A former New York Times executive editor says the paper’s news stories about the president aren’t objective but “unmistakably anti-Trump.”
Jill Abramson, who ran the newspaper from 2011 to 2014, writes in her upcoming book, “Merchants of Truth,” that the Times has financial incentive to bash Trump, Fox News reported.
In the first six months of Trump’s presidency, the Times saw a digital subscription jump from 600,000 to more than 2 million.
“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.
The first and only female executive editor of the Times also said that the bias is contributing to eroding the outlet’s credibility. Abramson was fired in 2014 by Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Time’s publisher.
In the book, which is expected to be published in February 2019, Abramson also expressed discontent with her successor, 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 writes.
She said that the Washington Post has the same flaws. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
Abramson attributed a lot of the paper’s more outwardly anti-Trump stances in supposed news pieces to the generational split at the paper, adding that younger staff wanted to be more open about the bias.
“The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” Abramson said.
[Also read: Exclusive: 72 percent say media ‘dividing Americans,’ spreading ‘hate’]
