Dan Froomkin writes:

The sad fact is that there is nothing terribly out of character about the New York Times’s decision to publish a deceptive hit piece about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, based on hacked data supplied by a noted eugenicist to whom they granted anonymity.

The newsroom will go to extreme lengths to achieve its primary missions — and one of them, most assuredly, is to take cheap shots at the left.

You can see it almost daily – just this past week alone in a condescending article about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s brave defense of democracy, and a celebratory story about Trump’s achievements that likened dissenting views to “asterisks” on his legacy.

And you can trace it back to the very top: to editor Joe Kahn and his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger. As I’ve exhaustively chronicled in my coverage of the New York Times, the newsroom is constantly under pressure from its leaders to prove that it is not taking sides in politics — or democracy, for that matter. And because printing the truth is seen as punching right, that requires expending a lot of effort to punch left. Punching left becomes the holy grail.

I mean think about it. Under what other circumstance could a story that breaks so many of the Times’s own rules have won the approval of senior editors?

Why else would the Times, which notoriously refuses to respond to critics, have issued a ten-tweet defense of its actions? Why else would Kahn have praised the story in Monday’s morning meeting?

Consider everything that was wrong with the article. It’s a long list. [Continue reading…]