Jill Abramson, the veteran journalist who led the New York Times from 2011 to 2014 is now criticizing the paper for its extreme bias against President Trump and says that although it helps the paper’s bottom line, it’s quickly eroding their credibility in the process.
Abramson was promoting her new book, “Merchants of Truth,” which casts doubt on the reliability of today’s news sources. She agrees with Steve Bannon’s assessment that the media is the opposition party.
She is from the old school when reporters reported the news and not their ideology. She is unlikely to ever work in the media again, so she can afford to tell the truth.
“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson writes, adding that she believes the same is true of the Washington Post. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
What’s more, she says, citing legendary 20th century publisher Adolph Ochs, “the more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased. Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear or favor sounded like an impossible promise in such a polarized environment.”
Abramson describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” she writes.