Although NewsBusters has documented The New York Times’s commitment to pushing a liberal agenda for years, it took a discrimination scandal inside the paper itself for the MSNBC network to air a liberal journalist admitting what everyone already knows but liberals are loath to confess: The Times has a left-of-center tilt, despite its dogged persistence in claiming to be objective.
On the May 15 edition of Ronan Farrow Daily, former Times reporter Leslie Bennetts, author of the The Feminine Mistake, expressed her outrage at the allegation of wage discrimination among Times executives coming to light as a result of the sudden sacking of executive editor Jill Abramson. [see video below]
Abramson reportedly approached publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. with her discovery that she was being paid less than a male deputy and less than her predecessor was paid and was fired shortly thereafter.
The New York Times considers itself “one of the leading voices for liberal values and for social justice in America” Bennetts reminded viewers, decrying the hypocrisy of its publisher knowingly participating in gender pay discrimination.
Of course, for her part, Abramson – so devoted a fan of the Times she literally had a “T” tattooed on her back – has repeatedly denied there was any bias in the paper’s news pages.
It remains to be seen if her tune changes now that they paper she worshiped has fired her, but other Times alumni have been candid about the paper’s biases.
Here are a few:
"So many [reporters and editors] share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of the Times. As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in the Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects." — Outgoing public editor Arthur Brisbane in his final New York Times column, August 26, 2012.
"If the 2012 election were held in the newsrooms of America and pitted Sarah Palin against Barack Obama, I doubt Palin would get 10 percent of the vote. However tempting the newsworthy havoc of a Palin presidency, I’m pretty sure most journalists would recoil in horror from the idea." — then-New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller in a column for the paper’s June 19, 2011 Sunday Magazine.
"Of course it is....These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think the Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed." — then-New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent in a July 25, 2004 column asking, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?"
