Talk:The New York Times

Liberal?

A few edits have been made recently that add to the first sentence of the article that NYT is liberal. Is this accurate or do we need consensus before we can add this claim? X-Editor (talk) 14:04, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

I believe this is the most recent edit in question. The Fordham ref looks like a blog, whose author conflates the NYT with National Geographic magazine for rhetorical effect, with some handwaving about how NYT readers ostensibly expect it to be "sensitive about notions of language and power". That's an essay, not a source for the paper's editorial slant. The CJR ref looks like a Marxist's complaint that the NYT doesn't lean far enough to the left. Neither of those refs seems like a solid definitive source for the claim that the Times is a "liberal" paper.

If this discussion is going to get anywhere, the first thing to do is reach agreement on a working definition of "liberal" in this context. Just plain Bill (talk) 14:31, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

@Just plain Bill: I was able to find this article from WaPo that says that NYT’s audience is more liberal according to Pew research, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the content in NYT itself is liberal. X-Editor (talk) 19:31, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

That 2014 Pew study shows up on media article talk pages every so often, but extrapolating from an audience survey to saying, in Wikipedia's voice in the first sentence of the lead, that a publication has a "liberal" editorial slant is more of a stretch than WP policy allows. Just plain Bill (talk) 12:42, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

@Just plain Bill: Agreed. X-Editor (talk) 13:01, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

I've reverted. Consensus for such a characterization should be obtained on the talk page since it's historically been a controversial thing. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 14:54, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Left or Left-center would be an appropriate description of the current paper. Keep in mind they've never endorsed a Republican Presidential candidate.

[1] (just 3 days after this discussion)

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I mean I can go on, but these are all clear indications of leftward bias. There's no need to omit it. The overall facts are generally accurate, but the manner of publication is an issue. Buffs (talk) 22:03, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

@Buffs: Some of the sources you have provided are unreliable, but you would still need to get consensus first for claiming that the NYT is left or leaning left based on the reliable sources you have provided. X-Editor (talk) 05:31, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

• Those are almost all unreliable sources (New York Post, Media Bias Fact Check, Allsides, Adfontes, the Heritage foundation, a student paper, Fox on politics), or opinion pieces (the NJ.com piece, the Reason piece, the heritage piece, the WSJ piece), or in some cases opinion pieces from unreliable sources. Most of them are also severely biased (The Post, Fox, WSJ, the Heritage Foundation, Reason). None of them are usable for statements of fact in the article voice. --Aquillion (talk) 13:42, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

• You've unilaterally decided that they are untrustworthy, but there's tons of research to the contrary: https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/u-s-media-polarization-and-the-2020-election-a-nation-divided/pj_2020-01-24_media-polarization_0-03/ . When 50% of a population don't trust a publication, it's safe to say they aren't trusted by those groups. When you look at the articles I cited above (as a wide smattering of articles, not as specific, definitive sources of such a claim), you decided to simply ignore them and dismissively label them as "unreliable" when, in fact, they ARE reliable FOR THOSE OPINIONS. You're literally following this line of logic:

"People don't feel that way"

"Here are some examples of how they feel"

"Those aren't reliable sources"

"How aren't they reliable sources? That's LITERALLY them saying how they feel"

• Does this mean they are 100% accurate across the country? Of course not. But that wasn't the point I was trying to make. Buffs (talk) 15:59, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

  It was not Aquillion who "unilaterally decided that they are untrustworthy" but consensus through Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. They are not reliable because they may lack fact-checking, get key and uncontroversial facts wrong, etc. There may well be a liberal bias but certainly not in the way you interpret it or in a left-wing way, and most generally reliable sources are able to remain reliable because their bias does not affect them to get most things right. All sources are biased but the ones you used are either self-published, lack fact-checking, and their bias affect them in a much bigger way that simply does not make them reliable for facts. Davide King (talk) 03:50, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

  "there may be a liberal bias...but not in a left-wing way"? DenverCoder9 (talk) 08:19, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

"Is the New York Times a liberal newspaper? Of course it is." This quote is taken from Daniel Okrent in a New York Times editorial. The paper itself claims to be liberal; I don't understand the reticence to use a label that the newspaper uses to describe itself. (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/the-public-editor-is-the-new-york-times-a-liberal-newspaper.html). I note that Blaze Media is properly characterized as a conservative media company, and Pod Save America is properly characterized as a liberal political podcast. Why should Wikipedia refrain from using these labels when appropriate? Other evidence:

• Allsides characterizes the newspaper as leaning liberal (https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times)
• TheFactual characterizes the paper as "moderate left." (https://www.thefactual.com/blog/nyt-bias-credible/)
• Media Bias Fact Check rates the NYT as "left center" (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/) but of note also received a "high" rating for factual reporting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidcnorris (talk • contribs) 00:55, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Two sentences after "Of course it is [liberal]" Okrent addresses criticism of the paper from the left. If you want to call the New York Times "liberal", that would be fair. However, do not conflate that with the left. 71.185.178.141 (talk) 02:53, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

"liberal" and "left" generally refer to "Democratic" in the United States. Are you saying you'd agree to add "liberal" to the lede? DenverCoder9 (talk) 08:20, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Incorrect claim by user: Pyrrho the Skipper that Secondary sources are required.

Pyrrho the Skipper has repeatedly reverted changes based on incorrect understanding on guidelines for primary sources - despite those guidelines being provided to the user. I would suggest the refusal to read the guidelines is Edit WARRING but I will presume in good faith that the user simply misunderstood the guidelines and I have broken them down for said user below to go through at his leisure. In the meantime, however, the edits should very clearly remain in the article.

The source in question is an MIT Open Access study regarding NYT's bias studied through machine learning. It is a primary source. The user claims in the comments for his reversion that primary sources are not permitted and that a secondary source is a requirement.

Primary sources are permitted as long as there is no interpretation of the primary source as per the guidelines here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_using_primary_sources#Primary_sources_should_be_used_carefully

"Material based on primary sources can be valuable and appropriate additions to articles. However, primary sources may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements that any educated person—with access to the source but without specialist knowledge—will be able to verify are directly supported by the source. This person does not have to be able to determine that the material in the article or in the primary source is true. The goal is only that the person could compare the primary source with the material in the Wikipedia article, and agree that the primary source actually, directly says just what the article says it does. "

The article passages the user keeps reverting are DIRECTLY from the primary source. The passages are from the introduction and the conclusion of the study - not exactly hard to locate even without using the Find function. No further interpretation has been made and thus it is a valid use of a primary source.

One published by MIT Open Access and based on statistical analysis (and has the source to replicate it) provided no less.

Yogidoo88 (talk) 22:14, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

But your entry is misleading. This is not "A 2021 study by MIT"; this is a paper by an engineering undergraduate. It's not appropriate as a source for anything in this article. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇} 22:40, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

It is not up to you to dismiss a study because it is done by an undergraduate. The paper has been published on MIT Open Access and is a valid primary source.

The description can be ammended to more accurately describe the paper's origin, however.

I'll also just mention that a study on the topic of bias using open-sourced machine learning by an engineering and computer science undergraduate at MIT is a valuable insight into a topic plagued with bias.

I hope this has also benefited Pyrrho the Skipper's understanding of Wikipedia's policy on primary sources when quoted directly.

Yogidoo88 (talk) 23:10, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Let's take it further:

I don't see how a study put out by an MIT undergraduate using open-source machine learning on the topic of bias is any less valid for consideration than:

i) a misleading journalist, leaving selected titbits for their target audience, who also has their hands-tied by their food, shelter and reputation maintainer.

ii) an old potatoe, using rusty biological wires, indulging themselves in endless paragraphs of ramblings usually based on what effectively boils down to hearsay, imagination and what creativity is left.

Which are littered all over wikipedia as sources worthy of consideration. What is the difference between the reputation of an author or the publisher and the student and their educator in putting out work that has the potential to be inaccurate or misleading? Are today's expectations of all journalists and authors that are accepted on wikipedia that much more stringent than undergraduates at prestigious universities?

The section on Pre-prints says they are generally discouraged. It doesn't say that they cannot be used.

In this case the author is not making an exceptional claim. They are adding to claims of other papers already in the article.

The author provides links to the code used to replicate the study as open-source.

The interest comes from the machine learning used to process the information to determine bias, which makes it particularly interesting.

I'm not going to die on this hill. But adding the source with an explanation that is an undergraduate pre-print paper should be permissible, especially when you consider all the other rubbish that usually gets sourced.

For bio-medical articles, I would be much more hesitant. But in the case of determining bias, it's an interesting addition, worthy of a mention - with a suitable introduction.Yogidoo88 (talk) 01:27, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Refs

• Rindsberg, Ashley. The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. Hungary, Midnight Oil Publishers, 2021.

Bookku, 'Encyclopedias = expanding information & knowledge' (talk) 10:52, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Reading the article on Ashley Rindsberg, all I’m seeing is a background in “science and technology” and philosophy (and just B.A.s in both). Does this dude seriously have the credentials to be considered a reliable source? Dronebogus (talk) 13:31, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

"Political Alignment"

Add one for this paper in the margin. Drsruli (talk) 15:49, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Anti-Ukraine bias

I add few sentences about criticism NYT has received, such as encouraging Ukraine to give lands to Russia and parallels some prominent individuals have drawn with Duranty's coverage. All of it has been deleted as undue. Is it really controversial to include a few sentences of valid criticism? NYT has flawed legacy and their recent statements on Ukraine are appropriate for the section discussing Duranty. LeontinaVarlamonva (talk) 03:31, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

I removed sources cited to Twitter. They are some random political commentators, not experts, and we normally should expect better sourcing than self-published sources. Ditto with the photo, which I removed per NOR policy. Even if including the photo could pass the NOR test, its dueness should be established first.

I didn't remove everything. I'll leave discussing the rest to others. Politrukki (talk) 12:47, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

How many tens of thousands of opinions have been expressed in this publication since its inception? The nature of opinions is that they are not facts, they are matters about which there is disagreement. Just because it's on folks mind in the past 6 months does not make it significant fact about the publication in toto, and your personal opinion about the legacy of this publication reveals that perhaps you had no intention to make your edit NPOV in the first place. SPECIFICO talk 13:16, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

So a former head of state, Toomas Hendrik Ilves telling his 187.9K Followers that NYT is no better than it was during Walter Duranty is just a "random commentator" that's worth dismissing? Just because medium here is twitter doesn't mean it wrong. I think at least Ilves comment should be added back because he is noteworthy and also because parallel to Duranty is relevant in that section since it starts with Duranty. I don't feel strong about image or any other things that were removed.--LeontinaVarlamonva (talk) 18:08, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

With no disrespect to Ilves, who is good people, Ilves is not a subject-matter expert for the content. Hence, "random commentator" applies in this content, as it would apply to possible tweets about football, astrophysics, and train timetables. Wikipedia is mainly based on secondary reliable sources. Self-published sources are the lowest quality of sources. There are countless of Wikipedia notable persons who have millions of fans, but are mainly experts for statements about themselves. Accepting self-published sources widely would be untenable. Politrukki (talk) 19:49, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Financial status of the company?

Might be nice to delve a bit into the profitability of the company. As that's missing, but it would be interesting to know how much they earn as they are a paywall news company. CaribDigita (talk) 09:27, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

"New York Time" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect New York Time and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 December 5#New York Time until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Certes (talk) 13:34, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Paragraph on specific articles

Genuinely, how does listing specifically controversial articles qualify as undue here in a section specifically on NYT anti-trans articles in 2022-2023?

And even if there was one you didn’t agree with the inclusion of, again, you don’t get to blank the entire paragraph.

User:SPECIFICO Snokalok (talk) 22:45, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Tagging User:Sideswipe9th and User:Newimpartial, I feel they’d have valuable input Snokalok (talk) 22:50, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

OP. you appear to be highly concerned about trans issues. This page is about the history, people, achievements, and reception, of a 150+ year old publication. We deal with the recent trans coverage in a section that is already disproportionately large. Cherrypicking various recent comments by semi-experts on the subject is UNDUE and there are BLP issues involved, particularly relating to the editorial board and to Pamela Paul, who has been villified for her recent commentary. The small removal I made gets the section closer to a reasonable size and sourcing. SPECIFICO talk 23:51, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Whether an editor is concerned about trans issues is not the issue here. Editors on Wikipedia may support LGBT rights. That is normal. If you want to make it about editors, we could also examine your own affiliations. But that's not the issue here, is it? The section here is about trans issues as they have been covered by The New York Times, and reactions to that coverage. I also found those deletions to be inappropriate. There has been significant coverage of these issues in the news media, and that coverage deserves space to be addressed. The content is following WP:DUE. It seems that by your own admission, your main complaint is that the section isn't as short as you would like, but that is not a good reason to delete well-sourced content. Hist9600 (talk) 00:27, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Journalistic-opinion-taken-as-fact has always plagued Wikipedia (especially in sports articles), so I'm happy to see its progress checked whenever possible. Seasider53 (talk) 01:01, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

• WP:DUE weight is relative. I definitely agree that this aspect deserves a section; but is it, for example, deserving of more space than criticism of the Times' coverage of the Iraq War? Is it significantly more important than the Times' coverage of AIDs, something that doesn't have its own section at all? Based on the space we are devoting it, we're currently treating this as one of the absolute biggest controversies in the Times' history - is it? This sort of disparity can be fixed by trimming in one area or by expanding others, but it's difficult to see every part of the controversy section being expanded to this size. It's also worth considering weight within the section - are these individual articles and the response to them equivalent in weight to eg. criticism from WPATH, or the letters from massive numbers of contributors and the Times' heavily-covered response? Getting too deep into the individual nuts-and-bolts of individual criticisms isn't really necessary on the main article for the Times itself when we have more sweeping and higher-covered criticism from higher-quality sources. --Aquillion (talk) 05:47, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

  Why don’t we have a section on their AIDS coverage? Is such an influential paper using their influence to deliberately make things worse for the gay community not historically notable enough for their main page? Snokalok (talk) 08:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Because nobody has written it, presumably. You could take a shot at it. These sorts of sections are prone to WP:RECENTISM - you can see that it heavily-emphasizes controversies that occurred while Wikipedia existed and omits most controversies from before then. --Aquillion (talk) 10:46, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I shall. In the meantime, the consensus seems to be against the disputed paragraph, so do as you wish on that front. If we go another 12 hours and nothing's changed, I'll delete it. Snokalok (talk) 13:31, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I find myself agreeing with SPECIFICO here. While the section as a whole is due, the paragraph that we're discussing here does not seem to be. Of the six citations in it, the first three are explicitly opinion pieces, and one (the USPATH latter) is a primary source. Only the PinkNews and ScienceBasedMedicine sources seem to be secondary. Some of the prose is also redundant to what was said in previous paragraphs.

As for the rest of the section, it could definitely use a trim. There's a lot of detail on the open letter content that I'm don't think we need to go into as much detail over. There might also be a little bit of OR in the second to last paragraph, I've not read all of the sources in that section yet so maybe there's an explicit link in one or multiple of them, but I would question if the "The next day, the paper published an op-ed" is actually framed that way in the sources discussing this controversy? Sideswipe9th (talk) 02:01, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Since I was asked :) I agree with Sideswipe9th about this. Newimpartial (talk) 03:08, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Hmmm very well, I’ll defer to your editorial wisdom Snokalok (talk) 08:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Hats off. Sometimes talk page collaboration actually works as intended. SPECIFICO talk 16:10, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Excessive blockquotes in the controversy section

The controversy section has no fewer than six blockquotes. Most of these are not individually significant quotes; five out of the six are WP:PRIMARY quotes to the NYT itself with no secondary source - largely to opinion pieces. While an editor presumably felt that these were significant because they reflected the opinions of people working at the Times, we don't need five fairly massive blockquotes. In one case we have two blockquotes to the same person from the same article! Doing so (in the absence of any secondary coverage) places undue emphasis on the opinions of what is ultimately just a few individuals. I don't think that these opinions necessarily need to be excluded entirely (although in a few cases they smack of WP:RECENTISM), but we can summarize them in one sentence each rather than allowing one or two voices to dominate entire sections. --Aquillion (talk) 10:55, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I disagree. I feel that this is appropriate. This is tendentious editing that you've been trying to remove for a while. DenverCoder9 (talk) 08:21, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

"now colloquially referred to as the morgue."[

Incorrectly implies that "the morgue" was called something else "then" or "at some other time". Which is false, and not supported by the reference.

Also, of course, Anada didn't create the photo library, and the the morgue wasn't created by the addition of the photo library to Anada's morgue. For more information and references, see The_New_York_Times_Archival_Library 1.159.58.220 (talk) 21:53, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Plagiarism of NYT/ copyright breaches

NYT is widely copied on the web: search for any NYT headline and you'll find not just copies of the article, but actual copy-cat sites.

I'd like to see what the NYT response is, and their description off the situation 1.159.58.220 (talk) 22:02, 4 March 2023 (UTC)