New York Times: Review

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Updated:
June 2, 2010.

Other Voices:

Journalistic Fraud in the City:
Reviewing the New York Times' Coverage of Urban/Transport Topics

First of All, Should I Read It or Not?
NYT Logo

To read -- or even just skim -- the New York Times on a daily basis in order to "keep informed" is no easy commitment. Compared to NYC's other dailies, ranging from the two city tabloids, the Wall Street Journal and suburban Newsday, this newspaper tries to cover quite a bit of ground, marshaling greater quantities of actual facts and evidence, often in a serious and intelligent way, than any other daily paper in the country. Unfortunately, despite the real journalism printed in it, much else is suspect, for a wide variety of reasons, many outside the scope of this website's analysis. The paper's signature writing style forces readers to slog through a lot of tedious restatements and outright filler to find the really important nuggets of information. Numerous thinly camouflaged promotions, info-tainment and "soft news" that clog the paper serve to boost profits and perhaps counterbalance the paper's "hard" reporting. [All too often this filler just happens to mesh closely with their major advertisers' deepest profit concerns and fears.] Certainly most readers welcome occasional lifestyle, human interest and even merchandising stories, but the NY Times seems choked with this stuff.

NYC: Knee-Deep in Political Muck - But Who's Reporting It?
Basically, no-one. The weekly Village Voice, one of the last bastions of actual muck-raking investigative reporting, has been sold numerous times, and has not only physically shrunk but is ruined. Its last genuine journalists, Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, should find a better venue! NYC government is essentially fraudulent - City Hall was purchased for some $75 million dollars in 2000 by a multi-billionaire, who employs slick public relations, maintains a low profile and an oatmeal public image, and quietly buys off independent voices, meanwhile bankrolling the local and national Republican Party and frantically cutting closed-door business deals, such as the two baseball stadiums, that are manifestly not in our interests. As always, New York's perennial crises -- traffic, pollution, noise, the lack of affordable housing, police brutality, construction site killings, crane crashes, public schools and garbage recycling -- all careen on, unchecked.

The Tabloids
The tabloids -- the Daily News and the Post, both steady money losers because of their poor quality, are owned by bully-boy Bush-supporting rightwingers - Mort Zuckerman and Rupert Murdoch, respectively - and these two billionaires don't hesitate to use their properties as megaphones to shout down local politicians who might interfere with their business and real estate plans. Any journalism that appears in these papers is strictly by chance. The once-great Newsday was sold to L.A. business interests who gutted the paper, then sold it to the Dolans, owners of Cablevision and MSG, in '08, who have subjected the paper to yet another unnecessary redesign, fired a lot of journalists, and shifted even more to consumerist hype, worthless-celebrity vomit-fluff, encouragement of alcoholism among the young, extremely parochial local Long Island news.

As for readers of the Post and the Daily News, most of them may or may not agree with Murdoch's and Zuckerman's corporate-protectionist views, bigotry and chauvinism, especially since those papers commonly contradict such readers' own economic and social interests, but they definitely find repugnant the relentless elitism of the NY Times, a neo-con corporatist paper focused on the concerns of well-to-do second- and third-home-owning white businessmen. Despite the Times' misty-eyed self-advertising about its journalistic practice, the paper's business owners' prime concern is the national edition, again, the better to enhance various business interests. That's why they treat NYC issues like a third-world nation, and that's why the Metro section was squashed in Oct '08 (see below).

At about the same time that the Times sank the separate NY section, a strong challenger from the extreme rightwing, the New York Sun went under - perhaps because it was so obviously a front for real estate interests and because it insisted in pushing extreme hard-rightwing views, essentially acting as a mouthpiece for the rightwing Manhattan Institute, in a city with one of the nation's highest percentage of progressive and well-informed citizens.

Then in spring 2010, the Wall Street Journal launched a separate New York section, an open challenge to the Times. The Times response: new ads crowing how good their coverage is (but no change in actual coverage).

Some Alternatives - and Journalist Frauds
There are some on-line sources of news about NYC's pathetic, stalemated transportation situation, such as the Indypendent, published 17 times a year [more about on-line sources later]. There are some excellent small-circulation local weeklies, such as the Villager, Chelsea Now and Downtown Express, that do a pretty good job covering the streets and ongoing development scandals, and often print Charlie Komanoff's terrific letters and op-eds. Incisive local coverage in the dailies is spotty at best. The crappy free paper Metro used to run fine articles by Patrick Arden and Amy Zimmer on transit, overdevelopment, parks encroachment/privatization, toxic plastic turf, etc. -- all of concern to those New Yorkers without second or third homes. But budget cuts seemed to have shut them out. Make no mistake about it - these free papers -- Metro and amNewYork -- journalistically are frauds, routinely blenderizing the news, garbling facts, mashing up viewpoints and omitting essentials. They too are fronts for business, real estate and tavern interests just like their bigger competitors.

Conclusion - Read Everything!
So, then, is the Times a great journalistic standard bearer, using its mighty front page to embarrass wrongdoers before the world, or just another parasitic, exploitative and heavily camouflaged institution feeding off NYC's human and artistic capital and grassroots energies, giving precious little in return and misleading and misinforming at every chance to benefit its advertisers and the city's richest corporations, fiefdoms and most well-off people? How about a little of both? The presence of so much slothful, bland, parochial coverage, and the inclusion of relentless "two-plus-two-equals-five" op-ed columns by anti-environment neo-cons like David Brooks and John Tierney [thankfully, war-mongering rightwinger William Kristol was canned in '09] can probably be traced to the paper's gloating that it has no serious local competition . . .

Still, the Times is the paper of record - and you will find many references to it throughout this website. A full review of this paper is beyond the scope of this webpage - please check out some of the many books (including John Hess' My Times: A Memoir of Dissent), magazine articles and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting critiques about this powerful national newpaper, a paper that some consider the country's finest and most professional. We recommend reading everything, so that patterns of bias in the media, when juxtaposed against ownership and profit motives, can become more obvious. Also support alternative media, such as the very organization whose website you are reading from!

One thing is certain, as can be seen by all the frantic "mea culpas" and "ombudsmanning" the paper's been printing -- the Times does have a thin skin -- even as it continues the same biases, and makes the same mistakes, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. The editors, counting on sheer volume of words dumped on us every day, and being able to re-spin their spin to deflect criticism, have molded it, at least on some issues, into a very fast-moving, shape-changing target. In the meantime, here are a few short critiques, focusing on urban/transport issues, most recent first:

April 2, 2010 edition [Friday]:
Finding Beauty in the Cross-Bronx Auto Death March
It's not clear how they do it, but somehow the auto zombies at the NY Times managed to find people to quote on their front page saying how wonderful the Cross Bronx Expressway is! "I think the trucks up high with the lights all around them, they're very pretty", one woman said. A neighbor of hers "sees the highway as his therapist." Since their homes are at the intersection of the Cross Bronx and the Bronx River parkway, perhaps these residents -- and the Times editors -- have been breathing a little too much exhaust fumes?

October 14, 2009 edition [Wednesday]:
Vision 42 Reviewed on Back Page of Business Section
Today's "Square Feet" column, which covers commercial real estate in Manhattan, reviewed the Vision 42 light rail proposal ["Without Cars, a Different Sort of 42nd St.", by Alison Gregor], but got the number of supporters off by many orders of magnitudes -- Vision 42 has more than just "dozens of supporters".

October 13, 2009 edition [Tuesday]:
Motorists' Whining and ExxonMobil Ad on Front Page
This is surely a dark time for serious newspaper journalism in NYC. Just look at today's NY Times: an ExxonMobil ad on the cover, and front-page headlines by Danny Hakim about the urgent crisis of NY State motorists' registration labels falling off their windows because the glue isn't good enough. And what can only be seen as a slap in the face of those seeking serious national news, a big space-filler on page A15, " 'Boneless Wings', the Cheaper Bite", by William Neuman, reported on the dishonest re-marketing of chicken parts as chicken wings, in fry-pit fast-food joints nationwide. "If they can figure out how to grow chickens with four wings," one owner of an 80-outlet Atlanta-based franchise fry-pit operation is quoted, "we'd be in really great shape."

September 20, 2009 edition [Sunday]:
Phoenix Light Rail Praised Thru Tightly Gritted Teeth
Badly car-sprawled Phoenix, without any subway, finally and courageously installed and opened (in Dec '08) a 20-mile light rail line, which has turned out to be a great success in terms of ridership numbers, convenience, new real estate investment and the city's image. Forced to acknowledge this success, Jennifer Steinhauer, writing in today's paper ("In Phoenix, Weekend Users Make Light Rail A Success") started off her piece: "Among the many detractors -- and they were multitudinous -- who thought light rail in this sprawling city would be a . . . failure was Starlee Rhodes . . . "

March 29, 2009 edition [Sunday]:
Queensboro Bridge Fluff Piece Writes Transit out of History, Stalin-Style
This Sunday filler piece commemorating the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Queensboro Bridge completely leaves out even the briefest mention or image of the once-extensive public transportation over the bridge, nor transit's huge role in the early development of Queens. Written by James Barron, "To Fans, a Steel Swan, Not an Ugly Duckling" features a large and pretty photograph of the bridge in late afternoon, which takes up lots of space in the Sunday paper's metropolitan section rather than say, actual journalism about the city's pressing problems. The article wrongly claims the Hell Gate [rail] Bridge links Manhattan and the Bronx, and its comments about the "little people" who "make the city run" implies they all drive in over the bridge. In reality, they're on the subway. It's as if the reporters at the Times were visiting some little-understood foreign country, rather than the teeming borough just a short distance from their posh 8th Avenue headquarters. [For a much better understanding of the Hell Gate Bridge, read "The Eighth Bridge", by Tom Buckley, which appeared in the New Yorker on Jan. 14, 1991.]

December 22, 2008 edition [Monday]:
Phony Anti-Caroline-Kennedy Letter from Paris Mayor Printed Today!
You would think the NY Times had learnt from its previous scandals like the Jayson Blair fiasco or Judith Miller's front-page series of White House "leaks" that helped instigate the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But no. The paper printed a phony letter attacking Caroline Kennedy as a possible new NY senator, a letter supposedly written by Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe. A few phone calls could have confirmed the letter's inauthenticity, but our local "paper of record" couldn't even do that. They were able to apologize the next day though. What's next - a letter from Elvis?

November 16, 2008 edition [Sunday]:
Op-Ed Page: Detroit Should Convert into "Transportmakers"
In a view that made common sense decades ago but has been given short shrift for years in the pages of the Times, Robert Goodman, an environmental design professor, writes here that the American auto industry should begin making transit vehicles, including light rail cars and high-speed trains.

November 12, 2008 edition [Wednesday]:
Times Notices Foreign Companies, Not Ford or GM, Building Streetcars Here
This article, by John Tagliabue, appearing on a backpage of the Business section, examines foreign tram builders in the light of an expected increase in the US market for new light rail systems due to the huge recent jump in public transit ridership nationwide, and the forthcoming presumably pro-transit Obama administration. American law states that 2/3 of a tram car [by value] must come from the US, meaning the vehicles, although foreign-designed, are mostly built here in the US. The article mentions that federal spending on light rail systems nationwide, in 2007 totalled $473 million, as compared to $935 million in 2006. To get an idea how little that spending represents in our federal budget, consider the ongoing US occupation of Iraq, which costs American taxpayers some $12 billion a month!

October 16, 2008 edition [Thursday]:
Times Buries a Pro-Transit PBS TV Show
Every other year or so, and despite the pressure from its automotive advertisers, PBS on television runs a terrific documentary on public transportation. The Times could do its part to be civic-minded by reviewing and promoting these shows, but usually doesn't. On this evening, at 8:30pm, PBS ran a half-hour show, NOW, hosted by David Brancaccio, a balanced look about California making substantial improvements in public transportation and in curbing sprawl. It featured an excellent Oakland-based organization called Reconnecting America, and even scored the McCain and Obama campaigns' websites about their transit proposals (McCain: none; Obama: some). What listing did the Times run today for this exact time slot, on their TV page? A crank show called "Speeders Fight Back", on the obscure cable channel, TruTV! Here's their description: "File this one under 'defensive drivers.' In this new series, motorists head to traffic court to confront the police officers who caught them speeding."

October 6, 2008 edition [Monday]:
Metro Section Gets Vaporized in Bid for Profits
The Times' editors, sick and tired of NYC's chronic problems, which they are unwilling to report fully about, finally abolished the Metro Section and banished it to back pages in the main news section, where it will attract less attention [a separate "New York" section will continue to appear in the Sunday paper, for now]. This move appears to dovetail with Mayor Bloomberg's push to buy off and eliminate democracy as expressed by the term limits law, and with the bad regional news ensuing as the Times editors' beloved FIRE sector [finance, insurance, real estate] collapses due to the financial meltdown. The editors, as if to stick their thumbs in the eyes of their readers, ran a lead article on the very last day of a separate Metro section [Sunday, Oct 5, '08] entitled "Drab Setting, But Joyous Work: Making 2 Into 1" - yet another puff piece, this time about the Manhattan Marriage Bureau, by Fernanda Santos, probably an underpaid freelancer. As the paper steadily shrinks, sprouts more vomit-fluff and and advertorials, and increasingly insists readers go online for content, people are beginning to ask why they should pay $1.50 for this crap.

August 14, 2008 edition [Thursday]:
Streetcars in The Spotlight (Cincinnati) - But Not NYC!
Today's paper ran a modest article by Bob Driehaus reviewing streetcar plans brewing in Cincinnati, with plenty of quotes by the usual nay-sayers and cranks. Cincinnati lost its streetcar system in the '50s, and now with the curtain coming down on subsidized gasoline prices and suburban sprawl, those cities making substantial investments right now in urban transit will be seen as really smart a few years from now [not NYC!]. The Times unfortunately slates such streetcar articles only once every 3 to 5 years, as opposed to an endless parade of automobile promotions masquerading as journalism. And certainly NYC trolley plans, like Auto-Free NY's 42nd Street plan, must be seen by those car-lovin' towncar-chauffeured editors at the Times as totally heretical.

August 10, 2008 edition [Sunday]:
Hurray for SUV's! Hurray, Hurray! Hey You - Got a Problem?
Most of the cover of the Travel Section this Sunday was taken up by a huge color photograph of an SUV in an empty, traffic-free landscape with three lunatics jumping up and down and presumably celebrating their 4-WD motor vehicle, accompanying an article by journo-victim Ethan Todras-Whitehill about driving in Bolivia. Take that, you earth-firsters!

June 22, 2008 edition [Sunday]:
Tom Friedman: American Gas-guzzling Is An Addiction
Thomas Friedman's op-ed column today, acting as the paper's muffled minority voice, courageously explains how President Bush is worsening our dependency on oil when he does stunts, like for instance travelling to Saudi Arabia and begging the sheiks to increase oil production (they said no). The column emphasized the association of gas-guzzling with harmful addiction, and its downward spiral. Unfortunately, Friedman also threw in a plug calling for a crash program for more nuclear power, which is a non-starter for both the American people and for big investors.

June 18, 2008 edition [Wednesday]:
The NY Times Hides the Eyesores Planned for the Seaport!
Today's article, while providing a fair amount of reportage, shows an illustration that crops out the most offensive part of a planned building complex that would replace the South Street Seaport. Everyone knows the Seaport has been mismanaged for years -- in fact, as the article relates, a lawsuit is now pending in State Supreme Court, trying to force the Seaport's current lease-holders, an out-of-town corporation, Chicago-based General Growth Properties, to better manage the site. The Seaport is still a public space allowing non-luxury-condo-owners a bit of a view, and since the City owns the property, a caring mayor could solve this issue overnight, if he wanted to. Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg is siding with General Growth, which is not only trying to sink the Seaport, but plans to privatize its space with taxpayer-subsidized luxury condos and a hotel. The greedhead developers hired a firm called SHop Architects whose egomaniacs came up with the ugliest eyesores imaginable, without the slightest trace of nautical, or even Old New York, influences -- which people love so much. David Dunlap's article ("New Look is Planned for Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport") shows one of their renderings -- but with the tower cut off! We see what looks like a cereal box on its side, perforated, with spikes sticking out at the roofline, plopped on top of what look like cages such as they used to keep tigers in during the bad old days of zoos. The 42-story luxury condo appears made of beer-can pop-tops welded together. Such a monstrous design, as if by kids or zombies from outer space, is not going to help the proposal, which already faces daunting economic, land-use and political hurdles, and hopefully, strong grassroots activist/preservationists.

June 8, 2008 edition [Sunday]:
The I-35 Bridge: The Times Insults Minnesotans, Bungles Reporting
This shameful article, by Monica Davey, is typical of how the Times bungles their journalistic responsibilities ("Construction as Spectator Sport: New Bridge Rises in Minnnesota"). Davey presumably wanted to show how local Minnesotans and tourists flock to the sidewalk tours being given about the $234 million replacement Interstate-35 bridge rapidly going up in Minneapolis over the Mississippi River. Fair enough. The original bridge collapsed in August, 2007, killing 13. Unfortunately, the article condescends to the people it reported on. Worse, it spent not one word on the struggle to add transit to the ten-highway-lane bridge, for example for tracks for light rail, or the inclusion of pedestrian and bicycle access [for the record, the bridge has two lanes that can accommodate light rail].