October 23, 2024 By Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian
In the early days of this blog — say, prior to about 2020 — I made a regular sport of heaping scorn on the New York Times. Every week or two I would take a particularly preposterous article and attempt to analyze whether it represented incomprehensible ignorance of the world versus intentional deception of the readership. Or maybe both! More recently, the Times has gotten so crazy, and the craziness so widely recognized, as rarely to justify such an effort on my part.
But then, sometimes I can’t stop myself. Take today’s Times.
As background, yesterday was the occasion of the last televised debate in the three-way mayoral race among Zohran Mamdani (Democrat), Andrew Cuomo (Independent) and Curtis Sliwa (Republican). Election Day is only 12 days away, and early voting starts in two days. If you go to the New York Post, you will find that the front page and several internal pages are devoted to coverage of the debate, including key soundbites from all candidates. That seems about normal to me. The Post’s take is that Cuomo had a good night, and Mamdani not so good, which you can take for what it’s worth (given that the Post is strongly supporting Cuomo at this point). Here is the Post’s cover from today:
And then there is the Times. I continue to subscribe to the print edition. I have gone through today’s edition multiple times to verify that the following statement is true: There is not one word about the debate. There is not even a mention that it took place.
Now granted, in this internet age the print edition no longer represents the totality of content at the Times. So I have gone through the website as well, looking not only for information about the debate, but anything about the campaign. First, I go to the opening page at www.nytimes.com, where my subscription gets me behind the paywall. Then I scroll way, way down — past Weather, and past More News, and past Culture and Lifestyle, and past The Athletic, and past Cooking, and past Games, and finally I come to an area called “News,” which among multiple other topics has three articles under a heading of “New York.” One of those is about gambling and the NBA, one is about an ICE raid on Canal Street, and the third has the headline “After Remark About Mamdani and Sept. 11, Cuomo Faces Democratic Rebukes.” This article also mentions nothing about the debate; and indeed the event reported in this story occurred this morning, and thus could not have been covered in today’s print edition. It seems that Cuomo appeared on a radio talk show hosted by conservative host Sid Rosenberg. The Times reports the exchange as follows:
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo laughed along with a conservative radio host on Thursday who said that Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim mayoral candidate, would celebrate another Sept. 11-style terrorist attack on New York City. Within hours, the exchange ricocheted across the campaign trail, where Mr. Mamdani and a cross-section of Democrats denounced the conversation as Islamophobic and outside the bounds of even a heated campaign.
The Times then proceeds to quote a litany of Democrats who are horrified and take the opportunity to cast Cuomo as an “Islamophobe.”
If you click the link and read this article, and make it all the way to the end, you will find a section headed “More on the N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race.” And in there is a link to this article: “N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Trade Zingers in Final Debate.” So yes, it does exist. I wonder how many people other than myself had the persistence to find it.
But getting back to the front page of today’s print edition, what we do find is a lengthy (some might say endless) puff piece about Mamdani’s days in high school, including the seminal moments of his political career running for class vice president: “How an Elite Public High School Set Mamdani on the Path to Politics. Zohran Mamdani’s time at the Bronx High School of Science expanded and helped shape his views of New York, from the cricket pitch to politics.” Here’s a good sample:
Cricket had never been recognized as an official sport in New York City’s public schools. Mr. Mamdani, like many South Asian schoolmates who had grown up around the game, wanted in anyway. And so, he and a friend effectively created a team themselves, with all the logistical fortitude available to distractible adolescents, amassing a cache of bats, pads and player sign-ups (“brown ain’t no requirement to play this game,” Mr. Mamdani urged on Facebook) and working to persuade enough students and adults that they were fronting a legitimate operation.
Just an innocent, enthusiastic, hard-working kid! And he promised free orange juice for all!
(Should I mention that my mother-in-law spent her career teaching at Bronx Science? She retired about 10 years before Mamdani got there.)
Getting back to what is actually on the front page of today’s Times, the biggest article in terms of real estate on the page has the headline “Pro-Palestine Activists Lament the Steep Cost.” (Slightly different headline online.). It’s all so sad:
For a time, the Gaza protests seemed to have the ingredients to grow into the next mass political movement for young Americans. The cause — which adherents saw as a struggle between a marginalized and dispossessed people and an oppressive global power — connected with university students, many of whom were already drifting to the left and had experienced their political awakenings during the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020. Many of them, in fact, started calling the Palestinian suffering “the moral issue of our time.”
And then, somehow, the American people just wouldn’t go along. It’s so inexplicable!
The other item taking up a big chunk of page 1 real estate is a picture of some activists gathering on an iceless King William Island in far-northern Canada to lament that global warming is making the Arctic more accessible to unwanted outsiders.
You get the picture. It’s not just that each article is more absurd than the next. It’s that none of them contain any actual useful information. They are all just the latest spin to promote one left-wing cause or another.
I apologize to the readers for continuing to spend money on this, but every once in a while it is useful to this blog to consult the Times to understand what the official party line of the left is on some particular subject.
