to publish negative stories about him, as it drove subscription growth. Additionally, an analysis by Columbia Journalism Review highlighted that the Times’ extensive coverage of Trump surpassed levels for any previous president.

But it must also be said that Trump does have a bad habit of labeling unfavorable coverage as “fake news,” something we historically expect from dictators of fourth-tier nation states, not the most powerful liberal democracy on earth.

Ashley Rindsberg on Media Malpractice

Anyway, about those deep-state claims.

Yes, the Times does have long-established institutional ties. No denying it. They’ve long been accused of operating in tandem with U.S. intelligence agencies and even maintained a relationship with the CIA, such as with Operation Mockingbird. In an earth-shattering Rolling Stone article published in 1977 titled “The CIA and the Media,” reporter Carl Bernstein exposed how more than 400 members of the U.S. press had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA, including New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Additionally, high-level government officials frequently move between national security roles and high-ranking positions at paper. There’s Wallace Turner, who was an assistant secretary in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Kennedy before becoming a Times bureau chief. You’ve also got Scott Malcomson, who went from senior positions at the UN and U.S. State Department to foreign editor for the Times magazine. Then there’s Richard Stengel, who served as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs under President Obama—after having worked as managing editor of Times magazine.

And these are just the top​-line examples.

Though I have seen no specific proof, I think we can reasonably assume these men helped shape narratives in way that aligned with state interests.

Beyond this, the New York Times has been criticized for advancing narratives that align with government objectives, especially regarding foreign policy. The most famous example is its support of the narrative of WMDs in Iraq, but you’ve also got the paper’s deference to U.S. intelligence claims about Russia, or its coverage of Julian Assange. In line with this, the paper also underreports or discredits information that challenges left-wing establishment narratives, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story or their heavily slanted, though slightly improved, reporting on trans issues.

Finally, the paper’s editorial choices consistently favor the national security state’s preferred policies, including NATO expansion, several “humanitarian” interventions, or even publishing op-eds by intelligence officials without pushing back on their claims.

But none of this equals “deep state propaganda,” which is a fairly low-resolution analysis of everything I just described.

Because in addition to all that, the Times also publishes some of the most groundbreaking investigative reports exposing government overreach, such as the Pentagon Papers, the NSA surveillance revelations, and war crimes committed by the U.S. military. They also frequently embarrass both Democratic and Republican administrations with their reporting—though admittedly more so Republicans—thus showing no singular loyalty to any “deep state.”

They’ve also reported extensively on CIA torture programs, drone strike failures, the failure of our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on.

And you may not know it, but they have surprisingly diverse editorial perspectives and host a range of opinions, including conservative and libertarian voices, and their columnists often criticize government policies, including interventionist foreign policy, mass surveillance, and criminal justice overreach.

Sure, the editorial board, which represents the official stance of the newspaper, generally aligns with liberal, internationalist, and institutionalist perspectives. But the op-ed section has maintained a mix of progressive, centrist, and conservative voices, though critics argue that even here what you get are establishment-friendly views rather than populist or nationalist conservatism.

Still, along with progressive and liberal voices like Paul Krugman on economics, Jamelle Bouie on race, or Michelle Goldberg on feminism, you’ve also got centrist voice such as Thomas Friedman on foreign policy, David Brooks, the neoconservative Bret Stephens, and Nicholas Kristof, the Catholic conservative Ross Douthat, and the former Nixon speechwriter William Safire.

In addition, guest contributors have included a startling range of perspective—from Bernie Sanders to Vladimir Putin.

You literally cannot do such things and reasonably be called “propaganda.” This is the exact opposite of propaganda. And unlike propaganda, they issue corrections and retractions when errors occur, demonstrating an adherence to journalistic integrity, even if they fail at times. And remember, they’re a huge organization so failures are to be expected—in addition, of course, to failures of actual bias.

That said, the departure of opinion editor James Bennet after the backlash to Senator Tom Cotton’s 2020 op-ed on military intervention in protests was correctly seen as evidence of a lack of tolerance for dissenting views, not to mention Bari Weiss’ decision to leave, noting the same concerns in her public resignation.

So is the Times biased? It depends on the issue, or more specifically, the reporter or editor in question. The bias of Bret Stephens is not the bias of board member Kathleen Kingsbury, who is accused of dismissing legitimate concerns around trans issues in her editing.

I don’t read the Times to learn about the world anymore. I read it for a well-reported story from the back of beyond. And actually, I rarely read it even for that. I just don’t read papers much anymore.

But for anyone who doesn’t already somehow know this, the main reason many Americans turned so sharply against the Times in recent years was either because they badly reported an issue that meant a lot to them—such as the trans issue, let’s say—or because they support Trump and he can’t stand the “failing New York Times.” And for the latter group, I’ll just say this: Trump has publicly expressed favor not toward those outlets and programs that are the best at what they do, report the facts accurately, explain complex developments well, or tell great stories, but simply for those that have praised him.

That’s it.

You really cannot avoid the comparison to authoritarianism here. Trump apparently sees the press not as the Fourth Estate, not as an essential part of a healthy democracy, and not as a means to inform and serve the public, but merely as an instrument for stroking his ego and telling him he’s right—even when he’s wrong.

He has praised the raw-meat-hurling morning show Fox & Friends as well as the dirt-stupid One American News Network. He also praised Newsmax—for their excellent reporting? No, because, like a petulant child, he switched teams when Fox News called Arizona for Biden. He praised Lou Dobbs, the host of Fox Business Network, because Dobbs consistently supported Trump’s policies. That is the simple pattern.

King Sargon of Akkad, who lived from 2334 to about 2279 BC, was the first ruler to use official scribes to record “history.” But he was also perhaps the first ruler to engage in what we might call “spin” by ensuring that inscriptions portrayed him as victorious, even after military losses. Records that didn’t praise him were destroyed.

The next great example is probably Emperor Augustus, who died in the year 14, and whose self-written “news report” titled Deeds of the Divine Augustus kept the citizens updated on his own greatness, and was posted across the empire. He rewarded writers like Livy for praising him and exiled poets like Ovid for spreading “fake news” about him. Napoleon and Stalin were no different in this regard.

And I think Trump’s conditional valuation of media outlets betrays an ancient but also primitive understanding of truth itself as a function of dominance rather than independent reality, but unlike the totalitarian worlds of Mesopotamia or Imperial Rome, the modern media ecosystem presents a more complex battleground.

The history of power is the history of truth held hostage, and the only thing you need to understand about all this is that the rules have hardly changed since. Whether inscribed on clay tablets or broadcast through digital networks, the battle has never really been between truth and lies, but between those who seek to control the narrative and those who resist becoming its servants.