The New York Times is full of “brown liquid”

On Saturday, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven million Americans^[1] participated in protests against their authoritarian government that were unprecedented in American history. By mid-day on Sunday, the front page of the New York Times website contained not a single news article about the protests.

As the great journalist and media critic James Fallows observed on Bluesky, the Times' Page-A23 treatment of the No Kings protests was a stark contrast to its front-page coverage of a much smaller gathering of conservatives just last month:

A few days ago many of us would have expected the New York Times to under-cover the No Kings protests relative to its coverage of much smaller right-wing gatherings. That's the kind of thing the paper does routinely. What I bet none of us could have predicted was the New York Times downplaying the president of the United States posting a video of himself dropping shit on the American people.

I guess I should explain, though I'd really rather not. Saturday evening, after days of insisting he wasn't bothered by the massive groundswell of opposition to his infantile and autocratic regime, Donald Trump posted to his social media website an extremely graphic video, apparently created with AI, of himself wearing a crown and piloting a jet labeled "King Trump" and using it to drop a bunch of excrement on the American people. Nope, he's definitely not bothered at all.

So here's how the New York Times covered Trump's poo-flinging:

Brown liquid? What, like chocolate milk? No, it was excrement. Obviously.

Journalist Mark Jacob compiled several examples of news companies ignoring or downplaying the extremism of Trump's video, noting: "The fact that so few news outlets have written about Trump's disgusting video 12 hours later shows how much the media have normalized Trump’s insanity."

Now, this stupid video isn't the most important thing in the world. Sure, it demonstrates Donald Trump to be a cruel and vengeful jackass with both the intellect and the temperament of that kid you knew in fifth grade who sat in the back of class pulling the wings off of flies. Then again, what doesn't?

But the news media's coverage (or lack thereof) of Trump's video demonstrates not only their normalization of Trump's insanity, as Jacob put it, but their dishonesty as well. The New York Times knows damn well what the "brown liquid" in Trump's video was. It was not subtle, as either visual or metaphor. By pretending there was some ambiguity about what Trump was dropping, the Times lied to its readers. If you cannot trust the New York Times to be honest about the president of the United States posting a depiction of himself dropping a load of literal shit on the American people, you can never trust the New York Times to fully detail Trump's misdeeds. This is not a complex tax proposal about which it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions. This is a video of Donald Trump shitting on America, posted by Donald Trump. There is no uncertainty here, except that invented by the New York Times for the purposes of soft-peddling the man's cruelty and the dangerously incomplete deck of cards with which he is playing.

One of the most common defenses people inevitably offer for bad coverage by big media companies is that they're just giving the people what they want -- they cover things that get clicks, and don't cover things that don't. This would be a lousy defense even if it was true, as journalism should be about covering the important, not merely the popular. But it isn't really true, either, and the New York Times' coverage of this weekend's events demonstrates that. I'm pretty sure there's an audience for high-quality coverage of mass demonstrations that draw millions of Americans to protest their unpopular president. And, for better or worse, there's definitely an internet audience for "President Posts Video Of Himself Shitting On American People."

We all know this is true:

And we should all understand what it says about the nation's biggest news companies.