Why I Can’t Read The New York Times Anymore

First I read The New York Times because I believed it was the best newspaper in the world. Then, after my view of economics shifted, I read it for its cultural and literary articles. Now I can’t stand to read even those sections, as the NYT’s smart, independent critics have been replaced by very bad writers with very stupid ideas about – everything.

Take the paper’s coverage of the Academy Awards. The NYT’s film critics were upset because Green Book beat out Black Panther for Best Picture. The rationale: Black Panther was a huge box office hit. Green Book was Driving Miss Daisy II, simply another feel-good movie where two people, black and white, gradually discover their common humanity.

Never mind that Black Panther was a comic book movie with an immensely simplistic moral message, banal dialogue, a predictable plot, and nothing-special effects.

Another example: a review of a memoir about the author’s escape from poverty-stricken Appalachia. It wasn’t actually a book review at all. It was a compilation of complaints about the book’s depiction of and commentary on Appalachian culture.

According to the critic, the author had the audacity to suggest that one of the reasons Appalachians have remained ignorant and poor is because of bad habits like dropping out of school, drinking and doing drugs, teenage motherhood, and a preference for government handouts instead of working. Not only that, the author dared to suggest that the plight of these people is their own fault! (I don’t have the article in front of me, but those are nearly the critic’s exact words.)

Meanwhile, the critic has never set foot in Appalachia. But the author of the memoir lived there. Details like that, of course, don’t matter when it comes to politics. Any idea not coincidental with leftist ideology is bad art.

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Gullible

The mainstream media is amazing. The stuff they publish. The way they manipulate facts to promote their viewpoints.

The New York Times is a good example. Recently, the Times ran an editorial noting that investors are running from stocks and buying bonds. The reason for this, says the Times, is that the stock market has become untrustworthy because it isn’t regulated.

They don’t know what they are talking about. They ignore the fact that people went into the market when it was unregulated – precisely because it was unregulated. And the Times apparently never stopped to consider that exiting the market right now just might be a good thing.

Fox News is another good example. They are always featuring “news” events that are nothing more than silly little stories that pander to the prejudices of conservatives.

This raises the question: Why do so many people believe this crap? And I think the answer is that most people are not capable of rational analysis. Our educational system does not include – as it should – basic courses in logic, discourse, and reasoning. These are considered “elective” subjects for college students. Yet they should be part of every grammar school curriculum.

Lacking the ability to reason, people need to make decisions nonetheless. So they rely on prejudices they learned as children. And they look to the media to reinforce their prejudices and, thus, justify their decisions.

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