The New York Times is fighting to maintain a middle course while being beset by criticism on all sides — and it has suffered some self-inflicted wounds in the process.
The Hill reports The Times, the single most influential news outlet in the nation, has been accused of anti-Trump bias by the right and excessive deference toward the president by the left.
Some of the Times’s problems are an inevitable consequence of a hyperpartisan era and a historically polarizing president — as well as the upheaval of the digital age.
The latest controversy came when opinion columnist Bret Stephens took umbrage at a tweet that referred to him as a “bedbug” — a reference to a separate report that the Times’s newsroom had been suffering an infestation.
Prior to the Stephens flap, a political editor at the Times, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was outed by the right-wing news outlet Breitbart for having tweeted anti-Semitic material a decade ago.
The Times has not fired Wright-Piersanti, though the paper has said it is looking into the matter and will “respond appropriately.”
That controversy was followed by a front-page story about how the paper is under attack from “a loose network of conservatives allied with the White House” it accused of targeting reporters.
Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger described the effort as “an escalation of an ongoing campaign against the free press.”
More recently, a transcript leaked of executive editor Dean Baquet telling the newsroom that the paper would pivot away from the Trump-Russia storyline to focus instead on the president’s alleged racism.
Those remarks ignited fury on the right and the left, with conservatives accusing the paper of being hellbent on destroying Trump and liberals angry over what they viewed as soft-pedaling on the issue of race.
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