I canceled my subscription to the NY Times and told them why.

[NNadir]

It was the highly offensive lie on their front page yesterday about how fit, tall, handsome, and possessed of stamina that doddering senile, criminal, uneducated, stooped thug Trump is, along with praise for his violent, racist crowds.

I told the Times person that if I wanted propaganda, I'd watch Fox News.

[piddyprints]

2. Wait...

They called that orange bloated bag of toxic air handsome and fit? The world is tall compared to me, so I wouldn’t be in a position to judge that. But fit and handsome?

NYT owes the world an explanation and apology.

[PortTack]

28. Nailed it!!

[ShazzieB]

30. The I can't find the quote now, but i don't think that's exactly what it said.

Pretty sure the word "handsome" wasn't used, because that would have stuck in my mind, lol.

I think it was more along the lines of Trump "appearing" more youthful (evidently because he dyes his hair and arranges it so you can't see how bald he really is) and his silly behavior at his rallies giving the impression of "stamina." (Trying to paraphrase in a way that doesn't sound complimentary to TSF like the original.)

It was pretty stupid and a major paper like the NYT should have known better.

[RobinA]

3. I Thought The Article

was pretty accurate in that it did point out how the two come across very differently and are held to totally different standards. The article just points that out. There's nothing new in the notion that Trump is a bull in a china shop who just plows ahead AND IS ABLE TO PROFIT FROM THAT. Biden has been picked on for gaffes for decades and it has hurt him for that long. Wrongly, in my opinion, but public opinion, especially now, is generally ignorant and fairly crass. A lot of what Trump does and says would never work in another candidate, but that's not the medias' fault. If people prefer a strong-voiced, dictator wannabe, idiot in the White House, that's on the voters, not the media who points it out.

[NNadir]

12. I thought the article was propanda designed to reinforce an obvious lie.

[robbob]

29. Except for one thing:

The media picks up on these narratives and chooses to amplify them. Then after months and years of doing this they run a piece “somehow, for some strange reason, the public sees candidate 1 as virile and manly and candidate 2 as feeble and weak…”. Gee, how did THAT happen? So we get Al Gore “serial exaggerator” because he “said he invented the internet” (hint: he did no such thing), and GW Bush lies us into a war with Iraq that cost billions (trillions?) of dollars and they can’t even work up any indignation about it.

[stopdiggin]

40. I agree. Read the article, and it was pretty factual

Certainly not extolling Trump by any stretch - and naming it propaganda seems (to me) quite a bit of stretch. The article lays out a pretty straight forward picture of tangible fact - and that is that Biden is getting dinged a great deal more on the the age and fitness issue than is Trump. That's just the way it is. And, no - I don't think that is as a result of media bias.
(Trump's deficiencies of character, acumen and abilities have been reported on extensively - in the NYT, and virtually everywhere else - for year upon endless year now. By this point in time I think it is incumbent to recognize that with Trump, it just doesn't make any difference. The media is, by and large painting an accurate picture - and a significant portion of the U.S. just simply doesn't care! And that is not the medias fault.)

[MLAA]

4. Well done

[MattNC2021]

5. I cancelled as well. Hopefully enough people do

You can play Quordle and Sequence on Miriam-Webster site

[soldierant]

35. Y'all almost make me wish I hadn't cancelled years ago

so I could cancel now. Almost.

[Ziggysmom]

6. I cancelled NYT a few months ago. Glad I did. Magmat rag!

[HAB911]

7. Ditto here

[usaf-vet]

8. Bush II and the lies that got us into the Iraq war hunting for WMD. They found ZERO nucs. And we still have troops.....

...... on the ground. They have been stenographers for the republican warmongers.

Judith Miller was the pipeline in then.

I canceled then and always looked for the source of a story.

I have commented on NYT stories on DU, but otherwise, the lies that got us into Iraq were it for me.

[yardwork]

32. That's what did it for me, too.

I haven't given the NYT a dime since they harbored that war criminal Judith Miller. Nothing they've done since has changed my mind. Far from it.

[Aussie105]

38. The US and its political leaders lost a lot of respect around the world.

To start with, the hype about WMDs in Iraq was echoed by a lot of the media and echoed around the hallowed halls of US politics.

The troops moved in.

Then none were found.

Any repercussions on media and political types, not to mention US 'intelligence' services?

Not that much . . .

Seems hype (aka BS) gets a free pass at times.
Seriously, Chinese Whispers at a high level?

[Quakerfriend]

9. Good! I did the same just yesterday.

I miss the old Gray Lady

[Warpy]

10. Face it, the Grey Lady has been turning tricks for a long time

Back in the 70s, Sunday morning down time in NYC, I bought a Boston Globe and WaPo at out of town prices, guy asked me why no Times, and I told him people who read he NY Post were better informed. Cue laughter.

[Joinfortmill]

11. We are in a moment in history, folks. Keep the faith.

[maxsolomon]

13. Amazing they have any subscribers left

based on how often DU cancels theirs.

[RainCaster]

14. I quit them 6 months ago

I'll never go back.

[meow2u3]

44. I canceled my NY Times subscription in October, 2022

I told them why: because the coverage is slanted in favor of a treasonous wannabe dictator. I got fed up with the right-wing bias and sensational, inflammatory headlines bashing Democrats as if our side could do no right.

[samsingh]

15. good for you

[SleeplessinSoCal]

16. Wonder if the mounting cancelations turned them farther to the Right

I fear they forgot the far right won't pick up the slack. They're awfully busy plotting their destruction of all we hold dear. Won't the Times be surprised to read they could've done their duty as an esteemed member of the fourth estate.

[StarryNite]

17. Good.

And it was important that you told them why.

[Duppers]

18. EXCELLENT ❗

[Hermit-The-Prog]

19. NYT did the same sort of fluff piece for Hitler...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218673897

[Dave Bowman]

20. Wow, I'm speechless.

Glad I dumped that rag last summer. I far much prefer The Guardian.

[erronis]

25. Agree with you on The Guardian. Let's hope they aren't knee-capped in some way!

[erronis]

21. Yes, Democrats should criticize the New York Times - Jamison Foser

https://www.findinggravity.net/p/yes-democrats-should-criticize-the
Jamison Foser - Senior Fellow at Media Matters

via https://digbysblog.net/2024/02/12/work-the-media-for-fun-and-political-profit/

It won't stop the Times from doing big things badly, but there are other important benefits

Nothing about the New York Times’1 conduct over the past three days, three years, or three decades should surprise anyone who has been paying even a little attention to the paper. The Times is a newspaper that falsely portrayed Al Gore as a serial liar and George W. Bush as a straight-talker; treated Hillary Clinton’s email hygiene practices as the most important issue in 2016; and routinely portrays Donald Trump as a law-and-order candidate despite his repeated, flagrant law-breaking. It is, politically, a Republican newspaper.

There are a lot of reasons why the Times did all that, and why it spent the last three days portraying Joe Biden as a senile old man with one foot in the grave and Donald Trump as the “After” photo in one of those testosterone-boosting scams2 that advertise during televised sporting events. I’ve written about most of those reasons, often at great length, for more than 20 years, and I won’t belabor each of them here. What they add up to is that functionally the New York Times is a Republican newspaper, long has been, and likely long will be.

First, I very much agree that the most important thing the anti-Trump coalition can talk about for the next ten months is how thoroughly awful Trump is and how unimaginably worse everything would be under a Trump presidency than a Biden presidency. Second, I agree, the Times’ ain’t a-changing3 any time soon. Twenty years ago I co-created Media Matters for America in large part in response to the New York Times’ coverage of Whitewater, the 2000 presidential campaign, and the Bush administration’s push for war in Iraq;4 I’ve spent a deeply depressing amount of my life, both professionally and as the world’s worst hobby, trying to get the Times to change and, short of that, trying to get more people to understand its flaws so fewer will be led astray by it. Whatever the opposite of boasting is, that’s what I’m doing when I say: Few people alive are more aware than I am of the Times’ flaws or the long odds against the paper getting much better as long as the Sulzberger family remains in control of it.5 And even a change in control would not likely lead to a change in behavior: The Times’ peer news companies behave much the same way.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

22. Would make an excellent OP. Thanks.

[NNadir]

27. Thank you for those links.

[stopdiggin]

41. well now there's some over the top hyperbole

why it spent the last three days portraying Joe Biden as a senile old man with one foot in the grave and Donald Trump as the “After” photo in one of those testosterone-boosting scams2 that advertise during televised sporting events.

And that is suppose to pass as even handed judgment/evaluation? Could we perhaps be a little more florid and bombastic?

[Cha]

23. Thank You!

[The Wizard]

24. I cancelled during the W Bush presidency

because they were publishing stories of Iraq's WMD with no evidence. The White House mole Judith Miller was publishing Rove's propaganda as news without reliable sources. Remember "Curve Ball" as her source.

[diva77]

31. That was the last straw for my subscription. Later on, Mother Jones made timeline of the lies leading up to war in Iraq

September/October 2006 Issue
Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq

Mushroom clouds, duct tape, Judy Miller, Curveball. Recalling how Americans were sold a bogus case for invasion.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline/

At a congressional hearing examining the march to war in Iraq, Republican congressman Walter Jones posed “a very simple question” about the administration’s manipulation of intelligence: “How could the professionals see what was happening and nobody speak out?”

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, responded with an equally simple answer: “The vice president.”

But the blame for Iraq does not end with Cheney, Bush, or Rumsfeld. Nor is it limited to the intelligence operatives who sat silent as the administration cherry-picked its case for war, or with those, like Colin Powell or Hans Blix, who, in the name of loyalty or statesmanship, did not give full throat to their misgivings. It is also shared by far too many in the Fourth Estate, most notably the New York Times‘ Judith Miller. But let us not forget that it lies, inescapably, with we the American people, who, in our fear and rage over the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, allowed ourselves to be suckered into the most audacious bait and switch of all time.

The first drafts of history are, by their nature, fragmentary. They arrive tragically late, and too often out of order. Back in 2006, we attempted to strip the history of the runup to the war to its bones, to reconstruct a skeleton that we thought might be key in resolving the open questions of the Bush era. As we prepare to leave Iraq, we present that timeline to you again. MotherJones.com offers a greatly expanded (if now technologically outdated) version of this timeline, one that is completely sourced to primary documents and initial news accounts. It was our hope to make this second draft of history as definitive as possible. So that we won’t be fooled again.—THE EDITORS

SNIP

======================
go to link to see actual timeline of LIES

[The Unmitigated Gall]

26. nicely done, sir.

I haven't considered that rag as any kind of a "newspaper of record" since the Judith Miller obscenity. Thousands of American servicemen and servicewomen are dead, and the Times helped.

[spooky3]

33. I did too (see this thread)

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218675236#post27

If enough of us do this, maybe change will come. In the current environment in the news industry, they can’t afford to alienate large numbers of subscribers. And I highly doubt that they have gained or will gain enough right winger subscribers to make it a wash.

[creeksneakers2]

34. The Times also published this:

I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way.

"I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focusing on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job. Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence, and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country. Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation — both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age — are likely to be of equal or greater importance."

I'm bothered by the attitude on DU that journalists should be advocates. It should be expected that we'll read some things we disagree with. I look at the publication as whole and don't look at every detail.

[NNadir]

36. The author of the article that caused me to cancel was very much advocating.

Basically, the article consisted of Trump excusing bald faced lies.

If you don't think that this statement from the article in question isn't filled with bald faced lies, I can't help you:

Mr. Trump, by contrast, does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways. Mr. Trump often dyes his hair and appears unnaturally tan. He is heavyset and tall, and he uses his physicality to project strength in front of crowds. When he takes the stage at rallies, he basks in adulation for several minutes, dancing to an opening song, and then holds forth in speeches replete with macho rhetoric and bombast that typically last well over an hour, a display of stamina.”

Here's what I sent to them in my LTE before calling this morning to tell them to cancel:

The “tan” is makeup, sprayed on. He’s not “heavyset,” he’s obese. He’s not “tall,” he’s stooped. The “adulation” comes from a cadre of cultish racist thugs who among other things stormed the capitol building to overthrow the government, smashing windows, violently assaulting police, stealing documents. His “macho rhetoric” is incoherent slurred words that have no rhyme or reason wherein he does things like announcing that one needs ID to buy a loaf of bread, hardly a reflection of stamina.

[creeksneakers2]

53. Both statements look similar. I don't think yours would pass in a big name newspaper.

[stopdiggin]

42. What!? You mean to say that the NYT ISN'T quite shamelessly shilling for Trump?

There might actually be some even handedness involved? Surely you must be mistaken!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[NNadir]

43. Yeah, Fox News has liberals on from time to time, you know, "Fair and Balanced."

Apparently this approach makes some people think that Fox News is "fair and balanced."

I'm sure that in the days of "but her emails" there was one or two articles in the New York Times saying "no big deal," among the hundreds that said it was a big deal. Who knows, maybe some of the coverage of Hunter Biden's laptop was even interrupted with comments on Jared Kushner's 2 billion dollar grift from the Saudis.

Sometimes appeal to naiveté works quite well.

[stopdiggin]

47. if you look at the article you point to - and see PROMOTION of

Trump as a candidate - then you and I just have different comprehension and perception of a given material.

I'll join other observers in lamenting the fact that it seems certain people in this camp will be satisfied with nothing less than a (consistent) slant in our direction - in order for anything to be considered unbiased or fair. That's simply not the definition I go with. Am I tickled with ever article I run across? Hardly. Am I convinced that the NYT (and others) are dead set on bringing this country DOWN? Again, no - that's way too jaundiced and over the top for me.

(oh, and thank you for slapping on a label of naivete ! )

[NNadir]

48. Thanks for your thanks, you're very welcome.

I stand readily by the slanted language for which you thank me, but I am expressing an opinion of a general class of people, people who think that Fox News and the New York Times is "fair and balanced."

In my opinion anyone who reads the New York Times and denies that it's reporting opinion as facts is not very sophisticated or insightful. I have personally, as a scientist, recognized this for a very long time where their science reporting appears, but now it's extended to a comparison to two elderly men. I often joke here at DU, that one cannot get a degree in journalism these days if one has passed a college level science course with a C or better.

I'm an old man who's lived a long time, and a long time student of history. To say that there a "slant" is needed to describe in factual language what Trump is borders on the absurd.

There hasn't been an American quite like Trump since possibly, Aaron Burr, and one doesn't need a bias to make an accurate description of that fact. For fuck's sake, the man inspired thugs to storm a citadel of government, is under criminal indictment and we have to hear how handsome he is?

Nixon did not appear on TV asking burglars to break into the Watergate building and the historic New York Times helped bring him down by reporting facts, not commentary on his good looks.

The article to which I object is clearly a slant, since it begins, before describing how much stamina Trump has, and how good looking he is, and how wonderful the crowd is, it points out how old Biden is.

Really? A man who regularly bicycles is old and out of shape and withered and a fat blob in Golf Cart has "stamina." Now that remark of mine is slanted, but I'm not being read by millions of people having a lie planted in what is nominally called "the liberal press."

The New York Times is now, as many posters in this thread have pointed out with many other examples, a right wing rag.

If that bothers anyone here, I really, really, really couldn't care less. I certainly can't help anyone so doing. Again, your welcome for the descriptive language that I used to describe the general class of people who don't recognize that the media is a habit these days of handing out propaganda.

[stopdiggin]

49. your lead sentence puts Fox News and NYT in the same basket. that pretty much tells the tale. -(nt)-

[NNadir]

51. I agree. It does, although one is slightly more subtle, but not by much.

[mahina]

37. Good job. No point closing your subscription without telling them.

[Aussie105]

39. When does a newspaper stop being a newspaper and become a propaganda sheet?

BINGO!

We have an answer!

Glad people can see that clearly in this case.

Should be more of it.
More people catching on, I mean.

[people]

45. Good for you!

[4lbs]

46. Notice that Dumpster Fire hardly ever mentions the NYT anymore?

Remember when he used to call them the "failing New York Times" ?

That was a few years ago. Now that they really support him, he lays off.

It's like he's Randolph Hearst reincarnate and the NYT has become part of that media empire.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

50. Here is someone else who cancelled their NYT subscription

I cancelled my subscription back in 2016 due to the Hillary email coverage. The NYT really wants to re-elect TFG

Link to tweet

[Mike Nelson]

52. Yikes!

... "fit, tall, handsome, and possessed of stamina"? Hope this was a NYT editorial, but even so... he seems unfit, both mentally and physically. He makes himself look tall, but looks to be within the average height for a male human. Handsome? Huh? I notice sometimes he holds on to the podium, like he's holding himself up... also, I wonder if he takes some kind of drug to hive himself stamina. It looks fake. Coffee... or something more? Maybe that is why he can't seem to understand the teleprompter speech and goes off script.

[Cha]

54. I was on Twitter earlier & read Mia Farrow had

a tweet that she Cancelled her NTY subscription, too!

May many others do the same!