Editors’ Note: Once upon a time, the New York Times decided that its readers deserved an advocate who would review their concerns about its work product, investigate, and report their findings. It worked well — for the readers that is. After a few years, the Times mandarins decided that it no longer needed anyone to critique its work, presumably because in their minds it was flawless. So they s***tcanned the public editor and everything worked out great, for the easily bruised sensibilities of Times hacks, that is.
For the rest of us, not so much. It turns out the Times gets stuff wrong. A lot. For that reason, at least one former public editor, the formidable Margaret Sullivan, has continued her fearless criticism in The Guardian. To further assist her and others, the Spy has appointed its own Meta-Content Generator, A.J. Liebling, to serve as the Public Editor in Exile. He’s got a lot on his plate.
By A.J.Liebling
Meta-Content Generator
With America in the midst of a sustained attack on every institution of its democracy, we need a strong and fearless free press to keep us informed of the latest outrages without pulling any punches or allowing itself to be sidetracked into irrelevant detours.
Instead we have The New York Times. Its repeated failures to properly report what’s going on have taken on even greater importance given the collapse of once-formidable competitors like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, both destroyed by their weirdo plutocratic owners, and the intentional and illegal assault on broadcasters like CBS and ABC/Disney.
In the current crisis its misadventures have become more remarkable and more glaring. It has also shown a repeated inability to accept any criticism or correct its lapses.
Consider its coverage of the now Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York, a bright young spark plug by the name of Zohran Mamdani. Or as is he is invariably referred to in Times news coverage, “democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.” His revolting once and future opponent, Handsy Andy Cuomo, never earned a similar epithet, like “sex pest Andy Cuomo” or “disgraced former Governor Cuomo,” for some reason.
The Times in its defense says that while Mamdani identifies as a “democratic socialist,” his opponent does not identify as a “sex offender,” despite clear evidence of same. “Democratic socialism” is, despite its name, not an ideology that calls for the nationalization of all means of production. Rather it seems to contemplate a well-knit social safety net and publicly-owned institutions to fill the gaps caused by market failures. Like housing and mass transit.
But that’s not the problem. The Times has taken a dislike to Mr. Mamdani for reasons best known to it and its plutocratic publisher, King Arthur Sulzberger XVI, who got his job the old-fashioned meritocratic way: from his daddy, the owner.
Two weeks ago, in a supposed scoop that violated Times standards on anonymous sourcing, the Times received stolen confidential Columbia admission files. That in itself is unforgivable. These are not the Pentagon Papers, which discuss matters of national policy. These are the personal private applications of 17 year old kids for admission, together with the notes of the Columbia admissions office. In short they are none of anyone’s business.
Thought experiment: do you think your college applications should be a matter of public record? Do you think the world should know that you boasted of being the most valuable player on your water polo team, even though your school didn’t have one? Or that you reminded the admissions committee that generations of your ancestors had been admitted to Columbia and given generously thereafter, like, we don’t know, King Arthur Sulzberger XVI?
The documents had been provided to the Times by a virulently racist crackpot as part of the ongoing campaign to delegitimize any and all efforts to diversify the distribution of benefits in society beyond rich entitled white men. Like King Arthur.
![]() |
Reliable source, according to The New York Times |
What was in these private personal files that constituted news that the public had a right to know? Wait for it: on his application Mamdani, an immigrant of South Asian ancestry born in Uganda, checked the boxes as both Asian and African. Hot tip for Times hacks: do a search online of what continent Uganda is in, and let us know what you find. Maybe they still have one of those spherical things hanging around with the map of the world printed on it.
To the Times, and the racist reactionaries who stole the personal files and provided quotes, like lying reactionary plug ugly (and favorite Times source, quoted 167 times in the last three years) Chris Rufo, this was huge news.
The stolen application data raised questions, at least in the fevered imaginations of Times hacks and their racist sources, of whether Mamdani had somehow misrepresented himself to obtain admission (which he didn’t by the way).
Margaret Sullivan, the former public editor (remember her?) said
The Times’s decision to pursue and publish the story was, at the very least, unwise.
For one thing, it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist.
Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication....The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.
In response to this well-founded criticism, the Times trotted out a hack named Patrick Healy, who used to preside over Republican-rigged focus groups designed to palm off Republican talking points as the true voice of the great unwashed and now serves as the chief bottle-washer for “standards” and “trust.”
He justified this illegal smear by noting that when asked about his application, Mamdani, instead of telling the Times to go s*** in its hat, confirmed the truth of the matter. To Healy, that transformed a story based on stolen documents peddled by racists into an impeccably sourced story. That didn’t make it newsworthy, though.
Soledad O’Brien ‘86, proud to be multiracial herself, said:
The Times’s second rationalization was that since so many people were talking about the story, the story must have been worth reporting. A lot of people would talk about a picture of King Arthur XVI fornicating with underaged goats on his upstate retreat too, but that doesn’t make it a story.
Having rejected out of hand the concerns expressed by serious journalists like O’Brien, Sullivan, and James Fallows, the Times tripled down on its blunder. First Times Supremo Joe “Where’s My Chair?” Kahn told the newsroom he was proud of his pisspoor story. Then he or someone commissioned an ass-covering follow-up, supposedly reporting on the difficulty applicants have of choosing their race and ethnic background on check-the-boxes forms. This might be a story, but it doesn’t serve to retcon the Times’s trafficking in personal documents stolen by racist weirdos.
But the best explanation may be that the Times believes that personal information is newsworthy when it’s about public figures. At least if they’re Democrats.
Consider its endless coverage over the past year over Joe Biden’s supposed debility and unfitness for office. Although neither the Times nor anyone else ever presented a shred of evidence demonstrating that a single one of Biden’s many decisions as President was affected by incapacity, his slow gait, stutter, and loss of stamina were said to be crippling debilities that made it impossible for him to continue as President.
We don’t intended to relitigate that one, but we will point out that the number of Times’s stories questioning Biden’s capacity versus the number questioning the cognitive state of the current incumbent stands at about 293 to zero.
![]() |
Pro tip: read A1 before you consume one of these tasty recipes |
This is despite daily efflorescences of Pol Potbelly’s raging dementia, whether claiming at the same time that he did and did not know that one of his subversive flunkies had cut off weapons supplies to Ukraine without telling him, or imposing 50% tariffs on Brazil over an entirely fair trial of a Brazilian national, or continuing to assert whoppers like whale-killing windmills or China having no wind or solar power.
You might think that such daily lapses would at least give rise to a thumbsucker or two about how they “raise questions” in the minds of “some critics” about the Dear Leader’s mental capacity. Not a word. The Times may be waiting for a brave Democratic politician (other than one tarred by the brush of democratic socialism) to state that the Emperor is prancing around the White House with his tiny toadstool swinging in the breeze because he is mad. But that’s no excuse: there’s plenty of credible persons out there raising those proverbial questions to justify one or 293 pieces about whether the man with the nuclear codes should be in a home.
To be fair, covering up the incapacity if not insanity of learning political figures has been a Times tradition for decades. You’d never know from reading the paper in real time that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a useless lush or his colleague Sen. Alphonse “Your winnings sir” D’Amato was a cheap hood, because they were favorites of King Arthur XIV and his liege, Cardinal Rosenthal.
But it’s not as if the Times is insensible to the feelings of those persecuted by Republican bigotry and intolerance. In some cases, it’s piling on.
Did you know that a tiny minority of your fellow citizens identify as a gender other than the one they presented with at birth? And that some of them seek well-accepted medical and surgical treatment to remedy this mismatch? It’s true!
And did you know that a small minority of them want to live their gender identity while still in school, including by playing on sports teams for that gender. If the idea of a 16-year-old trans girl placing soccer with the other girls in her class fills you with shock, horror, and loathing, then we’ve got a newspaper for you!
For years now, the Times has platformed the ravings of anti-trans bigots and their pseudo-“science” as if they were credible evidence that treating trans persons as they and their parents wish was somehow a bad thing. They trumpeted a UK review of medical research on treating trans kids called the Cass Report. The report, after throwing out all medical evidence that trans kids benefited from gender-affirming treatment upon the grounds that the studies were not double-blind or placebo-controlled (how would that work?), concluded that there was a lack of evidence supporting gender affirming care.
When that report was exhaustively debunked and refuted the Times didn’t say anything or repudiate their pisspoor reporting. Recently they printed a guest essay on the pain suffered by trans kids who are denied treatment. To the Times, that constituted balanced coverage.
Justices Alito and Thomas were grateful for the support of the Times in holding that bigoted state law prohibitions on certain medical treatments when used to help trans people only were not sex discrimination. They cited as if it were real facts a series of idiotic Times roundups of anti-trans agitprop in support of their lawless conclusions:
Whether or not trans people are more or less likely to leave their pubic hair on soda cans was not discussed by Clarence “Leavin' on a Jet Plane” Thomas.
The point is not only that the Times violates standards of decent journalism pretty much every day. It’s that they seem to regard as outrageous any attempt to call them to account for it. When was the last time you read in the Times that they f**ked something up? We’ll wait.
Ultimately if the Times continues to burn its credibility due to its own arrogance and cowardice, two things will happen: it will no longer be taken seriously as a purveyor of important information outside of word games, recipes, and product reviews. And its audience will look to other sources for reliable information, including enterprising reporters setting up shop on Substack.
Independent writers like Judd Legum and Marisa Kabas are doing wonderful work. But we are the losers: No matter how successful they are, they are unlikely to have the reach and clout of the Times. As a result, the American public will be less able to comprehend the scope and depth of the ongoing Fascist coup against our country.
In the early 1940’s the Times’s failure to cover the Holocaust contributed to the failure of America to take steps to save European Jews. Today its failures are contributing to the death of American democracy. As in the 1940’s the consequences may be irreversible.
But at least the puzzles are fun and the recipes scrumptious.