That f.....g newspaper

Dan Froomkin, interviewing former NYT reporter Nina Bernstein, has a good summary of why we so often find the New York Times infuriating. 

[I]t is nothing new for editors at the New York Times and elsewhere to be uneasy about calling too much attention to reality — when that reality has a liberal bias. (Stephen Colbert coined the phrase “reality has a well-known liberal bias” during the Bush administration.)

But that friction is particularly at issue today, at the Times and elsewhere, as political reporters and their editors struggle to accurately and sufficiently convey facts about the Republican assault on voting rights and democracy. The fear of taking sides is very obviously holding them back.

“Many reporters across the traditional news media are struggling against institutional tics and timidities that make ‘balance’ a false idol,” Bernstein said. The result: “The inadvertent normalization of existential threats to democracy and public health by one party and its right-wing media echo chamber.”

 

I don't have much to add. The Republican party is a stranger to the truth. But the conventions of journalism make it very difficult for reporters to state that clearly. Anyway, read it. 

Also, too, Froomkin's discussion with Dana Milbank of the WaPo.

 

“I don’t think anything in our training or experience as journalists prepared us for a moment in which one of the two major political parties is no longer cooperating with the democratic process: promulgating the most outrageous lies, disenfranchising voters and giving state legislatures the ability to overturn unfavorable election results, openly embracing white nationalism,” Milbank said. Not knowing any other way to write about politics, “they’re doing the normal thing.” . . .

“The old methods of back and forth just don’t apply,” he said. “There was a time when both sides had claim to the truth — they were just on different sides on the issues. We really are in a new world where one side is, a large amount of the time, operating from fiction. It’s not just fairy tale fiction. It’s very corrosive and damaging fiction,” he said.

“I don’t think it is hyperbolic to say that we are in this existential struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and between fact and fiction, and we should not be on the sidelines of those,” Milbank said.

 

Yep.