The New York Times is an internationally influential daily newspaper published in New York and distributed worldwide. The paper's current slogan is "All The News That's Fit To Print."
History
Nicknamed "The Gray Lady" or The Times, this newspaper was founded as The New-York Daily Times in 1851 by Henry J. Raymond and George Jones as a sober alternative to the more partisan newspapers that dominated the New York journalism of the time.
In its very first edition on September 18, 1851, the paper stated, "We publish today the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come."
Adolph Ochs acquired the Times in 1896, and under his guidance the newspaper achieved an international scope, circulation, and reputation. It is currently owned by the New York Times Company, in which descendants of Ochs, principally the Sulzberger family, maintain a dominant role.
The Times Today
The Times enjoys the reputation of being a generally reliable source of news. The editorial position of the Times is often regarded as liberal in its interpretation of social issues and events. However, it does have a mix of editorial columnists, ranging in approximate political position from Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and Bob Herbert on the left to William Safire and David Brooks, formerly of the Weekly Standard magazine, on the right.
Many conservatives believe that the Times news coverage, as well as its editorial board, has a liberal slant. Many books have been written about the reliability of the New York Times and its impact on the political community. Comparisons have been made between the Times and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, both of which are also published in New York have a much more conservative slant, at least on their editorial pages.
Flaws and instrumental in propaganda campaigns
Jayson Blair
In 2003, the Times admitted to journalism fraud committed over a span of several years by one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, and the general professionalism of the paper was questioned, though Blair was immediately fired following the incident. Questions of affirmative action in journalism were also raised, since Blair was African American. Several top officials, including the chief of its editorial board, also resigned their posts following the incident.
Ignominious role in spreading propaganda for war against Iraq
Beginning in 2001, many articles appeared in the New York Times pushing the various US government and neoconservative propaganda lines about Iraq, e.g., weapons of mass destruction, connection to Al Qaeda, etc. Alexander Cockburn, the co-editor of CounterPunch, has written several articles about Judith Miller's exploits, this statement summarizes her ignominious role:
- Lay all Judith Miller’s New York Times stories end to end, from late 2001 to June 2003 and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah’s Ark of scam-artists.
And while Miller, either under her own single by-line or with NYT colleagues, was touting the bioterror threat, her book Germs, co-authored with Times-men Steven Engelberg and William Broad was in the bookstores and climbing the best seller lists. The same day that Miller opened an envelope of white powder (which turned out to be harmless) at her desk at the New York Times, her book was #6 on the New York Times best seller list. The following week (October 21, 2001), it reached #2. By October 28, –at the height of her scare-mongering campaign–it was up to #1. If we were cynical…
We don’t have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller’s major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam’s palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration’s propaganda drive towards invasion.
What does that make Miller? She was a witting cheer-leader for war. She knew what she was doing.
And what does Miller’s performance make the New York Times? Didn’t any senior editors at the New York Times or even the boss, A.O. Sulzberger, ask themselves whether it was appropriate to have a trio of Times reporters touting their book Germs on tv and radio, while simultaneously running stories in the New York Times headlining the risks of biowar and thus creating just the sort of public alarm beneficial to the sales of their book. Isn’t that the sort of conflict of interest prosecutors have been hounding Wall Street punters for?[1]
John F. Sugg, an investigative journalist, reinforced this by stating:
- I don’t like what Miller represents in journalism. She is not, to my mind, a journalist. She forfeited that claim when she became a conduit of propaganda for the neo-conservative cabal that has its bloody hands on the control levers of the nation. In a stunning declaration this month, Miller admitted that she’d been granted a Pentagon security clearance. She tried to backpedal on the assertion, claiming the clearance was routine. But she couldn’t spin away the disclosure that she’d been blindsiding her editors and colleagues. She had become a shill for the Bush administration; her employment at the New York Times was merely a cover. [...]Information bartering is, indeed, part of journalism, but it’s clear that what Miller was up to was far from anything that even remotely could be called newsgathering. She was simply spreading the smear the White House wanted spread. The WMD lies exposed by Wilson were integral to the whole scare-and-deceive-the-public strategy to bolster support for the war. The famed British "Downing Street Memo" spoke of the Bushies’ efforts to "fix" intelligence. Miller was nothing more than one of the fixers.[2]
People
Executive editors
- Turner Catledge (1964-1968)
- James Reston (1968-1969)
- position vacant (1969-1976)
- Abe Rosenthal (1977-1986)
- Max Frankel (1986-1994)
- Joseph Lelyveld (1994-2001)
- Howell Raines (2001-2003)
- Bill Keller (2003- )
Reporters
- Michael R. Gordon, chief military correspondent
Public editors
- Arthur S. Brisbane (2010- )
- Clark Hoyt (2007-2010)
- Byron Calame (2005-2007)
- Daniel Okrent (2003-2005)
Other SourceWatch resources
- Ethan Bronner
- Judith Miller
- Walter Goodman
- Ben A. Franklin
- Robert Pear
- Shirley Christian
- John Noble Wilford
- David E. Sanger
- Roger Starr
- Kathleen Teltsch
- David C. Anderson - former editorial board member
- Alice Rawsthorn - columnist
- Helene Cooper
- Harrison E. Salisbury
Contact details
- Web: www.nytimes.com
External links
- Edward Herman, "All The News Fit To Print (Part I): Structure and Background of the New York Times", Z Magazine, April 1998.
- The Editors, The Times and Iraq, New York Times, May 26, 2004.
- Daniel Okrent, Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction? New York Times, May 30, 2004.
- Allan M. Siegal (Chairman), "Preserving Our Readers Trust", New York Times, May 2, 2005. (Pdf file).
- Katharine Q. Seelye, Times Panel Proposes Steps to Build Credibility, New York Times, May 9, 2005
- Erica Iacono, Panel's suggestions to up 'Times' credibility spark some concerns, PR Week, May 16, 2005. (Sub req'd.)
- Robert Scheer, The New York Times' Misguided Crusade, AlterNet, October 18, 2005.
- Byron Calame, When the Newspaper Is the News, "The Public Editor ", New York Times, December 4, 2005.
- Joe Strupp, Want to e-Mail a 'New York Times' Columnist? Better Subscribe to TimesSelect, Editor & Publisher, January 17, 2006.
- Patrick O’Connor and Jonathan Allen, GOP bill targets NY Times, The Hill, June 28, 2006.
- John Aravosis, "Video of House Dems taking on the Republicans over bogus NYT-bashing resolution," AMERICAblog, June 29, 2006.
Note: Portions of this article are taken from a corresponding article in the Wikipedia.
- ↑ Alexander Cockburn, Judy Miller’s War, CounterPunch, 16 August 2003.
- ↑ John F. Sugg, Judith Miller and Me, CounterPunch, 25 October 2005.