This week, the New York Times experienced an uprising in its ranks and among its readers. The paper was denounced by its own staff and liberal pundits called for the entire editorial staff to be canned. Why? Because The New York Times actually reported news that was deemed harmful to the Democrats, specifically Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The newspaper took the additional step of publishing a cringing explanation of why it reported the news that Mamdani lied on his Columbia application in claiming to be black.For liberals, it was an utter nightmare. For a party still defined by identity politics, Mamdani’s false claim over his race left many uncertain about how to react.The left has always maintained a high degree of tolerance for false claims by its own leaders, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren claiming to be a native American to Sen. Richard Blumenthal claiming to have served in the Vietnam War.
The problem is when a news eco-chamber for many readers is shattered by an errant outbreak of journalism. Many Times readers live within a hermetically sealed news silo, relying on MSNBC for cable, The New York Times for print, and BlueSky for social media. You can literally go all day without being exposed to an opposing view or fact. Then suddenly this happens.
The result is often anger. It is the same response many in higher education have to “triggering” views being expressed on campus by conservative or libertarian speakers.
The fact is that the Mamdani story was obvious news—and confirmed by the candidate himself. Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his 2009 Columbia University application, according to the New York Times.
Some accused him of being a fraud while others suggested he was trying to abuse affirmative action.
The Times reported, adding:
Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, said he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather “an American who was born in Africa.” He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process. (He was not accepted at Columbia.)
Other candidates, like Mayor Eric Adams, went after Mamdani, and the matter has now become an issue in the mayoral election.
The Times readers were outraged to the point that the paper published a lengthy statement from the Times’ assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust, Patrick Healy, attempting to explain why it decided to publish facts that undermined a Democratic candidate. Healy sheepishly explained that “When we hear anything of news value, we try to confirm it through direct sources. Mr. Mamdani confirmed this information in an interview with The Times.”
It did not help. Much like the infamous Cotton scandal, where editors were fired for allowing a Republican senator to print an opposing view on riots, writers and pundits demanded firings or attacked the journalists.
One such response came from Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who attacked the journalists themselves. Not surprisingly, the attack appropriately came on BlueSky, a social media site designed to be a safe place for liberals who do not want to be triggered by opposing views.
Bouie slammed Times reporter, Benjamin Ryan, as stupid, claiming, “Everything I have seen about him screams a guy with little to no actual brain activity.”
After that outrageous attack, Bouie deleted the post, explaining, “I deleted several posts about a Times story because they violated Times social media standards.”
Bouie seems to view Ryan as simply stupid for publishing the truth about the leading candidate for mayor lying about his race. It is the ultimate expression of advocacy journalism. Apparently, the Times should have killed the story to keep readers from knowing about Mamdani’s prior false claim.
In “The Indispensable Right,” I discuss the radical shift in American journalism that occurred with the rejection of neutrality and objectivity in favor of advocacy journalism. J-schools now teach that objectivity is a dated concept. As former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “All journalism is activism.”
After interviewing more than 75 media leaders, Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, detailed how media leaders view neutrality and objectivity as dated concepts that inhibit social and political agendas.
The problem is that once readers become accustomed to an echo chamber, exposure to opposing facts triggers rage.
That was evident among pundits and commentators like former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who declared, “Your absolute abrogation of the NYT standards would in a better era there have led the full range of you in management to resign. Utter failure. Then again, if you don’t realize NYT is perceived as actively campaigning against Mamdani, you’re all lost anyway.”
Ironically, the opposition to Mamdani by some liberals over his anti-Israeli views is being cited as the only reason that the Times would run such a story opposing a leading Democratic candidate. It raises an even more chilling prospect that, absent such a division among Times readers, this story might not have been published.
I hope that that is not true. As many on the left breathe into paper bags from the exposure to an opposing view in the Times, this could prove an important cultural moment for a newspaper that has led the industry toward advocacy journalism.
Many of us still hope that the Times and papers like the Washington Post will still reject advocacy journalism and move back toward objective journalism. However, as this latest controversy demonstrates, that revival will be difficult after years of hiring writers and editors who view neutrality as a relic of journalism.
The job of The New York Times is to ask tough questions so that the voting public will be informed. The Times has had a lot of tough questions for Republicans but when a tough question is asked of a Democratic the left goes koko nuts. You can hear the leftist parrots across the nation calling cuckoo for koko nuts, cuckoo for koko nuts. The Times simply asked what a man’s motivation would be for claiming that he is black on a college entrance application. Their preference on the left is for fake news rather than real news. Give the man a break. If he says he’s black then everyone should agree that he is black and if he should say he is a black woman we all must agree that he is a black woman under fear of the penalty of the law. It’s who they are in a nutshell shell.
I stopped believing anything that mass media put out once I noticed the blatant double standards regarding race and crime. If the offender is White and victim nonWhite, race will be in the headline. If the offender is nonWhite and the victim White, race probably won’t be mentioned a single time in the article. Or how about the capitalization of every race except for White. And so on. US media is far-left tabloid trash and I won’t say what I think should happen to every last employee of ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, (most of) FOX, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, LA Times, Dallas Morning News, Boston Herald, etc.
Just FYI, found a typo:
Bouie slammed Times reporters, Benjamin Ryan
Is it possible for journalism to cover everything that happened in a 24-hr day?
If you want to get to the heart of what’s sick within the profession, zero in on the news selection process. “Everything that’s fit to print” is vague pabulum — it can mean anything. Ask your favorite news sources if they have written standards for their news selection process. Don’t be shocked that written standards only apply AFTER choosing what to cover.
You’ll often hear editors cite “relevance” — which is a highly subjective yardstick. Progressives don’t think Mamdani’s Columbia college application fib is all that relevant. Just like MAGA conservatives ignore it when Secy. of Energy Chris Wright censors scientists at our national labs from using specific terminology describing global warming.
If a news org wants to gain my trust, it must be willing to present counter-narrative stories (so long as they are verified as factual) — counter-narrative meaning challenging a widely-held belief or impression of their audience. The relevance of such info is precisely its value in breaking down widely-held misperceptions.
How many years has the climate kooks told us NY city would be under water?
Far too long.
Whether Mamdani is black or not is an objective fact. He is not. He presumably lied to try to give himself an edge on admissions.
Equating that to the Secretary of Energy establishing guidelines to exclude loaded propagandistic language from official policy statements is nuts.
its the business model. advertising use to mean you run a few pages of printed ads, PLUS you sell the content. You make revenue in two forms: from ads in the paper and from subscriptions.
that doesn’t exist anymore…not to any meaningful revenue.
now the model is exclusively, and revenue from some of the worlds’ most powerful and profitable global companies…Google to be specific…apple..Microsoft and to a lessor degree a large gaggle of independent marketers and advertisers. the efficiency and profitabilty of these new digital technologies far surpass any comparable revenue that could ever have been generated by paper ads, or paper print for that matter.
and with this comes the pressure to sell content, to create tension and manufacture tension in order to build reader/audience reaction and emotional triggering.
focusing on cable news, it’s the same thing…but much worse. You cannot possibly build a long form comprehensive news segment when it gets limited to less than 10 minutes end to end, with at least 3 commercial “breaks” interupting the same content. So the news creators simply build by lines, attention grabbing, short attention span focused “shows”. they don’t even bother to call it news or journalism. media, that’s all it is.
fun fact: in a 24 hour period of “news” you might get maybe 5 minutes of actual hard hitting investigative journalism…and usually that is a single source from some independent journalist who is doing all the heavy lifting..the actual work to get the story to make meaning of it and to publish it so that it can stand on its own. The other 23 hours and 55 minutes is ridiculous opinion, echo chambering and clambering over who can REdescribe that 5 minutes of actual reporting fact.
here are the basic elements of investigative journalism…if you cannot find these elements present when reading or watching a “program”, then you KNOW it isn’t investigative journalism….it’s just news.
a. the title is not misleading nor does it attempt to cheaply use gimics to draw you in.
b. the article is dated and the author is attributed. a specific date and a specific name.
c. the writing makes it clear when moving from facts to opinions and back and forth. no parlor tricks are used to present innuendo, gossip and rumor and guessing as actual facts.
d. sources are named and quotes are complete…no hiding behind “sources say”…”an official who asked to remain anonymous said”. either the content can stand up to authenticity and attribution or it does not.
e. financial sources are known and declared. who is paying for the article? is there a conflict of interest.
f. mistakes when they happen are cleared up quickly and redactions and in some cases the entire article is retracted. This is done to preserve truth but also reputational “contracts”. Journalists have the ethical responsibility to get the story correctly and when this doesn’t happen…for any reason…the publish corrections and do not hide them in 2 point font on page 4.
now that you’ve read this short list of basic requirements of investigative journalism…can you actually name a single news company or journalist that actually performs these kinds of responsible professional commitments?
I know of about 4. that’s it. I know about 4 journalists who consistently fulfill their obligations to be ethical about what they print and publish.
maybe you know more. I would presume based on the so called stats, that the vast number of people who watch and read the news don’t even know WHY these elements are so important. And to me, that is very problematic.
To me, this simply confirms that the NYT is the official mouthpiece of the Democratic Party establishment, and that said establishment has determined that the Overton Window hasn’t yet moved enough to permit a candidate like Mandami to rise to a position with that much visibility. AOC? Fine as part of a legislative body. But Mandami? The establishment is well aware of the damage that big-city mayors like Lori Lightfoot, Brandon Johnson and Karen Bass have done to the party’s brand, and doesn’t think going for the trifecta is a particularly good idea. At least, not yet.
Lost in this nonsense, why do I see white progressives lying about being black, native Americans, etc.?
Why don’t I see blacks lying about being white?
Then explain systemic racism.
There seems to be more communist in the northeast than one would want to admit.
Where ever you find a gaggle of pseudo-intellectuals (i.e. university staff and large herds of government bureaucrats) you will find a preponderance of those sympathetic to the utopian dream of communism. Sheltered, affluent, and living within a bubble tends to do that. Just make a map of blue cities and then overlay it with a map of high concentrations of universities and government centers and don’t be surprised by the overlap.
If anything good can come of Mamdani’s candidacy, we now know that as a naturalized American citizen (yet to be confirmed) born in Uganda to non-U.S. citizen parents, he is ineligible to be President. Let NYC alone suffer.
As long as the only consequence for advocacy journalism is a loss of trust, then nothing will change. Why? Because trust doesn’t necessarily equal truth.
Licensing, credentialing for the enhanced access provided to members of the press should come with enhanced scrutiny for adherence to objectivity and factual standards.
*. Only, does “advocacy journalism” have an historic name? It’s “persuasive speech” with half truths and lies as a foundation. Snake oil cones to mind but is it simply propaganda or yellow journalism? Snake oil journalism?
That might be a relief to those not connected the NYC and NY State. This communist’s influence, especially with the approaching election for governor, could prove disastrous for most of upstate NY.
whimsicalmama,
I think the current NY governor has herself in a quandary: Endorse Adams and she might lose the Muslim and wealthy, white young vote. Endorse Mamdani she might lose the Jewish vote, sane and normal Democrats and all those businesses who have said they would leave, would do it. Along with Mamdani she would be the scapegoat for the demise of NYC.
“As many on the left breathe into paper bags from the exposure to an opposing view in the Times…”
Do we have any hope at all that a significant number of them will asphyxiate or trigger cardiac arrest in so doing?
Since they’re used to living in a vacuum, at least of the ideological variety, perhaps they’re protected against asphyxiation.
I think this is a clear sign the staff at the NYTs and their readers are not ready for things like facts or reality. They want their echo chamber. They want their safe spaces where big bad things like facts and reality cannot intrude. They want their news as biased as possible for progressive points of view.
I’m afraid it’s worse still – that they’ve reached a point at which they truly believe facts irrelevant unless weaponizable, and reality as genuinely manipulable as perception.
*. Yes EE, because it is. There’s more than one truth. The truth is majority successes and minority failures that render as acceptable as 80-20 split.
It’s always been the problem with a majority opinion in policy and government interference. Consensus is 100% success without compromise. Example all people need food. A political system that delivers food to 100% of the people is Consensus and a complete success.
The argument then becomes is it quality food to all at fair prices. Food pricing then uses the affordability based on the least or minority population that also encompasses the majority, everyone benefits.
The argument then becomes the majority
(wealth) should pay more (Alex Cortez) tax the rich. She’s envious because she already has the same food at the same price. She boils dissatisfaction for ballots translated to personal power and self interest, gain.
*. There are two roads to truth. Experience and reading about history are those roads. The progressives are rewriting history from a point of view of failed people. The failure view and waiting for those people with experience to age out.
If you can wade through my grammar. –> I have put my hand in fire and been burned. I can now tell children , if you put your hand in fire it burns.
The result will be an account of failures only, a history of failures, UF.
Those entities crossed the Rubicon long ago.
“The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.” –Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807.
“The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.”
Unfortunately, while it may be impotent as a conveyor of facts, it is far from impotent as a propaganda instrument masquerading as such.
Advocacy journalism is a nice way of saying fiction journalism or just outright lying. They have fabricated a bubble of “protection” from the truth for their audience. They practice this type of journalism in Communist countries which we rightfully deem propaganda. When interviewed, citizens who have been fed this diet of journalism, prove themselves ignorant about facts. They know nothing about historical relevant facts or opposing point of views with the facts that support those views. They are in the dark except for the news that has been fed to them. They cannot explain why they have their views but adamantly defend the right to hold them. They have been reduced to non thinking regurgitating followers. They don’t want to know the entire truth because they haven’t been conditioned to know the ugly truth. That’s why they can easily verbally and physically attack anyone they see as opponents while calling themselves tolerant but labeling their “opponents” as haters. They have been raised as spoiled children who like tantrums, meltdowns, protests and crying to ease their discomfort. They cannot debate with a darn but they can sing their beliefs in song quite terribly.
We now have a peekhow the Biden dementia was unreported in the 4 years!
The grey lady is now the DNC press agent
This is EXACTLY what happened to John Kass at the Chicago Tribune!
Two Accounts of de-platforming John Kass (a Chicago-based Conservative political columnist)
The truth about John Kass’ dispute with the Tribune and the Tribune Guild
… [By] Eric Zorn on August 9, 2022
In this post I will summarize the controversy that former Tribune columnist John Kass returns to over and over in an effort to discredit not just the members of the Tribune’s newsroom union but the newspaper itself. I do so because I find it infamous how he is trying to harm the paper and the men and women who work there by advancing a false narrative. There are some redundancies in this narrative because it is an amalgamation of several posts. I remain willing to post and promote any response or corrections Kass might want to offer on this narrative. (Last updated with a critical letter, May, 2023)
By: Eric Zorn ~ June 12, 2024
https://ericzorn.com/the-truth-about-john-kass-dispute-with-the-tribune-and-the-tribune-guild/
Mission accomplished: John Kass has been deplatformed
Yes, it’s part of the tragic gutting of the Tribune. But Kass’s departure is still good news.
By: John Greenfield June 24, 2021
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/mission-accomplished-john-kass-has-been-deplatformed/
If I can claim to be any gender I want to be why I can’t I claim to be any race I want to be?
You can delude yourself all that you want but the rest of the sane world rejects you delusion and makes it a false statement. And that is the problem we have at this point in our culture, there is no base line for truth or facts. Communists/atheists and those aligned with a cult such as islam, reject anything but subjective reality and therein lies our current cultural problem and certain demise if not stopped.
*. Correct, anon, thus “identity politics”. The left propagandists say anyone can identify as any gender and race or any fictitious identity. What is correct for mamdani is to state the facts and then say I’m an advocate for blacks not I am black.
A little lie like this didn’t derail Fauxcahontas from being elected to the Senate, and it won’t stop a skillful politician like Mamdani from going to Gracie Mansion either.
*. He does have hysteria on his side. There actually is the fact that the poor in NYC are homeless and starving. He is their advocate is his platform to gain what is power in office. Can he deliver? No.
At least Columbia had the good sense to reject him. New York voters, take heed. Follow Columbia’s lead.
NYC is a pit of vipers. Has been for quite a while. Cut it loose and let it float away.
WOL, there are stranded Americans on that island.
I continue to find this kind of controversy mind boggling.
Remember NY slime supported Stalin