New York Times Struggles To Explain Why It Reported News To Traumatized Readers

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

This week, the New York Times experienced an uprising in its ranks and among its readers. The paper was denounced by its own staff and liberal pundits called for the entire editorial staff to be canned.

Why?

Because The New York Times actually reported news that was deemed harmful to the Democrats, specifically Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The newspaper took the additional step of publishing a cringing explanation of why it reported the news that Mamdani lied on his Columbia application in claiming to be black.For liberals, it was an utter nightmare. For a party still defined by identity politics, Mamdani’s false claim over his race left many uncertain about how to react.The left has always maintained a high degree of tolerance for false claims by its own leaders, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren claiming to be a native American to Sen. Richard Blumenthal claiming to have served in the Vietnam War.

The problem is when a news eco-chamber for many readers is shattered by an errant outbreak of journalism. Many Times readers live within a hermetically sealed news silo, relying on MSNBC for cable, The New York Times for print, and BlueSky for social media. You can literally go all day without being exposed to an opposing view or fact. Then suddenly this happens.

The result is often anger. It is the same response many in higher education have to “triggering” views being expressed on campus by conservative or libertarian speakers.

The fact is that the Mamdani story was obvious news—and confirmed by the candidate himself. Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his 2009 Columbia University application, according to the New York Times.

Some accused him of being a fraud while others suggested he was trying to abuse affirmative action.

The Times reported, adding:

Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, said he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather “an American who was born in Africa.” He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process. (He was not accepted at Columbia.)

Other candidates, like Mayor Eric Adams, went after Mamdani, and the matter has now become an issue in the mayoral election.

The Times readers were outraged to the point that the paper published a lengthy statement from the Times’ assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust, Patrick Healy, attempting to explain why it decided to publish facts that undermined a Democratic candidate. Healy sheepishly explained that “When we hear anything of news value, we try to confirm it through direct sources. Mr. Mamdani confirmed this information in an interview with The Times.”

It did not help. Much like the infamous Cotton scandal, where editors were fired for allowing a Republican senator to print an opposing view on riots, writers and pundits demanded firings or attacked the journalists.

One such response came from Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who attacked the journalists themselves. Not surprisingly, the attack appropriately came on BlueSky, a social media site designed to be a safe place for liberals who do not want to be triggered by opposing views.

Bouie slammed Times reporter, Benjamin Ryan, as stupid, claiming, “Everything I have seen about him screams a guy with little to no actual brain activity.”

After that outrageous attack, Bouie deleted the post, explaining, “I deleted several posts about a Times story because they violated Times social media standards.”

Bouie seems to view Ryan as simply stupid for publishing the truth about the leading candidate for mayor lying about his race. It is the ultimate expression of advocacy journalism. Apparently, the Times should have killed the story to keep readers from knowing about Mamdani’s prior false claim.

In “The Indispensable Right,” I discuss the radical shift in American journalism that occurred with the rejection of neutrality and objectivity in favor of advocacy journalism. J-schools now teach that objectivity is a dated concept. As former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “All journalism is activism.”

After interviewing more than 75 media leaders, Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, detailed how media leaders view neutrality and objectivity as dated concepts that inhibit social and political agendas.

The problem is that once readers become accustomed to an echo chamber, exposure to opposing facts triggers rage.

That was evident among pundits and commentators like former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who declared, “Your absolute abrogation of the NYT standards would in a better era there have led the full range of you in management to resign. Utter failure. Then again, if you don’t realize NYT is perceived as actively campaigning against Mamdani, you’re all lost anyway.”

Ironically, the opposition to Mamdani by some liberals over his anti-Israeli views is being cited as the only reason that the Times would run such a story opposing a leading Democratic candidate. It raises an even more chilling prospect that, absent such a division among Times readers, this story might not have been published.

I hope that that is not true. As many on the left breathe into paper bags from the exposure to an opposing view in the Times, this could prove an important cultural moment for a newspaper that has led the industry toward advocacy journalism.

Many of us still hope that the Times and papers like the Washington Post will still reject advocacy journalism and move back toward objective journalism. However, as this latest controversy demonstrates, that revival will be difficult after years of hiring writers and editors who view neutrality as a relic of journalism.