Legacy media have been moving away from the practice of journalism for years, and once Donald Trump arrived on the scene, they abandoned it altogether. The media collectively embraced activism, and the New York Times has led the way.
The extraordinary power of the New York Times to not only influence events but to shape them cannot be denied. Without question, the apex predator in the media world today, it can set any narrative, no matter the facts. And when the Democratic Party has a message to get out, they turn to the Gray Lady to do their bidding.
Last month, the New York Times published an article titled “Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise.” The widely read piece wasn’t simply the random musings of a couple of writers who consider President Joe Biden too old to serve. It was a nuclear bomb, one that allowed Democratic legislators, aides, and voters finally to say out loud what most of the country knows to be true: Biden is an awful president.
The New York Times editors read the polls the same way Democratic Party leaders do. They understand Biden’s tumbling approval ratings are a liability to his party that will likely cost them this November. So it’s difficult to see the publication’s recent article as anything but a deliberate, strategic decision — the opening salvo in the campaign to oust Biden from office.
Suddenly, it is OK to say the president is too old for the job. It’s now fine to not only point out his regular verbal gaffes but to also suggest that they may be indicative of cognitive decline. Of course, they’d never put it like that — not yet, at least. Instead, citing many “Democratic lawmakers and party officials,” they described Biden as “an anchor that should be cut loose in 2024.”
Predictably, the rest of the liberal media has jumped on board, and, one month later, a full court press to replace the president is in place. The attacks have increased in frequency and tone — especially at the New York Times. On Monday, a New York Times writer compared watching Biden to “seeing someone wobble on a tightrope.”
Last Saturday, another New York Times columnist wrote, “At 79, Biden is testing the boundaries of age and the presidency.” Summing up the sentiment of “more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers,” the article said, “But they acknowledged Mr. Biden looks older than just a few years ago, a political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shake-ups or new communications plans. His energy level, while impressive for a man of his age, is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him. He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.”
While it may be obvious to those of us who have been paying attention that Biden is not up to the task of the presidency, we shouldn’t mistake the New York Times’s recent admission to that point as anything but political opportunism. It’s not Biden’s age that’s the problem — it’s his political unpopularity. If his approval ratings were higher and his agenda more successful, these articles would not have been written, and a Biden reelection campaign would likely go unchallenged.
But that’s not the reality for Democrats today. This November, they’re staring down a red wave that could hand Republicans control of the House and Senate. In other words, Biden is already a lame duck — and the liberal media is finally starting to treat him like it.
This is far from the first time the media, specifically the New York Times, has engaged in activist reporting of a kind meant to benefit the Democratic cause. It gleefully ran with the Russian collusion hoax despite the obvious contradictions and errors littered throughout. In her wildest dreams, Hillary Clinton could not have imagined how far her disinformation campaign against then-candidate Trump would go. With the full support of the New York Times, Christopher Steele’s collection of lies about her opponent would go on to dominate the national news cycle for three years and cripple his presidency with investigation after investigation.
The New York Times also helped set the divisive “systemic racism” narrative. In fact, the adoption of racism as a top issue in American discourse was a premeditated decision by the New York Times’s editors. And it happened long before people ever heard of George Floyd.
The occasion was a “crisis employee town-hall” held by then-Executive Editor Dean Baquet in August 2019. At the time, Trump had just delivered a widely praised speech on two mass shootings that had taken place nearly simultaneously in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
The headline in the New York Times read, “TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM.” Following harsh criticism from the Left for their positive take on the speech, they changed the title to “ASSAILING HATE BUT NOT GUNS.”
Baquet opened the meeting with a discussion of the “significant missteps” they had made in handling the “crisis.” Then, he pivoted. “We built our newsroom to cover one story (referring to the Trump-Russia collusion story), and we did it truly well,” Baquet said. “Now, we have to regroup and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”
The story that would drive the news for the next two years, he said, would be race.
Baquet had two goals. The first was to paint Trump as a racist. The second was to reshape American history and put slavery at the center of the story. The result was the ahistorical 1619 Project, which has made its way into public school curricula throughout the country.
As preposterous as Baquet may have sounded at the time, the New York Times has, to a large extent, achieved both objectives. It will likely succeed in killing any chance of another Biden campaign as well.
Though that latter objective might be beneficial to conservatives, we ought to consider: When a newspaper can decide a president’s term has expired, legitimize a political candidate’s phony opposition research to the point of undermining a presidency, and dictate which topic will dominate the news over the next two years, it has too much power. It has left the purview of the media and has become a political organization. And, undoubtedly, all of its activism points in one direction: the Democratic Party.
Elizabeth Stauffer is a contract writer at the Western Journal. Her articles have appeared on many conservative websites, including RedState, Newsmax, the Federalist, Bongino.com, HotAir, MSN, and RealClearPolitics. Follow Elizabeth on Twitter or LinkedIn.
