Ashley Rindsberg highlights the liberal bias of the New York Times
Author of 'The Gray Lady Winked' tells Fox News Digital Americans have 'completely lost trust' in the New York Times.
The New York Times, long called America’s paper of record, has strayed too far to the left in the eyes of some critics, and the starkest example for them in recent memory is its championing of the controversial 1619 Project.
Led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project aims to "reframe" America’s history through the lens of slavery. It won a Pulitzer Prize but has been criticized for historical inaccuracies, with one Times columnist, Bret Stephens, calling it a "thesis in search of evidence." Hannah-Jones is outspokenly left-wing and has taken on a sharply defensive posture over any critiques of her work.
"Activism" is not traditionally a word associated with journalism, but for Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 project, they are one in the same. "All journalism is activism," she told CBS News last year.
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Newt Gingrich called the project a "propaganda campaign on race," and Washington Post columnist George Will said the project was "malicious" and "historically illiterate."
Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told Fox News Digital the 1619 Project reveals the New York Times "does not care about the truth," but rather "hires and promotes its reporters and editors on woke - race and gender - criteria rather than proven reporting excellence."
"It is the CNN of print journalism," Hanson continued, "and has done to its reputation what CNN did to its own -ruin it for short term political expediency."
1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones appearing on MSNBC host Chris Hayes' "Why Is This Happening?" live podcast. (Jeff Scheart/MSNBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
Hanson said the New York Times was always a liberal paper, but has now become "hardcore progressive."
"It no longer believes in duty to report factual events, and welcomes a free exchange of ideas, but has become a propaganda organ to achieve left-wing agendas by any means necessary," he said..
In the summer of 2020, the New York Times staff revolted over an opinion piece published in the paper by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., calling for the military to be used to quell the violent protests following the death of George Floyd.
Later that summer, columnist and opinion editor Bari Weiss resigned from the Times, releasing a scathing letter, saying, "a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else."
In her resignation letter, Weiss added that Twitter has become the paper’s "ultimate editor," with stories "chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions."
The New York Times building in Manhattan (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo)
Author of "The Gray Lady Winked" Ashley Rindsberg said the staff protest over Cotton’s essay led to a "ideological death-spiral" at the paper.
"The newsroom has kind of understood that it’s got this real power to shape the journalism they’re doing by protesting, by walking out when Tom Cotton has an oped published there," he said. "And the New York Times management is now chasing their staffers and whatever quickly-evolving ideologies and beliefs they have. So they’re kind of in this ideological death-spiral that is going to be hard to pull out of."
Rindsberg said one reason for the New York Times’ shift was that the paper is marketing itself to a "younger, more millennial woke audience" who is on the hard-left.
According to Pew Research in 2020, more than 90% of those who say they get most of their news from the New York Times identify as Democrats, and nearly two-thirds are under the age of 50.
Rindsberg said the shift of the New York Times toward more biased journalism has made many of the long-time readers question the objectivity of the paper.
"People have completely lost trust in the Times, and that’s not just people that are more conservative-minded," he said. "I know a lot of self-described lifelong New York Times readers who have canceled the subscriptions because they see what is naked activism. They see ideology plastered across the front page of the New York Times. And that is a real shift."
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Both Rindsberg and Hanson said the New York Times is not, and should not, be considered a paper of record because of this liberal bent.
"Half the country has not considered it the paper of record for some time, given its sins of commission and omission," Hanson said.
It is not just the New York Times that Americans have lost faith in. A 2021 Gallup survey showed that only 36% of Americans have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust in the media – the second-lowest level on record.
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"We’ve had this traditional notion of the mainstream media serving as the fourth estate," Rindsberg said. "And I think with them doing so much activism and being so in the tank for a certain type of ideology and a certain political party that I’m not sure we can make that claim anymore about the media for the most part."