The New York Times has twisted itself into a grotesque representation of modern journalism on issues of race. Now, the outlet is far tougher on random teenagers than it is on sitting governors.
A New York Times interview with Northam touts that he leaves office “with a widely praised progressive record on racial justice.” It’s a record, of course, that was created as Northam desperately pandered to activists in order to retain his job after it had been revealed that he either wore blackface or a Ku Klux Klan hood (we still don’t know which is him) for a picture that was placed on his personal yearbook page during medical school.
It’s an interview with so many softballs that you could mistake it for the recent Women’s College World Series. At one point, the interviewer, reporter Astead Herndon, uses a question to ask Northam how he would advise parents in Loudoun County to accept the “anti-racist” literature that Northam read during his scandal. And the interview is made even worse by the standard that the New York Times has previously used in covering racial issues.
Consider the repugnant “news” piece that celebrated a high school student, Jimmy Galligan, saving a three-second Snapchat video of a classmate saying the N-word. Galligan saved the video, plotting revenge, and released it when his classmate, Mimi Groves, had finally chosen the college she would attend. She was removed from the University of Tennessee’s cheer team and pressured by the university into withdrawing.
Groves was a high school freshman at the time of the video. Northam, in contrast, was 25 years old at the time of the yearbook photo — a full-grown adult. Groves was a random private citizen, one of millions of incoming college freshmen. Northam is a sitting governor and the most powerful man in the state of Virginia.
Yet the New York Times piece on Groves touts this demented revenge plot as a “reckoning.” The piece touts the “power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable.” It relayed that “many said” that it was a pleasant surprise that Groves had been “punished.” And it paints Galligan as some sort of hero for racial justice as he boasts that he “taught someone a lesson.”
The New York Times also wrote 13 pieces about country music star Morgan Wallen using the N-word once and eight pieces about NASCAR driver Kyle Larson doing the same.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering what this is all really about, Hunter Biden’s repeated use of the slur has netted zero articles so far.
The New York Times is trying to be both a woke, racial justice-oriented outlet and its typical Democratic-friendly self. So, even as it pushes the embarrassment of journalism that was the 1619 Project and boasts about teenagers being denied admission to college, it runs cover for the president’s son and lobs softballs to the current (and potentially future) Democratic governor of Virginia. It would be pathetic for any newspaper, but it’s especially so for the one that was once known as the “paper of record.”
