It’s no secret that the “traditional news media” are in decline — viewership and readership are down sharply, and, as a generational issue, Armageddon lies dead ahead: the fact is that a large and growing number of people under the age of 30 don’t consult traditional media outlets at all.

The New York Times is the self-declared “paper of record,” and it is, as the right loves to point out, the supposed standard bearer of a supposed “liberal elite”.  And yet the Times is increasingly difficult to engage as a top-down authority in a world where news reporting is no longer merely a matter of professionals trained to provide the public with a healthy high-fibre diet of vetted stories and opinion.  There are real reasons for this, most of them editorial.  The “balance” that journalism is supposed to provide on stories of the day has devolved into ideological warfare in which, if X says one thing, then what Y says in response — no matter how crazy or irresponsible or demonstrably, factually wrong — is fair comment and deserving of equal consideration.  Fact-checking is secondary.  The passive reporting of what gets said is primary.  And the New York Times has only added to the problem in recent years when it should in fact have been combating it on all fronts.

The complicity of the Times in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq is an excellent place to start, and characterizing it requires just one name, Judith Miller, who took insider-access journalism to a disastrous history altering low. In one infamous instance, Dick Cheney’s office provided Miller with unreliable intelligence pertaining to Saddam Hussein’s supposed effort to produce nuclear weapons.  Miller duly published it in the Times on 7 September 2002, and Cheney then cited it the next day on Meet the Press as independent confirmation.  In this way a dubious leak from an anonymous self-serving source became news in the paper of record, which effectively legitimatized it.  It’s no wonder that progressive bloggers disdainfully refer to Washington insiders (whether politicians or journalists) as Villagers.  Miller, of course, was also subsequently implicated in the crazy Rube Goldberg machinations by which Cheney’s office outed CIA agent Valerie Plame as political payback to her husband, Joseph Wilson, for his effort to debunk these same shoddy allegations circulating out of Cheney’s office. 

The Times has never found its footing since the awfulness of the Miller affair and apparently still can’t make amends.  Eight years ago it was willing to publish bogus stories on non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but today can’t in its news pages bring itself to call the abuse the Bush administration inflicted upon detainees “torture“. It prefers instead placebos like “harsh” or “enhanced interrogation,” despite the fact that practices like waterboarding (”simulated drowning” in NYTspeak) are recognized in international law as torture and are therefore prosecutable as war crimes.  Not to call them war crimes is to give war criminals credible cover for their actions: “Some say waterboarding is torture, some say it isn’t.  It’s all debatable.”  But that is not the case.  Waterboarding is torture.  It is a war crime.  Those who are responsible for it should be prosecuted and punished.

If only it ended there.  But last year the Times hired a conservative columnist to replace Republican party operative Bill Kristol, the 29 year old Ross Douthat, who, judging by his mediocrity and meteoric rise, is a familiar example of the Peter Principle for the privileged and well-connected.  Week after week Douthat publishes columns that are a journalistic embarrassment for their intellectual shallowness and occasional incomprehensibility.  All are arguably notable for their ideology driven dishonesty.  What Douthat produces seems designed well in advance to mislead though omission, commission and casuistry.

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