Gray Lady Down
Filed under: US Elections
A report in yesterday's New York Times shows just how dire the Gray Lady's straits really are. Of the country's top 25 newspapers, only seven had worse declines in daily circulation over the past six months than the NYT, whose daily readership was down 4.5% (with the vaunted Sunday paper plummeting even more dramatically, by 7.6%) while the top-25 average was only a 2.4% drop. In an appalling display, the paper not only buried this information deep in the story, it appended a graphic which ranked the 25 papers not by their loss (or gain) of circulation but by total circulation, placing the NYT near the top rather than near the bottom of the list. And then it tried to minimize the losses, claiming it had intentionally "shed less-profitable circulation." Yes, that's right, the NYT doesn't WANT those nasty, dirty readers it lost. Not a single word about how various scandals of inaccuracy might have affected readership, nor anything about its ever more biased attitudes. Can you believe it? All the news that's fit to adulterate beyond recognition! Do you dare imagine what the Times editorial board would say if the Bush administration tried something like this? Come to think of it, how come the editorial board never opines on the Times fortunes -- isn't it a big enough story to merit their attention?
In a telling microcosm, blogger Ed Driscoll noticed a few days ago that the Times had reported as fact a sham story out of Japan about people wearing Coke machine disguises to avoid muggers. And to round things out, a National Review writer exposed a Times interview with him as outrageously skewed.
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