Comment by throwaway713
6 years ago
I have become increasingly frustrated with the NYT's reporting practices. They are very hypocritical about criticizing tech while continuing to advertise heavily on the same services they criticize to promote their journalism.
A lot of what they publish nowadays is often "technically correct" but misleading to the point of being dangerous. That, combined with the philosophy of the younger journalists working there to refuse having any contrasting opinions published (I say this as someone under 30), and it's clear that the NYT feeds off of bipartisan hatred and conflict in order to make money. It's astounding that the same practices they criticize others of they engage in themselves. The nation is becoming ever more deeply polarized, and I put much of the blame on the NYT and similar publications.
It's Fox News for psuedo-intellectuals. My mother is a subscriber so I read a bit and it is absolutely atrociously biased and blatantly misleading in a similar way to how Fox News operate. The main difference is NYT add a minor sheen of intellectual language over the top to try obfuscate it.
Do you have any links to articles you find particularly egregious?
Would you ask the same question about Fox News? It's a little redundant no?
2 replies →
The NYT should be seen as a tech company. The New York Times Company is a multibillion dollar multinational. One can argue that its monetisation has improved even as its audience has narrowed.
It’s not neutral. A direct competitor is not a neutral arbiter. $NYT is one of the hottest tech stocks this year.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-05-28/five-t...
> One that's doing phenomenally well is the New York Times itself. It's well known that many big tech companies (or at least their shares) are booming amid the Covid crisis. But so far this year, the NYT is doing better than names like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Of the tech megacaps, only Amazon is doing better. If it hasn't been clear before, it should be obvious to everyone now that the NYT is a tech company and a tech stock. It benefits from network effects and accelerating economies of scale like any other tech company. It's booming in the podcast space. It's got popular apps for cooking and games. It's even rolling out its own proprietary platform for online ad targeting next year, cutting off third-party players.
> the philosophy of the younger journalists working there to refuse having any contrasting opinions published
These are the same journalists who are coworkers with Bret Stephens, Bari Weiss, Ross Douthat, etc.?
Or, wait, are you referring to Bret Stephens himself? https://twitter.com/wajahatali/status/1268973742811684864
> NYT feeds off of bipartisan hatred and conflict in order to make money
This is how every newspaper that is reliant on ad views for revenue operates. You'll notice the ones that depend more on subscriptions, like Financial Times and WSJ, are noticeably less clickbaity or intentionally provocative.
Also, I'll go out on a limb and guess that you work at Facebook - aren't you guilty of the same thing? Sowing ideological division to increase "engagement"?
Edit: OP originally I said "I work at one of the companies that nyt constantly disparages," hence my last line. He edited that out after I posted my reply, so my comment now sounds snipey and out of place. I figure FB is a fair guess for the intersection of his remark and HN audience.