The Death of the Gray Lady

While The New York Times polls for dollars, our nation burns ...

After being a loyal reader for the better part of 60 years, I have officially run out of respect for The New York Times.

I have come to the grudging realization that this newspaper is actively playing a part in undermining our Democracy by convening a political horse race, and backing a burnt-orange, reprehensible, racist traitor, and his dirty trainers, who mean our country harm.

I believe they are doing this because they have lost their way and their morals, and have carefully dug out a tributary that flows from the obscene river of cash that is currently poisoning our politics, and runs directly into the bottomless pockets of the broken decision-makers whose fat asses are comfortably stuffed in the chairs of their front offices.

Unrest and instability might be bad for our Democracy, but they are damn good for business at The New York Times.

I take no pride in writing what I believe is this necessary piece.

I have been a steady reader of the “Gray Lady” for most of my life. Growing up in New Jersey, I actually aspired to work at the place as a starry-eyed kid, who pedaled his bike around delivering newspapers after school each day.

That never happened, and mostly by design. It turns out I got far more of a thrill working for smaller, underdog newspapers that stood up for their readers, called power to account, and strived to make a real difference in their communities.

Still, I never lost my respect for The Times — until now.

Their news presentation was boring, gray and haughty, but their writing and editing was second to none, and I had a certain amount of confidence that if there was an important world or national story that needed telling they’d get to it before anybody, and fire it out there for all to see.

In the wake of the terrible blast on November 8, 2016, that blew a hole through America’s decency, it took me no time at all to write in so many words, that it would be professional journalism organizations like The New York Times that would dig deep into Trump’s gory affairs, and begin exposing him for what he was, and always had been.

They would save the day, because that is what good journalism can do when it is done right.

They’d cover his White House like a blanket. When he invariably did completely terrible, anti-American things like defending Vladimir Putin’s attack on America while standing next to the murdering fascist in Helsinki, they’d put a laser focus on it, and make sure everybody in the world understood why that really mattered.

Yes, their treatment of Hillary Clinton’s emails (and the woman herself) leading up to the 2016 Election was a journalistic crime spree, but I still had confidence they would make amends for that malfeasance.

If you are saying to yourself right now that I was a gullible fool, and I was served my just deserts, I am saying that is completely fair.

I still believe I was mostly right, at least for a time, and The Times did start turning around some pretty good stuff that covered the burnt-orange traitor with shame. Just as quickly, however, they resorted to ultra-cheap, both-sides journalism, even when there was nobody even close to the incomparably awful, lying, pussy-grabbing racist and his fawning party on the other side.

And if I never read another 77-column-inch story dedicated to what 11 Trump supporters are saying about anything while inhaling black coffee in a Pennsylvania diner it will be too soon.

Poll Dancing

What has finally driven my lifelong respect for the paper to an end was yet another poll they conducted with Sienna College that went to print this weekend focusing on six swing states. The poll was accompanied by hundreds and hundreds of column inches devoted to a bunch of ridiculous numbers culled from a sampling of American voters that was so small, the 11 Trump voters at the diner looked more significant and reputable by comparison.

I guess The Times wanted everybody on the face of the Earth to know that according to them Joe Biden was in trouble in these six swing states, and that their burnt-orange steed was snorting hard and closing with a huff on the outside.

We can try to play stupid for a minute and pretend the leadership at The Times had somehow talked itself into believing it was performing some kind of helpful journalism to its readers by producing this bought-and-paid-for bilge, but that just doesn’t add up.

There are too many people there who know full well that a news organization’s job is to report the news, not make it. By devoting three full news cycles to this outlandish slop, the paper made it crystal clear they valued themselves and their bank accounts more than their readers.

Essentially, they told their readers this: “We are glad you are paying us to cover the news, but we just did something we think is important and we are going to spend the next three days patting ourselves on the back and telling you why we’ve come to amazing conclusions that we think are so bloody important. Please make sure you sign your checks before sending them to us. You’re welcome.”

I’m not going to wade too deeply into the results of this poll for reasons I will get to in a second. And frankly, I don’t know how many polls have to be wrong before people stop paying attention to them altogether. Still … I would like to know why Republicans were oversampled by The Times in this particular foray into professional guessing.

The Times has not provided an answer to this question, but it is a fact their minuscule sample size of the American public was predominated by right-leaning voters.

As to polls in general ... To start, they are often ridiculously wrong, as we’ve seen time and time again since, ironically, Trump was somehow elected despite being given a one-in-five chance on Election Day 2016 by these expert pollsters.

More consequentially, depending on their murky results, polls can also present a very dangerous bias and these days are being used mostly by Republicans to suppress the vote. Nobody has more practice in the ghoulish art of voter-suppression than they do.

Let me tell you just one grievous story about how bogus poll results were used to re-elect the vomit-inducing Ron Johnson (another one of Putin’s fast friends, incidentally) in last year’s senatorial race here in Wisconsin, and how the Democratic Party inexplicable and disastrously fell for this ruse.

In the final weeks of the race, polls were released in Wisconsin showing Johnson running 4%-to-7% points ahead of his firebrand of a challenger, Democrat, Mandela Barnes.

These numbers were a bit of stunner because incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers was also on the ballot, and was running slightly ahead of his Trump-kissed challenger.

It was also obvious to anybody who was actually covering this campaign, instead of floating poll numbers into the air about it, that it was crystal clear Barnes was closing like a freight train on the fading Johnson.

I was at two of Barnes rallies in the final days of the campaign and the man was drawing huge crowds, and was positively on fire. He was connecting, and I had no doubt in my mind that the race was going to be very close.

Trouble is, the Democratic National Committee got wind of these bad polls for Barnes and pulled the money they had planned to allocate to his campaign during the final week, and instead deployed it to other races they deemed closer and safer around the nation.

Turns out, Johnson prevailed by less than ONE percentage point. It was agonizingly close. Nobody will ever convince me otherwise that if the DNC had stayed with Barnes he would be in Washington right now representing my state in the Senate.

Oh, and Evers won his race in a cakewalk. So much for those polls.

In this case, bad polls actually scared the DNC away. In too many other cases, polls can convince prospective voters that maybe the person they are supporting doesn’t stand a chance. This might cool their support for him or her on Election Day.

I’d guess that both of these things conspired to sink Barnes, which still makes my stomach turn.

But back to this NYT poll, and why what’s left of my hair is on fire.

It turns out that buried deep inside the print editions of their endless, breathtaking coverage of their flimflam poll, was this juicy nugget they had to hope almost nobody would see:

“Polls have often failed to predict results of elections this far out.”

I mean, holy shit.

This isn’t burying the lede, it’s completely obliterating it.

Oh, and on Tuesday? Democrats once again exceeded expectations and those blasted polls in nationwide elections, and won just about every important race on the docket.

One final thing …

Ever since Trump and his Republicans attack on our country and subsequent coup attempt in 2021, I have been calling for The Times and ALL major media companies to establish Democracy Desks in their newsrooms.

Every day — hell, every HOUR — Republicans are doing something to undermine our Democratic Republic here in America, whether it be squashing voting rights, refusing to certify elections, threatening DOJ officials, flat lying about the results of these elections, supporting dictators around the world, banning books detailing our nation’s choppy history, all of the above, and more.

It never ends. There is no bigger overarching story in America right now than Republicans’ surge toward fascism.

WHY isn’t this being given the editorial weight it deserves?

I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again right here: If the Republicans are successful in taking down our Democracy and installing an authoritarian regime in Washington, one of the very first things to go will be our freedom of the press, and THEN where will The Times be?

It is ludicrous that their readers aren’t being educated everyday about what the Republicans have in mind and how devastating it would be to the citizens of this country if they ever got back into the White House.

For one thing, it’s fair to posit there would never be another election again -- at least not one that would be remotely fair.

Ever since the disaster in November, 2016, just enough Americans have risen up and gotten active stamping out the flames of fascism Republicans have so frantically been fanning.

But we could use a little help.

That would start with some first-class journalism and reporting about things as they are. That would start with knocking it the hell off with these stupid polls that predict nothing, and start dealing with our terrifying realties.

That would mean spending the time and resources necessary to really dig in, and actually start reporting only the news that’s fit to print.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough)

(Reuters, photo)