Cornucopia: Wall-to-Wall Bias in Andrew Rosenthal's New York Times Sunday Review

September 20th, 2015 10:51 PM

It's not just the New York Times news pages that lean left -- conservative viewpoints are virtually shut out of the paper's opinion pages as well, especially under the regime of toxically smug liberal Andrew Rosenthal, whose hobbies include calling Republicans racist and homophobic (but don't include following current events.) The Sunday Review section has long been a particularly opinionated outpost, with Rosenthal using the day of leisure to print left-wing essays.

The September 20 Sunday Review was a nearly flawless compendium of economic and social liberalism, beginning on A1 with "A Toxic Work World," an opinion piece by New American Foundation president Anne-Marie Slaughter claiming that in this ruthless new era, only the young and childless can advance.

For many Americans, life has become all competition all the time. Workers across the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about toiling 12- to 16-hour days (often without overtime pay) and experiencing anxiety attacks and exhaustion. Public health experts have begun talking about stress as an epidemic.

Her solution? Paternity leave for men, and "to emulate other industrialized countries and build an infrastructure of care." And a whole laundry list of liberal ideas:

To support care just as we support competition, we will need some combination of the following: high-quality and affordable child care and elder care; paid family and medical leave for women and men; a right to request part-time or flexible work; investment in early education comparable to our investment in elementary and secondary education; comprehensive job protection for pregnant workers; higher wages and training for paid caregivers; community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer; and reform of elementary and secondary school schedules to meet the needs of a digital rather than an agricultural economy.

On Page 3, Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, called for internet giants to be broken up under a lazy, populist headline: "Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful."

But as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies that must eventually be broken up.

Brian McFadden's weekly cartoon "The Strip" hailed teenager Ahmed Mohamed, who supposedly "invented" a clock that his teachers in Texas thought looked like a bomb. He was briefly detained by police, and become celebrated as yet another U.S. Muslim victim of racism.

An op-ed by Cornell University professor Kate Manne defended the latest left-wing silliness sprouting from the ivy of academe, "Why I Use Trigger Warnings," while a University of Michigan professor called for harsher punitive measures on General Motors in a case involving faulty airbags, including charging individuals within the company itself: "Justice Falls Short in G.M. Case."

And an op-ed by Benedictia Cippolla op-ed, "My Father, the Priest," called for a relaxation of the celibacy rules in order to mitigate a shortage of priests.

Unusually, the editorial page contained a single long editorial, nudging Obama to keep a campaign promise and close what the paper considers a blot on American's national honor: "How to Close Guantanamo."

For almost 14 years, the United States’ military prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has sat festering on the edge of the Caribbean and the Constitution. Opened by President George W. Bush in the panicky months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the detention center has had a powerful radicalizing effect, has severely tarnished America’s standing as a nation of laws and has cost taxpayers more than $5.2 billion.

The section was rounded out with contributions by reliably liberal columnists Timothy Egan and Nicholas Kristof. Even Ross Douthat, the sole right-of-center voice to appear at all, penned a liberal-pleasing column about Christian conservatives' over-reliance on heroic political figures like Dr. Ben Carson.