HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES IS KILLING AMERICA
By John Kass
March 23, 2025
When I was starting out as a Chicago City Hall reporter for that big metropolitan paper—when we could smoke in newsrooms on deadline, curse, tell jokes, laugh and wore jackets and ties to work—I had one rule.
I’d often discuss this rule with my political sources, elected officials, cops, city workers and others:
Lie to me just once, just once, and I’ll burn you to the ground.
It wasn’t an empty threat. Chicago politics wasn’t a cloistered convent. It was and remains a place of thieves protected by the laws and regulations that they themselves controlled. It is a Democrat Barter Town and like all such towns it is hell bent on strangling itself. And there was one top aide to the mayor who thought himself a master manipulator. Frank lied to me and I burned him.
I burned him repeatedly, mercilessly, using a line often attributed to the poet Richard Brautigan: “He’d sell a rat’s asshole to a blind man for a wedding ring.”
Political Chicago understood. He lied. But I would never use “asshole” in the paper. We had editors. So I adapted it to say Frank was the kind of weasel who’d sell dead rats on coat hangers to a blind man for earmuffs. His boss, the mayor, once asked me about the feud with Frank. He lied to me, I said. The mayor shrugged, said nothing more because he knew Frank.
I never spoke to Frank again, never trusted his word, even his allies were dead to me. He eventually left town. I think he’s a goatherd now.
It was necessary because an honest reporter can’t let such things go. And, because Chicago City Hall was and is the legendary epicenter of political lies and political corruption in Chicago. Even our reformers were crooked. One reform alderman who railed against the evils of prostitution was found by cops in the back of his car with a teen-aged girl, without his pants. Another reformer, a favorite of lakefront leftists who dubbed him the “conscience of the council” and “Mr. Clean” was sent to prison for tax fraud. The Chicago Police Department’s chief of detectives, lionized as a heroic cop by the papers, was in reality the mob’s paid man, the Chicago Outfit’s director of a nation-wide jewelry theft ring.
At least 30 Chicago aldermen have been convicted of corruption since 1973, most with high profile court cases. The most powerful crooks—like Ald. Ed Burke–controlled the agenda for decades and had bad judges in their pockets as hammers to enforce their will.
Investigative reporters–many of them liberals in the Democrat run cities–made handsome careers of Chicago corruption and learned these lessons well. One such reporter was Dean Baquet, who secured a Pulitzer Prize from an investigation of Chicago City Hall corruption and used that as a springboard to become editor of the New York Times.
Baquet was a good reporter and he loved fine suits and fancy silk neckties, but he had a habit of telling me about the novels of Marcel Proust. I should read Proust, he said to me as we were sitting near the City Desk. I stuck with Elmore Leonard.
But in the 21st Century an amazing thing happened to the media. Even as they mouthed their cliches about “speaking truth to power,” America’s corporate media began to openly revel at their participation in the power structure alongside their classmates and elites in the increasingly dominant managerial class. They became the willful tip of the spear for Deep State censorship and misinformation operations against populist challenges.
The Chicago political world was all about accountability not to the people, but to their fellow warlords. But the New York Times was accountable to no one.
Because of its dominant position in corporate journalism, the New York Times has never been held accountable. It leverages corporate media but has never taken responsibility for misinformation and malfeasance. The newspaper’s lies have been rewarded with dominant market position and those Pulitzer Prizes based on lies were wrapped adulation based on fear.
Far from its carefully nurtured Hollywood image as the fearless speaker of “truth to power,” the old gray lady is the newspaper of the Deep State and the American Kemalists who control and feed the Deep State.
But now, following abuses of journalism that have finally reached critical mass in the public consciousness, the New York Times has yet again become the object of ridicule by recently publishing a pathetic defense of its COVID coverage, misleading readers even as it bleats “We Were Badly Misled.”
You were misled? Really?
What’s left of real journalism couldn’t help but “pounce.”
No Amount Of Crocodile Tears Can Erase Corporate Media’s Complicity In Covid Scandal was a good take by The Federalist writer Jordan Boyd.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman asked How Often Has the New York Times Been Misled?
The NYT hand-wringing was good entertainment, since the old gray lady participated in a series of Deep State coverups and the comeuppance is a feature of melodrama. The New York Post naturally took a chomp out of it.
The national economy was crippled, America’s public schoolchildren were closed out of school by leftist educators and other COVID hysterics, drained of opportunity so that cities will never recover, the Deep State actors led by the New York Times elevated Covidians like Fauci, fed into the cancel culture and silenced all those questioning the “established views” in direct contravention of established scientific practice.
The Times served as the secular prayer book for hysterical leftists in local and state governments who used the New York Times as leverage to shut businesses and close schools, and now and you’re misled?
And what of the great journalism prizes where the Times pats itself on the back and puffs out its chest? There was the Walter Duranty Pulitzer that praised Stalin and covered up the famine that Stalin caused to murder tens of millions in Ukraine, to the recent New York Times Pulitzer damning President Donald Trump as an agent of Putin’s Russia in the “Russia Russia Collusion” stories based on a phony dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton.
And all were based on lies.
But will they ever return their phony Pulitzers? It doesn’t appear so.
The Times Pulitzer scandal continued as noted by Krystina Skurk in the Federalist” “New York Times Wins Another Pulitzer For Falsifying History.” And Mark Hemingway also of The Federalist offers this: “For Five Straight Years, The Pulitzer Prizes Have Rewarded Misinformation.”
The New York Times set a tone, from elevating President Obama to godlike status, to the scolding of anyone who would dare suggest that Joe Biden was non compos mentis though the world could see that the corrupt old man was descending into senility. Biden was propped up by the left and used as a figurehead, what historian Victor Davis Hanson refers to as a “waxen effigy.”
The New York Times was “misled” about COVID? Where are its insincere apologies for supporting the disastrous Iraq War? Years ago, I supported the Iraq War. I believed Iraq was a threat, as portrayed by the neo-conservatives who demanded an invasion. I was wrong. I repeatedly and publicly apologized for supporting the needless invasion that broke the Middle East.
Did the New York Times apologize? It waffled but did not apologize.
The litany stretches to hell. And that Hunter Biden laptop and the famed 51 American intelligence officials insisted bore “all the hallmarks” of Russian disinformation when it wasn’t Russian, but Hunter’s and on and on.
The New York Times brags that it contains “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
But was the Deep State plot to change America’s foundational date to 1619 fit to print and distribute to America’s schoolchildren? No. It set America’s foundation in slavery rather than the liberty expressed by our Declaration of Independence of 1776. It fed into the canonization of the street thug George Floyd, and that led to violent Black Lives Matter riots in cities during the infamous “Summer of Love.”
The left is all about force and violence. Did the New York Times say it was misled about Hunter’s laptop and the “1619 Project” and on and on?
No.
I’ve gone on for quite a bit here, but only to argue that the left, holding the New York Times as their secular bible has told lies for partisan advantage that have been deeply corrosive, killing American institutions that our nation needs to function. All the lies have now metastasized. The cancer from the leftist agenda attacks the bones of the nation, our spiritual and civic infrastructure. The left’s extreme excesses during COVID are causing Americans to not trust public health officials during the next pandemic, with deadly results. Apply the same citizen suspicion to the criminal justice system and the law, trace the curve and understand it leads to civic death. “Ozymandias” is not just a sonnet written long ago to be marveled at by schoolboys. It is a warning.
Think of it this way. With its 1619 Project, its stilted reporting on Donald Trump and a myriad of other ways, the New York Times took the lead in gain-of-function manipulations of America’s civic DNA to produce the intended and easily predictable damage to the health of the American way of life.
The New York Times owes a loud apology to America or it will forever be likened to some babbling old man at the end of the bar as the rest of the nation moves on and ignores him.
We are now in the season of those grand Washington journalism dinners, journalism with a Capital J, of brunch at the Hay-Adams Hotel, and dinners at ballrooms where the correspondents wear white tie and tails, or sashes to distinguish themselves. I’ve been to these corporate legacy media dinners of self-congratulation, the journos and the politicians performing skits and musical ditties, entertaining themselves like monkeys dressed up in velvet suits.
But we’re Americans.
We are not the masses to be manipulated and herded down the chutes like cattle at the slaughterhouse stockyards. Real America is not a land of cunning eunuchs and courtiers spinning lies to destroy enemies with the knives to be held by other witless tools.
We’re Americans. The cowboy is our icon, the pioneer, the frontiersman, the visionary entrepreneur and the self-made man whose lingering existence is an affront, and a mortal threat to the dominance of the Deep State cowards.
The stables must be mucked out. Now. And no amount of moaning about the mucking process should obscure the fact that the health of the state itself requires it. Urgently.
The New York Times is as lost in its Acela Corridor provincialism as any isolated shepherd boy in the most remote valley of Kurdistan. It hates the America that most of us love and so many died for. In its offices and newsroom, The New York Times whispers into its sleeve like the politicos of old Chicago and Tammany.
It is the one-eyed jack of our broken politics. And we’ve seen the other side of its face.
(Copyright 2025 John Kass)
-30-
About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.
Merchandise Now Available: If you’re looking for a gift for that hard-to-buy for special someone who has everything, just click on the link to the johnkassnews.com store.
Where else would you find a No Chumbolone™ cap or a Chicago Way™ coffee cup?
Because I know this about you: You’re not a Chumbolone.
Comments 91
“cunning eunuchs and courtiers spinning lies” -Ain’t it the feckin’ truth!
“like monkeys dressed up in velvet suits” Love it!
The New York Times and all the liberal left lying media can be summed up in a few words: Pravda wanna bes. But as long as bird cages need a paper lining on the bottom, the liberal media shines for that purpose. Anyone who takes the liberal media and TV journalism seriously is an idiot who can’t see beyond the nose on his face.
John, you put it all together rather nicely. I feel like I want to share it with a few people.
Author
please do John. Thanks.
Journalistic art. If we were in Italy, this column would be hanging in the Uffizi.
I hope and pray that this administration goes after these sons of bitches and make them pay a heavy price. If not I don’t think things experience lasting change. Free speech is one thing. Journalist/government collusion is another.
Author
Mike I don’t want the White House to go after journalists they don’t like. I would like it if the American people turned off the left-wing money spigot
John, the people the government needs to go after aren’t the publishers but the government functionaries that went to the publishers and got them to violate the rights of the American people in the name of the State.
Great column John
The NYT is as lost in it Acela corridor of provincialism…..
Brilliant summation.
Thank you John.
We have all been duped, for sure, and the end result is that no one trusts anyone or anything. Trump’s second term has already unearthed federal judges who are supposed to rule based on the Constitution, but they are instead ruling based on personal political affiliation. Equally, the political swamp creatures are being pulled from the muck and are repulsed by the sunlight.
Americans are not cattle. However, we have grown too comfortable and too divided to comprehend who are the actual enemies living amongst us.
This couldn’t have been stated any better. Thank you Erin for saying it the way you did.
Nice to hear from you Erin, miss your columns.
WoW , great article .
Thanks John for giving us non chumbolone’s the truth not slanted by the biased crooked media.
Huzzah, Sir John, Huzzah!
The Gray Lady needs to be put into the journalistic rest home until she dies a natural death.
When the NYT’s Jayson Blair fictional journalism scandal blew up in 2003, the paper — still capable of embarrassment — put a “public editor” in charge of internal scrutiny. Various of these ombuds tried to deal with the growing wave of left-partisan journalism at the Times, but ran into furious ideological warfare by its staff and Guild/union. That same warfare was waged against John Kass during the Tribune’s own descent to leftist journalism.
The Times settled its warfare problem by firing its public editor Liz Spayd in 2017 and cancelling the job. The Tribune settled its own by firing Kass in 2021 and cancelling all journalistic perspectives not lapdog left.
But John Kass News survives, strong and clear-eyed, while the Times and Tribune fall deeper into left fantasyland and cancelled subscriptions. Nice story, actually.
Author
Thank you David . Nothing like newsroom leftists devouring everything in their path. We should put in in a book:
How do we know what we think we know? Or, Is that etymology or the study of insects?
Thanks
John
If it walks like an insect, behaves like an insect, and was trained at a journalism school run by professorial insects — well, it’s an insect with a byline.
Keep going, John, keep going. You have a unique understanding of the insect-ian etymology of newspapers devolved to heirs of Pravda. They are actually losing, significantly thanks to courageous writers like you and Miranda Devine.
Excellent take. I spent 29 years in newspaper newsrooms with no ambition greater than to land a job as a columnist at the Tribune or the Sun-Times. After I moved back to Chicago working for a national Web site, I didn’t even bother to subscribe to either of its lying, cheating newspapers
Excellent take. I spent 29 years in newspaper newsrooms with no ambition greater than to land a job as a columnist at the Tribune or the Sun-Times. After I moved back to Chicago working for a national Web site, I didn’t even bother to subscribe to either of its lying, cheating newspapers.
P.S., Was hoping for a follow-up mention of Dean Baquet, who got far as “the first…” in his various jobs and gave the NYT newsrooms marching orders to go after Donald Trump 45. Not the Times’ role, of course, dedicating news hole to favoring one side 24/7, but there they went. Media have suicided their credibility — now they’re just crooked referees favoring the team that’s cheating.
At a local Irish watering hole in the woke capital of Ravenswood, there used to be a character, Jimmy, an ex-New Yorker, who smugly would sit at the bar every day and arrogantly scan page after page of the “Grey Lady” while the rest of us would quaff imperial pints of mother’s milk, i.e. Guinness, and discuss the local in lively discussions the local politics. Mr. Smugly was above us all street urchins as he maintained his pseudo intellectual posture. When I brought up to him an article out of the New York Post, he scoffed at my lumpen proletariat tastes. I think of Miranda Devine today from the Post and just cannot think of any current equivalency on the part of the Times. However, the wee puppies and dogs of Ravenswood are in dire need of Jimmy’s N.Y rag to keep the local sidewalks glistening.
I do enjoy waking up to these Sunday bombshells.
Thank you JK for your service.
WOW! Your best column ever. Not only in content but in verbiage. I always look forward to Sunday mornings to read your column and this one was a great way to start my day. Will probably reread to get a few more nuances out of your work
…,and for all those concerned about all the staff across all once-great newspapers, let them make solar panels or learn to code.
Well played Charles.
One of your very best — a Kass classic!
Thanks John, you’re my Pulitzer journalist!
What has happened at the NYT, is the same thing that happened at the Tribune, Times, and many others newspapers across the country, as well as local and national television news stations. They have all become just about irrelevant and untrustworthy because of the many lies and misleading information they have been peddling for decades. My parents taught me at a very young age about the dangers of telling lies. They start off small, then you need to constantly remember the 1st lie you told to cover up for the 2nd. Eventually, the hole you dug so deep trying to convince people of all the lies you told turns into the grave that will bury the trust that anyone had in you. Once the trust is dead and buried, it becomes extremely difficult to resurrect and regain that trust from anyone who you lied to.
Great piece this morning John.
It will take a Hercules to flush the stables clean.
Author
excellent!
Or maybe Paul Bunyan, Elizabeth. Besides his strength, he had to take care of Babe, so he had experience in this arena.
As Americans who disregard the 1619 Project and understand it is pure manipulation and also as Americans who embrace 1776, we know free markets win.
The NYT profits are no more. It is not a profitable entity. It’s subscriber reach is down and if it weren’t for public libraries and governments, maybe non-existent outside of 10% of the far left.
The other thing about capitalism is there is the concept of creative destruction. Things that are dominant don’t always stay dominant. There are no Packard cars. No Pierce Arrows. Other sources of news have usurped the NYT. They are now dominant. X and podcasts are one example.
A long time ago, I opined that if local papers wanted to stay in business they shouldn’t compete for clicks on the internet. They shouldn’t compete for national stories. They needed to look local, and go DEEP reporting honestly and transparently. But, in places like Chicago where the news people tried to curry favor like lapdogs to local politicians, it couldn’t happen. A scandal broke, and then there was the story. It read like a corporate annual report; everything was what happened before but nothing authentic about other scandals etc. The papers never rooted out crime or anticipated anything. If they did, it was pure conjecture and speculation fed to them by Democratic pols trying to shape the news. See the squirrel over there?
Bari Weiss has done a decent job since leaving the NYT but she isn’t there yet. The Chicago Sun Times just went under (again). The non-profit bent and pro-union bent failed it. The Trib failed.
The one thing all those old papers have going for them is brand names. Brand names in America are strong things. That’s why the old detergent companies never retire them.
Dear John,
You deserve a Pulitzer for this column. How true about the once great newspapers of the land as well as the television and radio media (with a few exceptions). Maybe one day they will wake up and smell the coffee and once again report the news as real news but I’m afraid that day is still off in the distant future.
Keep up the good work John and keep the faith for all of us,
Author
Thanks Warren:
You keep subscribing to johnkassnews.com and I’ll keep writing.
Deal?
JK
Excellent column John Kass. I have been skeptical of Chicago, Illinois, & Federal government since my late teens. Having watched the political machine operate in Chicago, the corrupt electrical union I belonged to, and business from corporate to Mom & Pop stores has made me feel what Erin Geary stated here: “We have all been duped, for sure, and the end result is that no one trusts anyone or anything.” We have become what the USSR was. Each time I visit Chicago I see the dejection & bitterness in most peoples faces. Gone is the friendliness when talking with people on the streets or small businesses I frequented. Many of these people have had the happiness torn from their souls & it makes me angry at the fools who have run the city & state into the ground. I live in NC but miss everything of how my hometown used to be. It’s where I was raised & all my fond memories are. I know Easter is approaching & what I wish for those corrupt people who destroyed Illinois in eternity in darkness & damnation. I know it’s wrong & I ask God to forgive me for such a thought.
Well done John.
As always your columns point on. !!!
Great column, as always, and you just reminded me why I disregard the (sic) “media” as much as I do. Other than your site, John Kass News, I haven’t purchased or read a newspaper in several years. I check things out on line and therefore get to choose what I consider “news” and what I consider “drivel”. I also haven’t watched the (sic) “news” on TV for several years. I consider watching some talking head, who may never have had an original thought, reading a teleprompter and trying to convince me how to think, very insulting.
When I saw those 51 alleged “intelligence experts” sell their souls to sign a letter claiming that hunter biden’s laptop had the all the appearances of “Russian Intelligence”, I shuddered. They took everything that they had done throughout their careers and threw it in the garbage. Pathetic.
Like many Americans, I trust the “media” about as far as I could throw my pickup truck, and even on my best day that isn’t too far.
Excellent ! Nothing else needs to be said.
Add another to the Trash Heap of Journalism : The WSJ . Now run by the Murdoch Brats under the direction of some Oxford credentialed editor, its news section has gone uber woke . The News Section allows a reader insight to what the Karens shopping in the cat food and white wine aisles of Whole Foods feel . Feel , not think . The reader comments are full of ‘I ‘ve had enough and I am cancelling”. Print journalism is dead and dying , replaced by on line real journalism , like Mr Kass
Read this along with my first cup of coffee. It works even better than the coffee.
As to the 1619 travesty and, on the other hand, the real America (or as you say, “the cowboy. . ., the pioneer, the frontiersman, the visionary entrepreneur and the self-made man”) at least Emanuel Leutze’s magnificent painting, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is still on display in the U.S. Capitol. Better days ahead, I pray.
https://www.aoc.gov/explore-capitol-campus/art/westward-course-empire-takes-its-way
Wow. One of the most scathing and scintillating takes on analog media I’ve ever read. Like millions, I accepted at face value the Covid-19 guidance and tried to do my part. Now, my eyes are wide open and my natural skepticism has thankfully been restored. Thanks brave men like John Kass.
Another excellent column. Well done!
Strong, strong column. Thanks so much!
OMG, you are so spot on, John.
Years ago I read a book named The Left Leaning Antenna, that was about the political leanings of mainstream broadcast media. It was way ahead of it’s time. Given the Marxist bent of the NY SLIME, and the Washington Post, there, if not written yet, an expose of ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO SLANT. That should be the mast head of the SLIME. Anything written by Dowd, Haberman, Friedman and Krugman should be taken with a grain of salt. Include Jenifer Rubin at WAPO in this grouping.
If the SLIME had any relevance, it would have jumped to the defense of the NY Post when Biden, Clinton, Obama, the DNC and Twitter censored the Post for the Biden laptop expose. But all we heard were crickets. That was the pinnacle of Fake News and now the real true Americans led by our hero John Kass are exposing frauds like the NY SLIME.
A column to include in its entirety in the Kass Hall of Fame highlight anals. The only weapons against First Amendment malpractice we have are the few torch bearers of truth left outside of MSM, wherein there are none. Thanks for throwing light still.
“All the News that Fits” – its liberal biases.
Elmore Leonard is my favorite!
Excellent column! How you’ve never won a Pulitzer is astounding.
There are 51 who have to face themselves in the mirror each day. One must wonder how do they do it?
Sadly it’s not just the NYT, it’s the tv anchors who spin their lies. I have watched something live, then turned on another channel only to be told what I saw wasn’t what I saw.
This is the best fifty bucks I spend in a year. Thanks for all your great columns.
Same here. JK News is worth $50 a month! Wondering if there are any former Ivy, former New England Divinity school alum at the Times
Yianni,
The only thing the NYT was good for, was their crossword puzzles! I rest my case…
thanks for the synopsis of a dying rag!
The MSM papers are all dying a slow death, prolonged by their online doppelgangers. (In case you haven’t noticed, the online stories aren’t always identical to the print ones, why remains a mystery that might be worth another Kass column.)
The Wall Street Journal’s leftist slant is increasingly impinging on its hallmark business coverage.
Its editorial department and editorial policy carried enough water for Obama and Biden to solve California’s water shortage a hundredfold times over.
Great JK, it’s just an example how the media went from protecting us the underdogs, and demanding honesty and accountability to joining the elites and selling their political ideology to the masses. Good work as always Kasso.
I have come across too many people who are just headline readers and believe that it is truth and that’s all they have to read. Now NYT has entered our local papers with those headlines. I pray that people do more research beyond those misleading headlines.
As any newspaper reporter will tell you, the reporters don’t write the headlines. But you may have to go to other sources to find the facts that are often left out of the story, so reading the rest of the story might not be sufficiently illuminating.
The Times’ misinformation and outright lies are a symptom of our power structure and electoral system, not the cause. The explosion of media along with the huge increase in voting populations have led media to a position of power. Getting elected – and thereby wielding power – is now all about mass media.
The internet age has splintered it substantially – there are now a multiplicity of outlets. Segmented sources therefore go for a certain segment to maintain market share, profitability and relevance. Hence, the Times’ feeds its segment – liberal elites.
The answer is to take down their power. Make mass media less relevant to power and electoral politics.
http://www.hearthepeople.org.
Let’s not forget “Historians” such as Heather Cox Richardson. I never knew who she was until right before the election, when a Facebook “friend ” (who is no longer a friend) posted her hateful, anti Trump, anti Republican opinions. The democratic left LOVES her. I am appalled on a daily basis about her “facts.” The latest is that she does apparently believe that Elon Musk was at the Pentagon to be briefed on war against China. She also stated that experts in domestic extremism find peaceful protests against Tesla dealerships and charging stations. Seriously? Setting Teslas on fire, destroying charging stations, firing guns into dealerships? We need to pay attention to these “Historians” who distort to please their AWFL audience.
I like John K. but I am a NY Times reader since 1962 and now a Shareholder.With the Sun Times laying off another chunk of staffers, legacy media is being tested. Guess who still passes the smell test? Rupert Murdoch’s Wall St. Journal in some aspects but not the Washington Post or the LA Times and we all gave up on the Tribune long ago. Yup,the NY effin Times. My paper. And it makes a ton of mistakes to this day including the Biden coverage. But,it has Nick Kristoff in dangerous places and during the Iraq War,it had CJ Chivers telling truths. The Times owner family,the Sulzbergers,are wealthy and they make mistakes,too. Even old Maureen Dowd was too fawning over Nancy Pelosi but she did criticize both Clintons. She missed the warning signs on Biden and then Harris. Thomas Friedman has a mostly good world view except he did support the Iraq invasion. oopsy.And go way back to the 1930s and that Times had a big problem covering changes in Germany and how it affected minorities and Jews. Big Oopsy. But it cares about Science and global warming,did very good covid pandemic reporting even when you disagree on Dr. Fauci. And now,it is doing superior work on thee Trump Follies 2.0 as is CBS News 60 Minutes. John K. misses the mark on the Times. It should apologize more for mistakes but the Sulzbergers do not like admitting mistakes which is why they removed the Public Editor Sunday essays on self-critiques. And forget how liberal and progressive it has become. Does anyone take Fox News journalism seriously before the 7pm personality hosted shows? I no longer even watch a full hour of MSDNC or CNN. But I trust the Times more than most other media although I know the political coverage was and is biased. But as I have opined,Donald Trump is saving nobody but his brands and using Elon Musk for a while till they piss each other off,to shield his own dealmaking weaknesses. Most of you in the John K. camp can’t admit that.It’s ok. Unless the Russia and China appeasements blow up. Or Da Bears become a Playoffs team. ouch! hey,John K.,open wide,this moutzah is for you!
I scan the NY Slime Times for the pictures.
Wait until this guy finds out the NYT coverage of “climate change” is even more misleading than its Covid dreck. Wellness check might be in order.
The New York Times has gone from “all the news that fit to print” to “all the leftist crap that we should think you should believe, even if it is not true”. Trump won for a reason – the American people got tired of all the Left’s crap and said enough of this garbage. Except for the loafing government employees and their unions, I don’t see anyone crying for the government employees losing their jobs, because they did just enough to get by and care less about the people they were supposed to serve and who were paying their salaries. No one is going to cry about arrogant people getting what they have coming to them. They work for the government because they can’t cut it anywhere else. They might have to do something useful somewhere else, and they could not handle the shock to actually have to do something useful. And they might have to show up at the workplace, instead of playing video games on the taxpayers’ dime.
HA! I just read your comment for laughs. You truly missed the points presented here by the wise JK. Yes, Trump/Musk are moving way too fast, and need to back up. Many worthy people have lost their jobs and are living in fear because of this new administration. My question is this, why do you think the American people elected Trump??? It is the fault 100% of the left and the goonies that run the NY Times, and outlets like them. Kamala? Really? What a pathetic joke she is. The voices of truth have been drowned out by liberal lunatics. Time for a 3rd party option.
I have always wondered about that headline, “all the news that’s fit to print”. Who makes that decision?
The demise of the newspaper and rise of the podcast culture will change how people get their news, but it might end up making us more divided not less. We all tend to seek out our own echo chamber.
Great column, John.
I caught on long ago not to believe everything I read or heard on the news.
In other words, what were their sources? If the sources were not true then it was all baloney.
The NYT credibility ship sailed long ago. They joined a fleet of other publications at sea.
As for all those journalistic award dinners – how phony can they get?
Among the worst is the annual Al Smith dinner in NY for politicos and journalists.
Self aggrandizing elites who are condescending, insulting and outright nasty –
no one is amused.
People are tired of reporters continuously shoveling drivel and claiming it as fact.
Writers who know their sources and tell the truth are like a breath of fresh air!
In addition, Real America includes Veterans who fought for the freedom we have today.
First, the Bush kid wasn’t qualified for the job and he didn’t know nothing about governing and he solely became dependent on his VP Dick Cheney.
Next, the chief villain for the Iraq War was Crook Kissinger and the then Sec of State Collin Powell felt so bad that his voice wasn’t heard so he resigned after his 1st term.
That “monkeys dressed up in velvet suits” could very well fit politicians like Pritzker.
And talking about Covid, I will squarely put the blame on the shoulders of Obama-Biden- Justice Antony Screwball Kennedy for planting the seeds of Covid thru their support of Same-Sex Marriage in this country. If then President Donald Trump had the slightest sense of moral judgement, he would have imposed National Emergency, sent the Congress home and sent the Obama-Biden team on an exile to a remote island or to a firing squad, placing the millions of lives lost on these guys’ shoulders.
My dad just made ninety years and his generation would turn on the evening news and crack open the daily newspaper. I remember the Chicago Today, Daily News, Sun Times and The Tribune when I was a kid. The first three were seen as liberal, left leaning Democrat papers. The Tribune was the opposite often endorsing Republicans in elections. The Today and Daily News are long gone. The Sun Times is on its way also, living on fumes right now. The Tribune? It still considers itself a conservative newspaper although most of its articles are sourced from discredited outlets like the Associated Press, NY Times and Bloomberg. There is always reason to doubt the truthfulness any article from those outlets. Any semblance of honest local reporting also left that rag a long time ago when it gutted real reporters like John and replaced them with ” activist reporters” from the also discredited Northwestern School of Journalism.
These papers are dying a slow death now that people can see the bias and lies they push. The Covid cover-up accelerated the process since people now had the time to actually read the bullshit that they were pushing. Four years of lying and covering up for Joe Biden definitely was the last nail for legacy print media. Print media spent four years telling its readers that Biden was mentally competent. Inflation was down. There was no border crises. I’m not even getting into the usual Trump lies since that went on for the previous four years also. I moved from Illinois to a free state four years ago. I seem to be cursed by this compulsion to read Chicago news so I subscribe online to the Tribune. I read it for laughs mostly and cancel it every few months until they reach out and offer me a six month subscription for a dollar. The price sounds just about right…
Always I have been a conservative but turned against Republicans when I was in 10th grade in my home country when I read in the newspaper (yes, we had to read English daily every day and discuss topics related to our young independent nation and the world in our Social Studies class) that how Ike was pushing for cold war and started seeking allies from the rest of the world while our Prime Minister along with Marshall Tito and Egypt’s Nazer was pushing for Non-Aligned Nations’ Treaty. Therefore 15 years later when I came to Chicago, I hated Tribune because I believed Republicans are war mongers and learnt about Chicago Politics from Daily News thru Mike Royko. Also I used to refer to Sun Times to read hilarieus articles from Art Buckwalt. But when the Daily news folded I went to Sun -Times and then to Tribune, wherever Royko moved! Finally when I learned Royko lived in Kennil Worth I stopped reading him. However I still have his books,
Sez Who? Sez Me, and Slats Grobnik and some other Friends that I used to enjoy reading. By then I had good admiration for congressmen like Paul Simon, Chuck Percy and another Rep that I forgot the Slavic name from Evanston side. Anyways, my first vote was for Gov. Jim Edger and it took me 23 years after I have been in this country to make a decision to finally renunciate my home country and to become a Citizen here! But then again, for reading I have had to turn to Chicago Tribune again for news and like you did I have had to drop my subscription too often and eventually when
John Kass left since I already stopped reading Rex Hukspuppie and a black lady and others. It was all so much nonsense and I quit!
I love that you have used a favorite reference of mine to diss the elites in the salons along the Acela Corridor! We need to come up with its opposite reference for the real Pulitzer caliber writers: Devine; Kass; Shellenberger; Taibbi; VDH; Solomon; Schweitzer! If I am forgetting some please forgive me. I’m thinking instead of salon it should be a gritty watering hole. I need to ponder on that a little harder and come up with a spot on praiseworthy reference. Maybe you have one in mind.
‘The Royko’, I would say ‘The Kass’ but he ain’t dead yet.
Great article. The NYT is produced by and for the upper West side, progressive elites and the few remaining wannabes out in the hinterlands. Their echo chamber is shrinking. Podcasts and substacks, like JKN, serve the market for those of us who hate being lied to.
I couldn’t agree more. I was wary of the NY Times with the 1619 project but then gave up on them as a lost cause when the Chicago George Floyd looting spree was buried as a minor column a few pages deep. Maybe I have local bias, but it was one of the top stories on a slow news day, if not the top. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me (and I won’t let twice happen).
I think the title to your column, John, attributes much too much power to a member of a dying industry.
I gave up on the Chicago media when the great (?) Carol Marin withheld a story about Carol Mosley Braun before the election because she didn’t want to influence the election. I never trusted her or any of the other media darlings again. Thank you JK for your honesty.
I remember when it was a great paper. In the early 1970s I drove every Sunday morning from northwest side to pick up the NYT paper at a downtown hotel or loop newsstand. It was great reading then. Sadly, no papers are without a political agenda: left or right.
Liars, Liars, Newspaper on Fire!
In 29 years of working on the streets of the southside of Chicago, I noticed the event I was called to had little or no resemblance to the event reported in the press. We would howl when some knucklehead was interviewed and gave a completely wrong version of the event. We used to joke that the reporters were trying to find the biggest nut to interview that they could find. We worked SARS and MERS and even had a suspected ebola case, we learned to wash our hands and to not lick doorknobs or hobos. People got fired for not getting the jab. 2 years of staying inside, eating takeout and binge watching was actually sold as the cure to a disease and people bought it. There is your truth, my truth and the truth….you can be wrong, but being purposeful is the sin.
In 29 years of working on the streets of the southside of Chicago, I noticed the event I was called to had little or no resemblance to the event reported in the press. We would howl when some knucklehead was interviewed and gave a completely wrong version of the event. We used to joke that the reporters were trying to find the biggest nut to interview that they could find. We worked SARS and MERS and even had a suspected ebola case, we learned to wash our hands and to not lick doorknobs or hobos. People got fired for not getting the jab. 2 years of staying inside, eating takeout and binge watching was actually sold as the cure to a disease and people bought it. There is your truth, my truth and the truth….you can be wrong, but being purposeful is the sin.
Great article and a shout out on Citizenfreepress.com!!
John, as a former newspaper reporter myself, once upon a time I, too, was upset that you had never been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. But now, I have to ask, of what value is a Pulitzer Prize anymore? Considering the people who award them and the quality of the people who have received them in recent years, NOT having a Pulitzer has become a recommendation in itself!
From the volume of comments, John, you’ve hit a home run on this one! Right on! Early on
I wrote a column for the Des Moines Register opining that the most likely source of Covid was the Wuhan lab and was personally attacked for it. The NYT should apologize for not questioning the conflicts of interest of those goverment officials and scientists who so virulently criticised those who proposed the lab origin most likely.
Dr. Ganske. You were smarter and more skeptical than I. But I am likelier more pissed. As an anesthesiologist I was up close and personal – intubating patients in respiratory failure – with the virus early on in the pandemic – before vaccines, before any meaningful remedies. I was fully on board with the conventional narrative that the virus was a natural occurring spill over event whereby the intermediary host had not yet been identified. In May 2020 one of my colleagues, who happened to be fluent in Italian, was watching an Italian version of 60 minutes on Youtube. He called me over and said: “hey Bruce look at this.” The gist of the piece he was watching was that the virus was a lab escape or lab creation or both. I of course dismissed this as some sort of right wing conspiracy. My mistake. I’ll never forgive the legacy press, nor in particular and far more importantly the legacy medical press (i.e. NEJM, Lancet) for repressing the likely truth; nor my naivete and gullibility.
This is why I keep subscribing. Keep it up!
Thank you for a crystal clear description and explanation of what is wrong with the media in the USA.
Really liked Michael Nolan’s water analogy. Funny and priceless.
John, are you going to write about the Supreme Court contest in Wisconsin? I fear that our neighbors to the north are going to be sunk by the lunatics of Madison and Milwaukee. What a shame, Wisconsin used to have some of the most common sense people in America. Remember, the ferocious rallies in Madison against Governor Walker, I fear that is the future. Oh yes, and burning Teslas!
Been listening to the death rattle of the World’s Stupidest Newspaper ( Chicago Sun Times) and I expect the lying lice like the New York Times to begin coughing up blood and bile in short order. It’s a start!
Beautifully written and true. I got burned and sheered by the New York Times since 2019. It’s hard to quit, for a philologist, because the writing is superb. And if you like word games, well, let’s just say stay away from their Spelling Bee. It’s been documented many times that the NSA and CIA have relationships with their columnists and reporters and feed them copy. Consider, of course, Judith Miller and her rah-rah-sis-boom-bah cheering for the war. (I’d have like to have seen Colin Powell put a bit of that yellow substance down his throat to prove it wasn’t what he said it was.)
The New York Times pulled a Hearst with Ukraine. Honestly, they brainwashed me, though Russia was the aggressor. Ukraine was brainwashed by US and EU military planners. Thank God it’s coming to a close.
They are one-way communicators, editing their comments section to reflect their own opinion, even if a civil, contradictory opinion comes through––they don’t publish it. It is pretentious, vain, and written for the rich.
So, my one point of difference: It’s not a liberal or leftist paper. It is an elite, rich newspaper. The Intercept, In These Times, The Nation, The New Republic, Harpers, The New Yorker, sometimes The Atlantic are liberal media. They don’t run million dollar homes as feature stories.
And Time, Newsweek, AP, Reuters, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, etc. are moderate media.
So screw the Times. As I’ve had to learn over and over again.
Tremendous article John, Keep them coming. Warmest regards, Dan Locallo
But Trump’s thousands of lies don’t seem to bother you. Why is that?
They don’t bother me! Isn’t that interesting? He loves America and his game is for you and me. We are living in a revolution, so pay attention. Someone said the sunlight is what the Deep State cannot stand.