Left-wing bias was not mentioned as a contributing factor to The New York Times’s ongoing financial woes in a profile of the “paper of record” published on Wednesday at the similarly left-wing Vanity Fair magazine.
Noting the changing business landscape of the news industry given technological shifts flowing from the rise of the internet, the article’s author – Sarah Ellison – neglects to offer any examination of the nature of The Gray Lady’s content as a driver of its own decline.
With print journalism’s bottom line damaged by the digitization of information, the Big Apple’s most well-known newspaper is not alone in facing challenges to its profitability. Ellison’s examination of these challenges, however, does not countenance the rise of alternative and dissident media competitors which have dually undermined The New York Times’s credibility while offering original news and analysis of a flavor never be found within legacy media outlets.
Without irony, Ellison describes the 164-year-old newspaper as “the most respected news organization in the land.”
Inadvertently illustrating left-wing arrogance, he newspaper’s former executive editor Jill Abramson is quoted as saying, ““Call me old-fashioned… but I wanted the newsroom to focus on journalism, not revenue generation.” In other words, the public’s appetite for news and information as expressed through their aggregate consumption of media in a free market can not be trusted to reward high-quality journalism with profitability.
Abramson now teaches journalism at Harvard University.
“The New York Times is winning at journalism,” concluded a report of the newspaper’s strengths and weaknesses in commissioned by Abramson in 2013. The newspaper’s business challenges, the report added, were in its marketing and leverage of modern platforms of delivery of news to readers. Again, no mention of the newspaper’s left-wing bias and its political alignment with Democrat politics offered as a possible driver of its reduced revenues.
Major media outlets seeking broad circulation would do well to consider good faith attempts towards climbing the unreachable mountain of objectivity. In lieu of such attempts, a greater diversity of political viewpoints might be helpful might in reaching a broader audience and increasing sales.
With the prevalence of left-wing political orientations across news outlets and among journalists/reporters, saturation of the industry with similar viewpoints further diminishes business viability. A political echo chamber across the nation’s most widely consumed newspapers is not good for business.
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