"Liberal" Bias in the Media is Just Imperial Bias
The New York Times does not, and will never, question the superstructure of the U.S. empire.
There’s a coffeeshop near my work that gets a daily delivery of The New York Times and as such I have access to a publication that I wouldn’t otherwise have (though sometimes I have to wait because some old guy is hoarding all the pages while he tries the crossword, and sometimes certain clippings and pages are missing if it’s been scrounged before I could do the same). This access has afforded me, amongst other things, the same feeling I get when I tune in to NPR programming at any given time of day — the feeling of an impending aneurysm.
The New York Times is the most important newspaper in the U.S., and therefore also, unfortunately, in the world. The reasons for the paper’s continued prominence are many, most of which have little to do with the paper’s quality of reportage. It has remained a behemoth, bringing in billions of dollars of yearly revenue despite the precipitous decline in print-based advertising dollars, thanks to its large base of paying subscribers. Every other print-based journal has succumbed to the evisceration of their advertising revenue by social media and online classifieds, with local newspapers across the country all but vanishing, online periodicals shuttering every day, and even large outlets like The Washington Post slashing jobs and spending while getting by on life-support from the teats of billionaires (and this is how that funding model has worked out for them). The New York Times is one of the few places left that can throw money at the kind of long-form, deeply investigated journalism that doesn’t get done anymore because it simply isn’t profitable. By virtue of the paper’s global import (much of which is held up by its own self-aggrandizement), it has the ability to influence the thoughts and attitudes of a global class of wealthy, educated elites, and therefore also influence the lives of those who are controlled by that class (you and me). It is a self-referential journalistic Faraday cage, simultaneously determining and reflecting elite opinion and little else.
Every overarching critique that I can make of The New York Times I have already made at length in my examination of NPR’s news coverage here for Current Affairs, and in this critique I wrote of the mainstream coverage of the war in Ukraine (and for a withering, trenchant insider’s critique, see Chris Hedges’ takedown of the Times here). So here I will offer some condensed bullet points of those critiques. In addition to the foundational Propaganda Model critique made by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their classic work Manufacturing Consent (which everyone should read), I argue that the mainstream liberal press of today is constituted by these main biases:
A warped view of “impartiality” for their coverage, which effectively means that any view that does not comport with ruling-class ideology is not “impartial” and therefore not permitted. “The reigning corporate ideology has infected the Times as it has most other liberal institutions,” Hedges writes. “Because this ideology does not challenge the status quo it is defended by these editors as evidence of the paper’s impartiality, balance and neutrality.”
An all-encompassing deference to the Democratic Party, particularly in its more modern, anti-populist, neoliberal, Clinton-ite form, which has manifested itself most clearly and recently by the craven change in the tone of coverage on Gaza since Donald Trump took over the White House (it is war crimes when a Republican does it, a principled mistake when a Democrat does it). The examples of this deference are litany, and, relying on the flawed logic of the horseshoe theory, it is attended by the paper’s dripping disdain for any socio-political current, be it from the left or the right, which goes against the Democratic Party’s dictates (socialists and the alt-right alike get no love from the Times).
Both a physical and ideological proximity to centers of power (big government, big tech, big military, etc.), wherein reporters and editors and the paper’s owners are all drawn from the same ideological well of the ruling class. They’re on the same team. This limits the scope of an outlet’s news coverage and precludes a political vision that might challenge the dominant ideologies of those very power centers that they cover.
The above point feeds into this point: A culture of accreditation and professionalization. The overall trend in the liberal press has been to treat journalism, not as something that you do (and therefore something that anyone can engage in), but rather as something that you are. Elite outlets are increasingly staffed by those who come from elite institutions and have been given the proper certifications. The days of a scrappy, self-educated, dogged freelancer like Seymour Hersh landing themselves a prominent and influential staff position are gone. Now, you need a master’s degree from the Ivy League Columbia School of Journalism, a university which is expelling supporters of Palestine, which tells you all you need to know about what views are permitted in these elite papers staffed with these elite reporters drawn from these elite institutions.
An overweening self-importance: I don’t care who you are, what your political persuasion is, or what your media consumption habits are like — if someone tells you that they are a reporter for The New York Times, your ears are going to perk up. As Hedges, former Middle-East bureau chief for the Times, said about how his reporting experience changed once he could tell people that he wrote for the Times: “People return your calls.” The New York Times as an institution knows its clout very well, which means that it doesn’t need to be responsive to or offer any sense of respect whatsoever to those who have a bone to pick with it. It is totally isolated from consequence, from the rabble, even from its own employees (just ask Chris Hedges and more recently Paul Krugman). The paper can do what it wants because no one can stop it from being so casually disrespectful. The implications of this are profound. So cloistered, The New York Times has no reason to correct course or punish or apologize for any of the mistakes that it makes (see their lavishly produced, award-winning, and lurid podcast, Caliphate, which turned out to be based on a total hoax. Its reporter still works for the Times). As such, the paper has been a key partner in the propaganda machine of the United States government and its attendant three-letter agencies. For generations the paper has spread official lies about Cold War enemies (and new-Cold War enemies), the war in Vietnam, U.S.-backed death squads in Latin America, the invasion of Iraq, the surveillance of U.S. citizens, political inconveniencies, Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, the Hamas mass-rape hoax, and on and on and on, and the paper suffers zero professional consequences for any of these lies it helped promulgate. Matt Taibbi goes into great detail in his book Hate Inc., a modern complement of sorts to Manufacturing Consent, of what happens to the industry as a whole when it is totally isolated from consequences for getting things wrong. The bottom line: it’s bad for news coverage, bad for a well-informed citizenry, and bad for the industry writ large. As Freddie DeBoer, a contributor to the Times, writes: “Ordinarily, the galactic pomposity that permeates the Times building like tasteful essential oils … would be an easy price to pay. But in an industry full of people grasping for a lifeboat, such perceptions of status start to matter more and more. Their size and influence are distending an industry that’s already been pulled like taffy into an unhealthy shape.” The sense of status bestowed by the paper and the resulting competitiveness and careerism this engenders in its contributors reaches ridiculous heights, with Chris Hedges describing how some of his colleagues would vomit in the bathrooms at the Times’ offices every morning from the sheer stress and precarity. Hedges calls the Times “a fear-ridden and oppressive place to work” and its newsroom “like most corporate nerve centers, is a labyrinth of intrigue, gossip, back-biting, rumor, false piety, rampant ambition, betrayal and deception. Those who play this game well are repugnant. They are also usually the people who run the place.” Fun Times!
So those are the basic problems with the mainstream liberal press. Now to get more specific and talk about what spurred me to write about this topic in the first place. The bias at The New York Times that is the most consequential is the bias in favor of the U.S. empire. Two recent articles from the Times exemplify this bias.
First is their article on the Senate’s confirmation hearing for Trump’s C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe. It is demonstrative of the usual nonconfrontational, stenographic role that the mainstream press plays on behalf of power. In the hearing, the Times writes that Ratcliffe “promised he would make the C.I.A. less averse to risk and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president, ‘going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do.’” Ratcliffe also said that “the agency’s analysis would be objective, ‘never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgement or infect our products.’” And the Times leaves it at that.
Aside from Ratcliffe’s weird reference to “products” (I guess Ratcliffe views the C.I.A.’s criminal activities with the same framework a Fortune 500 CEO views his company’s assets, not as a public servant but as a profit maximizer), here again is the lie of objectivity given unquestioning credence by the Times. People like Ratcliffe, immoral scum that they are, can’t bother to acknowledge that their entire project — the mere existence of the C.I.A in and of itself (especially outside of wartime), and even the existence of a standing military — is itself an ideological position. If you think we should have a permanent intelligence agency, your worldview is one where spying on people is okay. Where influencing the actions of people in other sovereign states in order to secure your own parochial interests through propaganda and violence is proper and good. By treating the world in this paranoid style, you are creating a paranoid world. This whole rotten business is ideological. To say that you will collect intelligence and torture people and overthrow democratically elected governments and train right-wing death squads in counterinsurgency tactics and “do things no one else can do” and that you will do it all “objectively” is patently absurd. In response to this absurdity, the Times could simply point it out, as it has already broken its traditional stylebook to allow itself to call out when Trump says something that is plainly untrue. But the paper’s fealty to “impartiality” ensures that it will never push back against the stance that has always been bipartisan: love of the American empire.
For an example of how an article on these confirmation hearings could be more combative, while still remaining outside the realm of an editorial, an article by The Intercept titled “Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio Get a Pass on Suffering in Gaza” is a useful one. The author, Matt Sledge, criticizes Hegseth and Rubio directly, while also catching lawmakers in his crosshairs, neither of which the Times does in its coverage. Sledge writes: “Yet while the defense secretary exerts sway over U.S. relations with Israel, the topic barely came up Tuesday during the hearing for his would-be successor. Instead, Hegseth’s hearing was dominated by Democrats’ questions about his drinking habits, sexual assault allegations, and infidelities, and by friendlier questions from Republicans seeking to prop up his nomination.”
It’s simple. You call out the bipartisan absurdities.
Later in the Times article they write, “Under questioning from Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, Mr. Ratcliffe said he would push for reauthorization of the [FISA Section 702] provision. He argued that the statute had been reformed, and that critics needed to offer a way to replace the intelligence that would be lost should the program not be authorized.” For those who don’t know, the FISA law allows for intelligence agencies to both collect and surveil the international communications of U.S. citizens without the need for a warrant. The program has recently been found to be unconstitutional, and while many lawmakers claim that the program has been sufficiently reformed since its creation, it is still plainly a violation of the protections of the Fourth Amendment. In regards to FISA, the Times again uncritically allows Ratcliffe’s stance to go uncontested. In contrast, again, The Intercept takes the time to provide essential context about FISA, and even highlights the contradiction of Trump rhetorically opposing the “Deep State” while nevertheless choosing nominees for federal positions who reflexively support the continuation of FISA.
Again, this is pretty simple. You highlight the contradictions. But The New York Times can’t be bothered. In this way, the Times not only selects the topics that are fit for debate, it defines how that narrow selection of topics should even be discussed — with amoral decorum.
Moving to the next example, we find the Times’ recent coverage of Venezuela and its leftwing president Nicolás Maduro. Regardless of how you feel about Maduro’s government, or about the left in general, the Times consistently demonstrates its practically reflexive labelling of leftwing Latin American governments as undemocratic with apparently zero self-awareness about its hypocrisy in using such descriptors. Consider this story about the assassination of a former Venezuelan Army officer hiding in Chile who had tried to overthrow Maduro, “Venezuela’s autocratic leader” the Times writes in its first mention of president Maduro. The assassination, the Times says, “represents a dark escalation in Mr. Maduro’s efforts to crush any threats to his authoritarian rule.” And then in the next paragraph, the Times makes a comical reach that would make the C.I.A. proud: the assassination “suggests the Venezuelan leader has also adopted the tactics of his close ally, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, to reach into foreign nations to assassinate political rivals.” Never mind the absurd continuation of irrational Cold War hostilities, the Times could have made a much more proximal reach — the United States.
Every U.S. drone assassination that hit its intended target, never mind all the innocent civilians killed in those strikes, was an assassination of a political rival by the U.S. president. If you think that killing “terrorists” is non-political, let my lengthy article for Current Affairs dissuade you of that faulty theory. The Obama administration murdered a U.S. citizen who was never even accused of engaging in active hostilities against the U.S., and was therefore a political rival. Moreover, the U.S. allowed Pinochet’s Chile — with the help of C.I.A. asset Michael Townley — to assassinate the Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington D.C., killing both him and his young American assistant Ronni Moffitt. The U.S. bankrolls and gives diplomatic cover to Israel, a country which is positively addicted to assassinating political rivals abroad in Lebanon, the U.A.E., Iran, France, and elsewhere. Donald Trump assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, two countries which we are not at war with, and therefore he was a mere political rival. The U.S. has given lists of names of socialists and labor organizers to right-wing death squads to facilitate their assassinations, perhaps most brazenly in Indonesia where over one million people were murdered on suspicion of being godless communists, all watched over by the deathly eyes of the United States empire. I could go on and on and on in this regard. The examples are litany and not difficult to find. Knowing this history, to read propagandistic passages such as these from “the paper of record” is to guffaw with barely constrained rage at the coffeeshop table.
The Times has even seen fit to publish a recent opinion piece, carrying on a longstanding tradition at the paper, that openly calls for violently deposing Maduro. How do you think the Times would characterize a foreign newspaper that called for the overthrow of the U.S. president? Because Maduro is unquestionably authoritarian (The New York Times said so), any measures are permitted against him and his country.
Do you think there is a single instance in The New York Times’ news pages where they refer to the U.S. empire as autocratic? Where Joe Biden, who gave tens of billions of dollars to Israel with no strings attached to facilitate its ethnic cleansing of Palestine while overseeing the nationwide crushing of pro-Palestine student protests, is referred to as a tyrannical war criminal? Where Barack Obama, who assassinated a U.S. citizen and his son in two separate drone strikes without regard for due process or other basic constitutional protections, is referred to as a rogue despot? Where George W. Bush, who accelerated the imposition of total surveillance over our electronic communications and instituted a worldwide kidnapping and torture program, is referred to as a totalitarian dictator? Where Bill Clinton, who bombed a medicine factory and oversaw the expansion of draconian anti-domestic terrorism laws, is referred to as a violator of the rules-based international order? Where Ronald Reagan, who gave weapons and funding to right-wing death squads throughout Latin America that resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of people, is referred to as a fascist demagogue? Where all of these presidents, who imprisoned, sought to imprison, and even tortured whistleblowers that exposed their crimes, are described as a continuous descent into unmitigated authoritarianism? I promise, you don’t have to bother looking, the answer to all these questions is an emphatic no.
These are just two recent demonstrative examples from the Times, but I could pick up any given issue and turn to any given story and begin dissecting its imperial worldview. I would humbly suggest that if you read The New York Times and find nothing objectionable about its news coverage, your worldview is severely limited, dangerously so, and in desperate need of a dash of empathy.
Of course the liberal bias in mainstream media manifests in many other ways as well— emphasizing identity politics at the expense of class-based politics; adopting a sneering tone against the working-class who are viewed as “anti-intellectual” and “philistine” and “ignorant populists”; treating elite education and expertise with pure credulity — but it is the liberal media’s imperial bias which is its most consequential, the most far-reaching, the most deathly, greasing the gears that crush millions of lives in their teeth. When reporters take an empire at its word, they create their own separate reality, in no way representing real life, which nevertheless has the very real power to take that life away. Such reporters are complicit in the worst crimes against humanity. Not only should they be forever ashamed, they should, and could, be held accountable.
Wow! That was potent and refreshing. I live with a New York Times reader and it is exasperating. All her friends are fellow New York liberals whose politics reflect the blindness of a cult. Thank you!