Tuesday, July 15, 2025

From the Public Editor: The New York Times is boldly doing terrible work, critics say


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.

Friday, July 4, 2025

A July 4 obituary edition: American democracy, dead at 249.

The lamps have gone out all over America.  

By Isaiah Thomas
Board of Editors

This publication was established 255 years ago to advocate for the independence of the then British colonies and the establishment of a democratic Constitutional republic that would rule according to laws enacted with the consent of the governed and dedicated to the proposition that government existed to protect the rights and advance the interests of the governed.

Six years later, on July 4, 1776, the Spy's efforts were crowned with success by the signature of the Declaration of Independence, which established the United States of America as a democratic republic.

At some point in the latter half of its 249th year, that government died.  

On this July 4, 2025, we pause to pronounce and mourn its passing.

How do we know it has died? Consider:

– Just last week, the six bent Republican Supreme Court Justices decided that Article III courts lacked the power to prevent the Executive Branch from repealing Constitutional amendments on its own say so.  In particular, the infant children of certain types of immigrants will now be denied citizenship in clear contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment unless they themselves crawl into court and sue on the own behalf. Trump v. CASA, No. 24A884 (June 27, 2025).

As Professor Kate Shaw explained in a rare worthwhile essay in New York Times Opinion:

In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court could have definitively decided that Mr. Trump’s executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship is flagrantly unconstitutional and may not be enforced. Instead, the court announced that it alone can decide such matters on a nationwide basis — and that it would not do so here. ...

Both the general tenor of the opinion and these instructions — to rapidly reconsider these cases in the context of an entirely new standard announced in an opinion that is far from clear — evinced a remarkable lack of respect for lower courts. And the decision comes at a time when district court judges have done more than any other constitutional players to maintain core constitutional protections. These are the same district judges who are facing unprecedented attacks online, threats to their safety and impeachment resolutions.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her dissent: “Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway. But this court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.” 

– As part of its program to terrorize, torture, and eventually deport aliens with pending or no status (i.e. awaiting decisions on timely filed asylum petitions), the Executive Branch has arrogated to itself the right and power to:

  • arrest and detain legal permanent residents of the United States for expressing opinions disagreeable to the President
  • summarily deport in the unreviewable discretion of the Secretary of State any alien he determines to be an “enemy” and to not just deport them but deliver them variously to a foreign concentration camp or a third country war zone regardless of whether the alien will face torture in either hellhole
  • concoct criminal prosecutions against sitting members of Congress for seeking to exercise their legal right to inspect immigration detention facilities
  • tackle and beat U.S. Senators for attempting to ask a Cabinet Secretary a question as part of their Article I duty to oversee the U.S. Government
  • beat and arrest not just persons suspected without probable cause for lacking immigration status satisfactory to them but also American citizens for attempting to protect those individuals and their and their own constitutional rights:


 

  • and commence illegal denaturalization proceedings against US citizens for failing to agree with the President 

But the unconstitutional actions of an out-of-control Presidency go far beyond torturing immigrants and beating dissenters.  In the past six months, the Executive has unconstitutionally

  • terminated federal agencies established by Congress and cut off their funding, resulting in the likely deaths of millions of starving children and families in famine-ravaged lands
  • cut off legally appropriated and awarded funding to research universities to force them to submit to the political will and bigoted views of the current President
  • imposed tariffs without the consent of the Congress as required by Article I 
  • illegally deployed US military forces into American cities to harass and oppress the populace
  • allied with the Russian aggressor in Ukraine in defiance of Congressional action
  • threatened to conquer by military force all or part of nations allied with the United States
  • pardoned 1,500 convicted insurrectionists and then hired some of them to work in, wait for it, the Justice Department
  • purged the Justice Department of career prosecutors who acted in accordance with the law but not the whim of the Executive; and
  • demanded bribes from media corporations to punish them for speaking truth and from others to line his own pockets in multiple scams  

None of these actions can be reconciled with the American Constitution, the rule of law, or the separation of powers. 

What happened?

The causes of the collapse of the American Republic are many and deep rooted, although they can all be traced to the contradictions of its founding: the tension between establishing the dignity and equality of all human beings and the reality of granting excessive power to white slavers and racists to perpetuate their cruel oligarchy.

In the 21st century, several different strands of white power were woven together into a rope strong enough to pull down the structure of American government.  A Republican-dominated Supreme Court first overturned the voters' verdict in the 2000 election, preserving Republican domination of the Court for a generation.  Later it lawlessly voided a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for suppression of minority and Democratic votes. 

That same Republican-packed Supreme Court in turn cemented the domination of Republicans by sanctioning unlimited plutocratic dark money in politics under the guise of “free speech.”  It furthered Republican gerrymandering of Congressional seats for blatant political advantage, thereby permitting partisan politicians to stifle the popular will.

As a result of these decisions, the Republican Party in the Congress became increasingly dominated by corrupt reactionaries dependent on the favor of a depraved President to remain in office.  Both these developments destroyed the separation of powers and key checks against Executive Branch tyranny. 

Today for example the House approved a cruel unpopular bill to starve and sicken the poor and grant huge tax cuts to billionaires.  The margin was 218 to 214.  That's two votes.  The Republican gerrymander of swing-state North Carolina in 2024 gave the Republican three new seats, or more than the margin of victory the Republicans enjoyed today. 

Devoted Fox News watcher

Soon the Republican Texas legislature is planning to redistrict Texas Congressional seats in the absence of any new Census data to unseat Democrats they don't like, like Jasmine Crockett.  A similar effort in 2003 generated five more seats for Texas Republicans.  

A second factor has been the transformation of the media into emasculated irrelevance (like the networks and major newspapers) or nonstop disinformation volcanoes whose lies have sunk into and eaten the brains of millions of white Americans:

...there are many, many Americans who blame Fox News for changes in their loved ones, and many people out there who feel as though their friends and family members have been lost to a 24/7 stream of right-wing propaganda.

....Any salesperson or con artist will tell you that you can’t incept a thought in a mark’s mind out of nowhere. You have to find the hook that’s already there — fear, or desire — and exploit it. When it comes to exacerbating and honing the anxieties of aging Americans you can’t do much better (or worse) than race and immigration.

Because the truth is, Fox News didn’t invent racism, and many of our family members would’ve believed in it on their own. This may have been the hardest thing I learned from the stories I heard: Fox didn’t necessarily change anyone’s mind, so much as it seems to have supercharged and weaponized a politics that was otherwise easy for white Americans to overlook in their loved ones. 

Which leads us to the overarching cause of the death of the American republic: perpetuation of white plutocratic power by whatever means necessary. This has been a battle since the founding of our Republic, according to Prof. Heather Cox Richardson:   

In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.

The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. 
 

It took the French five tries to get it right

Even as we face the reality that the American First Republic (or Second if you regard Reconstruction as the establishment of a new and better regime) has passed, the response cannot be either despair or acquiescence.  

France after all is now on its Fifth Republic and when we were there two weeks ago, it seemed pretty jolly.  If the French can re-establish a stable democratic Republic and still have time to hang out in cafés, we can do the same.

While the forces that destroyed the American Republic remain powerful, they are by no means invulnerable.  In any event, the future has a funny way of surprising us.  In this century alone we have endured a mass terror attack, an economic meltdown, a pandemic, and puppy killer Kristi Noem.  We are likely to be confronted by similarly consequential evens in the future: another pandemic, another economic collapse, war, perhaps involving nuclear weapons, and another animal murderer.  Each crisis creates an opportunity.

But that may or may not happen in the lifetimes of anyone writing or reading these words.

In the meantime it is for us the living to record the demise of a promising experiment in democratic government and to assign blame for its death where it is due: on white people.