NYT Bias

At The New York Times, public editor Liz Spayd writes:

Why is it that conservatives, and even many moderates, see in The Times a blue-state worldview? Let’s set aside for now the core of their criticism — that the coverage is in fact biased. I’ll be turning to that as I settle into the job. My focus here is only on the perceptions. Because while one might debate the substance of the claims, the building blocks that created them are in plain sight.
The home page is a good place to start. Anchoring its top right corner is the Opinion section, which promotes the columns and editorials of its mostly liberal writers. “Readers know the difference between opinion and news,” you’ll often hear. I’m not so sure all do, especially when the website makes neighbors of the two and social platforms make them nearly impossible to tease apart.

Maybe we’re well past worrying about that. So turn to the drumbeat of Hillary Clinton campaign ads on the website. Even for me, who fully knows an ad from a news story, seeing Clinton’s smiling face when I’ve come to read the news can be rather jarring.

Readers often run across ads like these on The New York Times’s homepage.

How about all the reader comments attached to political articles? On most days, conservatives occupy just a few back-row seats in this giant liberal echo chamber, not because Republicans are screened out by editors but because they don’t show up in the first place. Bassey Etim, who oversees the comments forum, makes a point of salting conservative voices into the week’s list of top commenters. “It just makes the conversation more dynamic and interesting,” he says.

For some print readers, the placement of an editorial calling for gun control on the front page last December, which garnered a record number of comments, was shrill proof of the kind of Times bias they expect. There was a torrent of debate over the appropriateness of its placement.

Borrowing from Amicus Briefs: Controversial Coverage

The New York Times has an article claiming that Justice Clarence Thomas uses language from amicus briefs more often than his colleagues.  At The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr knocks it down:

If you look at the data, though, they don’t support the conclusion that Justice Thomas is an outlier. Let’s look at the studies Liptak relies on in his article.

First up is the Feldman study, which gets the most attention in Liptak’s paper. Feldman compared how much of majority opinions by different Justices contained language from the merits briefs. Feldman did not include the Justice-by-Justice numbers in his paper, but he calculated them for Liptak and he kindly shared the results with me by e-mail. Here are the percentages in descending order:

Thomas: 11.29%
Sotomayor: 11.04%
Ginsburg: 10.55%
Alito: 9.48%
Roberts: 9.20%
Scalia: 8.74%
Kennedy: 8.36%
Breyer: 7.56%
Kagan: 7.13%

The numbers seem at odds with Liptak’s claim. Yes, Thomas has the highest shared language percentage. But it’s bizarre to say that his numbers are “unusually high,” that Thomas “relies heavily” on outside language or that “many” of his words are “not his own.” All of the Justices share language from the briefs at roughly similar rates: about 7 to 11 words out of 100. And the difference between Thomas and Sotomayor is a rounding error. It’s only 2.5 words out of 1,000. In a typical majority opinion, that’s probably the difference between including a short parenthetical quote from a precedent and leaving it out.

At Mediatie, Alex Griswold is even blunter:

But only a few paragraphs later, Liptak gives a perfectly mundane reason why Thomas uses so much borrowed language: “…he is particularly apt to be assigned the inconsequential and technical majority opinions that the justices call dogs. They often involve routine cases involving taxes, bankruptcy, pensions and patents, in which shared wording, including quotations from statutes and earlier decisions, is particularly common.

...
 So in other words, Thomas uses language from submitted briefs barely more often than his liberal peers, borrowing language from submitted briefs is extremely common, and Thomas has a perfectly reasonable explanation for why he uses borrowed language slightly more often. But instead of a generic take on how often the Supreme Court as an institution relies on briefs, the Times singled out Thomas and falsely said in its lede that he used borrowed language at “unusually high rates.

 I won’t dance around the issue; this was a partisan attack, plain and simple. There was no journalistic reason to single out Thomas, but plenty of ideological reasons to do so. So rather than write a wonky piece with a dispassionate headline, the Times and Liptak went for partisan clickbait, facts be damned

The New York Times Endorsement

Newspaper editorials  have only limited influence. Even at the peak of the traditional media's influence, most readers never glanced at the editorial page.  Declining circulation has further eroded their impact. Nevertheless, there are certain circumstances where they make a difference.  In New York, for instance, the endorsement of the New York Times can affect Democratic primaries for downballot races. At Politicker, David Freedlander writes:

The Times’ coverage of local politics has shrunk in recent years with the closing of the Metro section, but the paper’s ability to make or break candidates has grown. In conversations with nearly two dozen political operatives, office holders and candidates, the consensus was that The Times remains the biggest single factor in deciding who gets elected in this town. The paper’s imprimatur carries more weight than even the biggest unions. Pollsters estimate that a Times endorsement can boost a candidate anywhere between 5 and 20 points. Politicos say that it is worth the equivalent of out-raising your opponent by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“In Manhattan, I have colleagues who obsess over it,” said one City Councilman. “There are people here who, everything they do in public life, they gauge how The New York Times will react.”

There are, to be sure, local races in African-American or immigrant neighborhoods where getting The Times’ nod doesn’t much matter. But because of its sway in the whiter and more affluent parts of the city, which have the highest concentration of voters, the paper’s backing ends up being the primary factor in who gets elected to citywide and most boroughwide offices. And because Democratic primaries in New York State are so dominated by those voters—plus those in the affluent suburbs where the signature blue plastic bag is the must-have driveway accessory, the endorsement is the biggest prize for statewide races, too.
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Back in the day, campaign staffers used to camp out at a newsstand across from the Times Building, or at another on Christopher Street where the first editions were plopped down at midnight. Today, the news comes via Google News alert on campaign blackberries, leading to virtual midnight celebrations.

But even still, the endorsement remains a vestige of an earlier era.

“When I was going to elementary school I was taught that if you don’t know who is running, you bring The New York Times into the voting booth with you and you vote that way,” said George Arzt, a local consultant also thought to carry great sway with the board. “There are a lot less publications than there were then, but they are still dominant.” [emphasis added]

Foreign News

Our chapter on the mass media discusses the difficulty of covering international news. In this vein, The New York Times reports on its own foreign desk:

Always, though, as the day progresses, a dual mission remains in sight: update news for the Web, yes, but also build stories for tomorrow’s newspaper — especially for the front page.

To do this, the foreign desk operates within a complex system of networks, real and electronic. In the physical network, now stretched by fatigue and rising costs, The Times deploys photographers, correspondents and stringers around the globe, some in bureaus and others on the fly in hot spots. The Times also works closely with The International Herald Tribune, branded as the “global edition” of The Times, and its bureaus in Paris and Hong Kong.

The electronic network of The Times can be seen on Mr. Goodman’s two computer screens. News pours in from the wire services, like The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg and Reuters. Twitter feeds arrive constantly with updates from bloggers and competitors of all kinds. Times internal systems for print and the Web site display and manage stories-in-progress. Instant messages blink on continually as staffers try to stay on the same page.

Presiding over this is Susan Chira, who has been the foreign editor since early 2004. She doesn’t actually have time to “preside,” though. She edits articles, makes decisions, provides moral support to the troops and tries to keep the big picture in view.

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Many editors on the desk express concern about the steady flow of news developments and the pressure to post updates on the Web. “We are weighing ourselves against the wires,” Ms. Chira says. “That’s new for us.”

Rick Gladstone, the day editor who keeps the desk’s working list of stories and makes sure The International Herald Tribune gets fed on time, says: “We have become a news service that runs a newspaper. We are all wire editors now.”