The famously teeth-grinding boast in the corner of the front page of the New York Times is “All the news that’s fit to print”. In truth it should be “All the views we think fit to hold”, since for some time — most of our adult lives you might say — the paper’s decline from newspaper to viewspaper has been proceeding apace.
For most of us the realisation started to dawn whenever there was a story we knew something about. One read the NYT version and just thought “But that isn’t quite right”. In time this happened with story after story until you realised that if you didn’t trust them on the things you knew about, how could you trust them on the things you didn’t?
In no area in recent years has the NYT made itself more ridiculous than on the subject of the United Kingdom. Since those of us who live in the UK might be regarded as, if not experts, then at least well-informed observers, the paper’s coverage has stood out as being especially ridiculous or defamatory, depending on your mood that morning.
Take a few examples from recent years.
In May 2018 someone called Peter S Goodman wrote a NYT piece titled, “In Britain, austerity is changing everything”, the author basing his story on an apparently brief trip to Prescot in Lancashire. In some ways this is a good idea. Profiles from a capital city can — as UnHerd readers know — give a warped idea of the true state of a nation. But if the NYT expected illumination to come from Prescot they had overestimated the competence of their contributor.
Intent on portraying the entire United Kingdom as an austerity-ridden wasteland, Mr Goodman claimed in his piece that the Prescot library had closed when it was actually open. He claimed that the local fire station had been shut, despite a new one just having just been unveiled. He claimed the local museum had “receded into history” when the Prescot Museum was very much alive and well.
In short Mr Goodman claimed that everything in Prescot was shut down, and after the online, unpaid sleuths of the internet did the job any paid fact checkers at the NYT had failed to do there was nothing left of Goodman’s strange Prescot-based piece. So mercilessly were the flaws in his article shown up that on social media Goodman was soon reduced to retreating to that favoured defensive position of the fabulist: claiming that although the actual facts may not be true, nevertheless, the “perception” was correct.
In August 2018 the paper was back at it, in this case trying to attack Britain through the old staple of its food. In a culinary review written by one Robert Draper, readers of the NYT could learn that residents of the UK had been subsisting on boiled mutton and oatmeal until very recently. Indeed in his piece Mr Draper claimed that this was as recently as the time of his last trip to the country a decade earlier. That is, in 2008.
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SubscribeCurrently the New York Times appears to be using agency staff from Sidney Australia who I suspect have never been outside their antipodean city limits.
Yes, to all the above. But the obverse seems also to be true; this same sort of thing is why I dropped my Spectator subscription: its US reporting is bizarre, ignorant, and driven by visceral hatred of Donald Trump. There were even posts by “conservatives” like David Frum. Ye gods.