A former executive editor of the New York Times is coming clean and President Trump is not happy. She is finally admitting the paper’s news pages have become “unmistakably anti-Trump” and it is not by accident.
Jill Abramson led the newspaper from 2011 to 2014 and says the Times is doing it for the money which should not come as a surprise as Trump sells and negative Trump really sells.
But according to Abramson, this is coming at a huge cost to the paper’s credibility, before describing a split in the newsroom with some favoring an all-out assault on Trump’s presidency.
Her book “Merchants of Truth,” rips into the news business and calls into question its business model before agreeing with Trump that they are actively serving as an arm of the opposition party.
From The Hill: Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson teed off on her former employer’s coverage of President Trump, arguing that news articles have become “unmistakably anti-Trump” with some headlines and stories containing “raw opinion.”
Abramson, who served as the top news editor from 2011 until her firing in 2014, made the remarks, which included criticism of current Executive Editor Dean Baquet.
“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson wrote in the book, which is set for release on Jan. 19. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
Abramson added that she believes the Times’ longtime rival, The Washington Post, also mixes opinion in what are supposed to be unbiased news stories.
Abramson said the Times may be motivated to slant its coverage further after the paper added more than 600,000 subscribers in the first six months after Trump took office. Overall in 2017, subscription revenues at the Times exceeded $1 billion, due in part to strong growth in digital subscriptions.
“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated,” Abramson wrote.
She also makes some serious claims about other opposition tactics used by the “media” company that are sure to make Trump furious.
From Fox News: What’s more, she says, citing legendary 20th century publisher Adolph Ochs, “the more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased. Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear or favor sounded like an impossible promise in such a polarized environment.”
Abramson describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” she writes.
