This ironic 13-second video illustrates the modern news media. "Nothing to see here . . . " whenever the facts don't fit the preconceived narrative. For instance, the constant news reports concerning the Club Q nightclub shooting hit a sudden cold snap after the shooter was announced to be "non-binary."
My dog lives in the eternal present. It's OK for dogs to do so, but not OK for people. People need a sense of history to avoid the mistakes of the past. People need a foundation of hard-earned knowledge on which to make sense of the future or else they will not ever accomplish great things. Without a solid foundation of knowledge based on history, people will live like dogs.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
George Orwell - 1984
The NYT did some significant soul-searching after being exposed for promoting the WMD lie that plunged us into war in Iraq. That's old news now. Since the NYT won't come clean about it conduct over the past few years, Matt Taibbi has decided to continue to expose the NYT for what it has become. Here's an excerpt from: "The New York Times Editorial Board's Creepy Avengers Fantasy: A brief note on a strange byline."
Editors should spend 99.9% of their time making sure they’re not green-lighting factual car-wrecks, and about six seconds a day thinking about how to run earth. The Times Board is flipping that ratio.Trust in journalism isn’t something you can boost with a marketing campaign. It’s a tedious process of proving every day you have an institutional commitment to getting facts right while being willing to admit error. Readers paid attention when the Times held a piece questioning WMD intelligence until after the invasion of Iraq, when former CIA chief Michael Hayden bragged in a book about working with Times editors to kill stories critical of the intelligence community, and, more recently, when they refused any kind of audit with regard to failures in the Trump-Russia story.
. . . .
But no one needs newspapers to save the world. We just need them to get stuff right. Why isn’t that enough?
Facts first, then we can develop opinions. That's the way it needs to be. Our biggest problems these days seem to all be caused by those who spout opinions first, then gather facts conveniently filtered by the confirmation bias.
Taibbi, in his latest article: "No, New York Times, You Don't "Deserve Better" Than Donald Trump. Trump should spare us all and retire. But his antagonists' lack of self-awareness keeps giving him oxygen."
If these people were truly that far above the muck, they wouldn’t need to censor reality to prove it. Same with the Times. They penned that editorial pretending they hadn’t been outed years ago for building their whole newsroom around a phony Russia story. Slate published a transcript of a Times “town hall” in which Times editor Dean Baquet talked about his paper being caught “a tiny bit flat-footed” by the conclusion of the Mueller probe, because “our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’”
By “a tiny bit flat-footed” Baquet meant his paper was unprepared for Mueller to come up empty because it had ceased to be a news organization willing to embrace guilt, innocence, or whatever the hell the truth was, and instead became a political operation agitating on behalf of “our readers who want Donald Trump to go away.” It openly rooted for one particular outcome and ignored the other possibility, causing the paper to publish one mistaken or clearly biased story after the other.
These ranged from the infamous “Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence” story to the transparent government PR headline, “F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims” to stories proclaiming the “Nunes memo” about FBI malfeasance to be a mere partisan effort at “defending President Trump from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.” As later revealed in the report of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the Nunes memo was correct in virtually all its parts. Yet the Times didn’t investigate that story or dozens of others properly, because it was and is now a political organ, not a newspaper.