New York Times: Review

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Updated:
Dec 24, 2008.

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?
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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 three tabloids to Rupert Murdoch's neo-con Wall Street Journal, 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 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, was sold yet again, to even worse owners and has not only physically shrunk but is ruined. Its last genuine journalists, Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, should find a better venue! City Hall was purchased for some $50 million dollars in 2000 by a billionaire mayor skilled at slick public relations, who maintains a low profile and an oatmeal public image, and quietly buys off independent voices, meanwhile bankrolling the 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, affordable housing, police brutality, construction site killings, crane crashes, public schools and garbage recycling -- all drag 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 then gutted the paper. The consequences of Newsday's sale over the summer of '08, to the Dolans, who own Cablevision and MSG, are not clear. Meanwhile, the paper went through yet another unnecessary redesign, shifting even more to consumerist hype, worthless-celebrity vomit-fluff, encouragement of alcoholism among the young, extremely parochial local Long Island news, and even less investigative journalism!

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).

Finally, the New York Sun went under in Oct '08 - perhaps because it was so obviously a front for real estate interests and because it insisted in pushing extreme hard-rightwing views, essentially a mouthpiece for the Manhattan Institute, in a city with one of the nation's highest percentage of progressive and well-informed citizens.

Some Alternatives
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 development scandals, and often print Charlie Komanoff's terrific letters and op-eds. Incisive local coverage in the dailies, can be found in, of all places, the crappy free paper Metro, with writers Patrick Arden and Amy Zimmer doing fine work on such issues as transit, overdevelopment, parks encroachment/privatization, toxic plastic turf, etc. -- all of concern to those New Yorkers without second or third homes. But 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, smartly 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 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, and more recently war-mongering rightwinger William Kristol, 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 recently -- it wants to give the impression of being sensitive to criticism -- even as it continues the same biases, 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:

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 simple series of phone calls could have confirmed the letter's authenticity, but our local "paper of record" couldn't 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. For comparison, the US occupation of Iraq is costing 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 the car-lovin' 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 people jumping up and down and presumably celebrating their 4-WD motor vehicle, accompanying an article by an 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].

May 19, 2008 edition:
The Times Finally Goes After the MTA Over its Elevators/Escalators
Kudos to the Times for their front-page article, written by William Neuman, blasting the MTA for its decades-long mishandling of its elevator/escalator program, which has gobbled more than $1 billion over the past 15 or so years. Not only did this well-researched article ("$1 Billion Later, Subway Elevators Still Fail") appear on the front page, but it continued inside for another page and a half. The conclusion: the MTA's training program for mechanics is wholly inadequate; an MTA spokesman, Joseph Joyce, squeaked out that maybe this fall he would get around to hiring someone to improve training! And where has Mayor Bloomberg been over the past 7 years? Surely, if he can speak out about illegal guns, he could use the bully pulpit to berate the MTA about this. The Times left him off the hook.

Also to be congratulated today is Paul Krugman's Op-Ed column - "Stranded in Suburbia" - analysing what could be happening to the nation's automobile-dependent suburbia as gasoline prices accelerate upwards.

November 7, 2007 edition [Wednesday]:
"Business of Green" Section Leaves out Transportation
Here's another funny bias in the Times, yet another indicator of shoddy or fraudulent journalism. Cars, energy, "green business" get their own sections, but public transportation advocacy is always left out or mumbled in the tiniest of asides. Today's special section is a great example. Subtitled "The Carbon Calculus," the paper dishes us a hodgepodge of unevenly written articles, covering modest but ineffectual feel-good niches like nanotech R&D for lighting, coastal conservation efforts, etc., that will have little effect on the crisis of carbon emissions. The lead article, by Matt Wald, a very-long-time Times business/energy writer who should know better by now, concludes with details about an SF winery that will cut emissions by switching from "heavy" glass bottles to "lower-carbon" plastic bags of wine in cardboard boxes. There is only one brief mumble about public transportation in an article by Keith Schneider about, of all places, Salt Lake City, where residents voted for funding for a 45-mile light-rail system and an 88-mile commuter-rail network, to be completed by 2015.

March 13, 2007 edition (Tuesday):
It's Getting Hard Out Here for a Global Warming Denier!
To paraphrase the song apparently glorifying pimps that was sung at the recent Oscar awards ceremony, it's getting hard for paid liars financed by corporations to continue denying that global warming is happening! In Jan. '07, pResident Bush, probably under fierce pressure, actually uttered the words "global warming" in his State of the Union address, signaling a sea change [get it?] to the mainstream media in what we are allowed to think. The NY Times, sadly, has frequently and consistently given global warming deniers -- people like Gregg Easterbrook, Bjorn Limborg and Michael Crichton -- a broad platform to spread their misinformation over the years. The Tuesday Science section in today's paper broadcast what hopefully will be one of the last of these bald-faced propaganda pieces: "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype," written by longtime staff writer William J. Broad. The piece may have been timed to tamp down public concern heightened by Al Gore's popular, award-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth," released in May 2006. More likely it was deliberately placed in the paper in an attempt to subvert Mr. Gore's appearance before Congress to speak about global warming, only a week later - on March 21, 2007 -- by dishing out phony arguments as ammunition for the lowest of Washington's know-nothing, typically Republican, legislators. Sure enough, the Republicans - Rep. Joe L. Barton (TX), Rep. Ralph M. Hall (TX), Rep. John Dingell (MI) and the bitterly anti-environment Senator James Inhofe (OK) -- did their best at the hearings to try and discredit the winner of the 2000 Presidential election. These politicians on the national stage are acting as traitors to the planet we live on.

February 17, 2007 edition:
Columnist Dan Barry Wins Most Pointless Filler Award for Today
The headlines at the top of the National Report page this Sunday blared "He Confirmed It, Yes He Did: The Wicked Witch is Dead." This article, which filled a half-page of precious space which could have been used, say, to spotlight the Bush administration's ongoing strangling of Amtrak, instead tells us the very small adult actor who played the Munchkin Coroner in the Wizard of Oz, is, at age 91, still alive and living in a northern Florida retirement community. We're happy for the gent, of course, but this article should have been in the Arts section, along with all the paper's other musty entertainment fluff.

February 16, 2007 edition:
Stop the Presses: NY Cops Wear Heavy Coats When It's Cold!
This article, written by Cara Buckley, filled most of the top of the Friday Metro section - it's a pale, stale attempt to create sympathy for cops and traffic agents who have to spend their whole shifts outdoors. Yes, they deserve sympathy, but it makes for lousy journalism and more pointless filler. The subtext, of course, is that it's more Times editors' elite voyeurism of and condescension to how the working class "little people" actually live. Bonus points for bad journalism: including a big picture of mega-corporate trash-food purveyor McDonald's' 42nd St. marquee.