Former New York Times Executive Editor Admits Paper Is 'Unmistakably Anti-Trump'
Jill Abramson, the former managing editor and executive editor of The New York Times, is set to release a new book that labels The New York Times as “unmistakably anti-Trump,” Fox News reported.
In “Merchants of Truth,” Abramson writes that TheTimes has significantly shifted away from being a straight news coverage organization.
While The Times has long been criticized for being a biased publication, Fox News noted that “Abramson’s words carry special weight because she is also a former Times Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal correspondent specializing in investigative reporting.”
Abramson said one of the reasons the paper has taken such an anti-Trump position is due to the financial incentives.
“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative,” she wrote.
“They drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.”
Abramson admitted that The Times saw a “Trump bump” in its subscriptions during Trump’s first six months in office. Subscriptions rose from around 600,000 to over 2 million.
She explained that the younger staffers in particular believed they needed to continually produce anti-Trump coverage.
“The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” Abramson wrote.
The veteran journalist also had harsh words for her successor, Dean Baquet.
“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” she wrote.
Abramson added that the when it comes to opinionated headlines, The Washington Post is in the same position as The Times.
“Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis,” she said.
Abramson lamented The Times explicit bias, citing 20th-century publisher Adolph Ochs.
“The more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased,” Abramson wrote. “Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear or favor sounded like an impossible promise in such a polarized environment.”
Abramson was the paper’s executive editor from 2011 to 2014.
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