New York Times front page 09 March 2022
“The Gray Lady,” aka The New York Times, has for years had a slogan which reads “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Created in 1897 by Adolph S. Ochs (1858-1935), The New York Times owner who first owned the Chattanooga Times (now Chattanooga Times Free Press), the motto was meant to express the idea that the paper’s intention is to write the news impartially, and still appears on the paper’s masthead to this day.
In the era of Ochs’ ownership of the NYT, newspapers were openly partisan, and through his slogan, sought to instill a sense of confidence in the reading audience, and by his careful management, the paper increased its readership from 9,000 as a struggling publication when he purchased it in 1896, to 780,000 by 1921, and had a staff of 1885. The 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica wrote of the paper that, “By its fairness in the presentation of news, editorial moderation and ample foreign service, it secured a high place in American journalism, becoming widely read and influential throughout the country.”
Today, with the advent of instant global electronic communications, and changes in various laws mostly regulatory of ownership, the journalism landscape has changed drastically, some say for the better, while yet others demur. But regardless one’s opinion on such matters, suffice it to say that the paper’s detractors have slightly varied the motto thusly:
All the News that Fits.
One thing’s for certain, amid the democratization of news, and a broadened, liberalized monetary business landscape, and the cheapening of communications to be as a mere merchandised product, the profit motive remains strong for all journalists and news outlets, traditional, or modern. And effectively, what that means is sponsorship, and mentioning the sponsor’s name, at the least, and at the most, promoting their products, over other brands. So in other words, by virtue of that fact, it could hardly be considered “non-partisan,” partisanship being seen or perceived as partiality, instead of independence. And there’s certainly no limit to partisanship online, in print, or broadcast.
Such commodification can be seen in some newspapers by the presence of advertising on the FRONT PAGE, which historically, had NEVER been done… until now. It’s purely a profit motive, first for the paper, which can, and does, sell that space for MUCH, MUCH MORE than similarly-sized space inside the paper, and secondly, for the advertiser, who gets Front-and-Center “in your face” attention from readers.
But as noted in the Tweet above, what constitutes journalistic independence varies from nation-to-nation, and organization-to-organization, though underlying it all, hopefully, there resides adherence to a uniform standard of high ethical, and professional, practice. Effectively, what that means is that The New York Times is vastly different from The National Enquirer, London’s Daily Mail, or The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia.
American reporting on the still-ongoing matter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has, and continues to consist primarily of, prognosticating about what Russia will do, what Russia has done, what Russia could do, what Russia ought to do, and similarly opining on the psychological reasons/justifications for why Putin wants Ukraine. In stark contrast, “foreign” news agencies have focused much more on the Ukrainian people, what they’re doing, how they’re surviving, how their lives have changed, and the accomplishments of the Ukrainian military against the Russian invaders.
Such a reversal position and role is astounding, considering United States’ long history with Russia, even before it fell to Communism to become a Soviet state, and the subsequent failure of communism and the nation’s transformation into a criminal oligarchy by its corrupted government officials.
Arguably, the nation has long been a criminal state, with the presence of an elite criminal sect known as Read the rest of this entry »
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