The New York Times is a right-wing newsletter, with recipes

Trash newspaper does trash thing

Here is a New York Times headline earlier this week:

The Times article, by Benjamin Mullin, doesn’t get around to mentioning even a single example of criticism of NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s tweets until the fifteenth (15th) paragraph,¹ when it tells readers:

Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, called attention to many of Ms. Maher’s posts on X and shared a response from Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, who had responded to one of Ms. Maher’s posts that Mr. Rufo highlighted, saying, “This person is a crazy racist!”

“If NPR wants to truly be National Public Radio, it can’t pander to the furthest-left elements in the United States,” Mr. Rufo said in an interview. “To do so, NPR should part ways with Katherine Maher.”

Yep, Christopher Rufo.

You saw that coming a mile away, didn’t you?

I should note at this point that the blockquote above — the Elon Musk quote Rufo solicited, and the Rufo quote the Times solicited from Rufo — constitute one hundred percent (100%) of the examples of criticism of NPR’s CEO’s tweets contained in the New York Times article headlined “NPR C.E.O. Faces Criticism Over Tweets Supporting Progressive Causes.” That’s it. Two quotes, zero paraphrases. And one of the quotes didn’t even exist before the Times began “reporting” this story; the Times itself brought the quote into existence.

This is absolute trash.

A mildly discerning reader can tell it is a trash article even without knowing who Rufo and Musk are. Some Guy tweeting about NPR’s CEO, followed by Some Other Guy tweeting that the CEO is a racist, followed by the Times calling the first Guy up and getting a quote from him — that isn’t a story. That isn’t even the notes for a story. That isn’t even the idea for the notes for a story. It’s lazy and dumb and a completely transparent effort by a reporter and a news company to piggyback their own agenda into print with just the tiniest shred of pretext. It’s basically just a gigantic middle finger to Times readers.

Ah, but we do know who Rufo and Musk are: They are propagandists and racists. Not that the Times article mentioned this; that would have undermined the whole ridiculous thing.

If you’re going to base an entire article on Elon Musk calling NPR’s CEO a racist, as the Times did, you have to give readers some context to assess Musk’s credibility on such matters. The Times provides none; it describes him simply (and weirdly, given that it quoting a tweet² he posted on Twitter,³ which he owns) as “Tesla’s chief executive.”

What kind of context would be helpful to readers in assessing Musk’s characterization of NPR’s CEO? Well, the fact that Musk spends more or less all his time these days peddling various racist lies should be pretty high on the list. Though the New York Times has politely ignored Musk’s racist “great replacement” propaganda,⁴ the paper is well aware of Musk’s bigotry:

Yet the Times omitted any hint of Musk’s own history of bigotry from an article whose very existence rested on treating as newsworthy Musk’s description of someone else as a racist. This is simply not honest behavior.

And self-described propagandist Christopher Rufo, the inspiration for this New York Times article and so many others? A search of the New York Times website for items published in the past year mentioning Christopher Rufo yields 39 hits. By comparison, Secretary of Health & Human Services Xavier Becerra has been mentioned 19 times; Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm 27 times, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines 30 times, and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack 11 times.

So clearly the New York Times thinks Christopher Rufo is pretty important: It mentions him more often than Biden cabinet secretaries, and it bases entire articles on him posting a few tweets. And yet the Times describes Rufo only as “a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.” I’ve previously written at length about the cozy relationship between admitted propagandist Christopher Rufo and the New York Times, so I won’t belabor the point here. Suffice to say, the Times’ description of Rufo is inadequate to the point of dishonesty.

By now you’re probably wondering what was supposed to be so shocking about Maher’s tweets. The Times reports:

The posts, published on the social media platform Twitter, which is now called X, were written before she was named chief executive of NPR in January. They resurfaced this week after an essay by an NPR staff member who argued that the broadcaster’s leaders had allowed liberal bias to taint its coverage.

“Also, Donald Trump is a racist,” read one of Ms. Maher’s posts in 2018, which has since been deleted.

Tweeting that Donald Trump is a racist is hardly a shocking demonstration of bias. Trump, after all, is quite racist! And The New York Times knows Trump is quite racist. Here, take a look at this recent New York Times headline:

So, the New York Times knows that Donald Trump has a “long history of racist attacks” and yet it pretends that a news executive tweeting “Donald Trump is a racist”⁵ is a newsworthy example of bias. This is simply not honest behavior.

Put all of this together, and we have a New York Times article announcing that NPR’s CEO “faces criticism over tweets supporting progressive causes” that 1) is based entirely on Christopher Rufo, who the Times knows but does not tell readers is a dishonest propagandist, and Elon Musk, who the Times knows but does not tell readers regularly peddles racist tropes and 2) provided as an example of the CEO’s supposedly-biased tweets one that merely said a true thing that the New York Times itself has regularly reported.

Obviously, the Times article is not really about NPR’s CEO posting inappropriate tweets. So what is it really about? One clue is that the Times has published three articles in the past three days — all three written by Mullen, all three mentioning Rufo — based on conservative allegations of liberal bias at NPR.

Sound familiar? It should: This is the same playbook the Times, Rufo, and Elise Stefanik ran against Harvard last winter.

That’s because the New York Times is an active and eager participant in a right-wing culture war intended to demonize and destroy any institutions that might provide the slightest bit of resistance to Trumpist authoritarianism.⁶

Plus they publish recipes and Wordle.

I’ll conclude the same way I concluded my piece about The New York Times & Christopher Rufo back in January:⁷

There’s an endless supply of right-wing grifters and con artists like Rufo. He isn’t really the problem; he’s fungible. The problem is that whenever a new huckster on then Right emerges, the New York Times falls all over itself to amplify his lies. They did precisely the same thing with James O’Keefe almost 15 years ago.

At some point, when the same news company seems to keep falling for transparent bullshit, we’re the suckers if we don’t conclude that they’re just doing what they want to do. And we’re helping them get away with it: The Times’ doesn’t much care if liberals think the Times is easily manipulated by right-wing liars — they’d much prefer that to liberals recognizing that the Times purposefully helps peddle right-wing lies. The former merely leads to exasperation with the Times and frustration that right-wing propagandists are so effective; the latter would lead to cancelled subscriptions.

1. Though the Times’ lede does note that NPR’s CEO is the subject of “online criticism” — but, really, who isn’t?

2. I will never stop calling them Tweets. We don’t have to go along with Elon’s dumb BS.

3. You don’t have to refer to Twitter by Elon’s dumb new name for it, either.

4. In the news section, that is. The (excellent) Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has addressed it in his newsletter.

5. If you’re about to object that there is a difference between a person having a “long history of racist attacks” and “being racist,” just stop: You’ll look ridiculous.

6. Sidebar: I don’t have any particular interest in defending either Harvard — of which I am a frequent and vocal critic due to its tendency to do things like bestowing prestigious fellowships on MAGA fascists like Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer — or NPR — long, and justifiably, derided as “Nice Polite Republicans” for its tendency to dress right-leaning political content up in moderate-liberal-coded language and tone — but I do have interest in exposing the malicious intent behind the right-wing campaign against them.

7. Retweets are not endorsements, but: