For decades, I have voted as an "unenrolled" voter who is registered, but not in a political party. But it doesn't take a party affiliation to have wondered what has happened to the political news coverage over the past several years at the New York Times.
I am old enough to remember when the Times was revered as the gold standard of journalism - impeccable sources and "just the facts" coverage. Of late, however, reaction to their political news coverage is instead puzzlement at how (or why) it was published.
This article in Salon.com asks the quiet part out loud. What is, indeed, happening at that formerly venerable institution?
I have spent a lot of my career fighting "isms" in my work and my writing. The ceaseless focus on Biden's age is as frustrating to me as any commentary or writing that focuses on characteristics that are part of a person's genetics, instead of their ideology, their accomplishments, or other work or actions that may be in the category of actual information.
What is happening at the Times matters to us all. This country has lost too many sources of local and regional news in the past 5 to 10 years. We must be able to rely on those state and national publications that we could always count on for the facts.
Speculation is the laziest form of journalism, and perhaps it is being driven by relentless cutting of media budgets. And now polls (often bad ones) have become a substitute for rigorous political coverage. We must all call this out when we see it. More than ever before, we need trusted media institutions to deliver information, not hypothesizing.
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