By Dom Serafini
The New York Times has become an unreadable newspaper. I became aware of this development when I began to accumulate sections of the newspaper without having read them. I have traditionally always purchased the Sunday edition, which, among its nine sections, includes the “Magazine” and the “Book Review.”
Naturally, I browse through all the sections, but then I put them aside because the articles are either too long, utterly incomprehensible, or not interesting. The hope is that if I find some extra time during the week, I can go back to looking at them with a less critical eye. But that’s not what happens. After a week, the pile of newspapers goes straight to the paper recycling bin (which in my area of New York City is collected on Fridays).
Even the “Book Review,” once one of the best, if not the best place for reviews of new books, lately does not feature books that I’d like to purchase or even read reviews of. And to think that years ago, the “Book Review” of The New York Times was so popular that I used to use its annual subscriptions as gifts to give to relatives and friends.
Being a fan of the printed paper, I replaced The New York Times with The Wall Street Journal, which has two souls: a journalistic one, which is interesting, informative and balanced, and commentary pages that are somewhat reactionary (following the editorial line of the FOX-TV network, which is part of the same group).
However, this involves ignoring only three pages and not the entire newspaper, which is made up of two and sometimes three sections on weekdays and four sections on Saturdays. The WSJ does not publish on Sundays. Unlike the Times, the WSJ offers shorter but more comprehensive articles of practical interest and with a discursive language that makes you want to read them all.
Ultimately, the revelation came from above. On December 16, 2023, a very long article by James Bennet in the British weekly, The Economist, put everything into perspective. Bennet is a former editor of The New York Times’ Op-Ed page, and a current columnist for The Economist. Bennet was fired from the Times in the summer of 2020 because he published an article by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton that was considered too right-wing. Bennet had justified it as an article to balance the newspaper’s extremist left-wing positions. The NewsGuild-CWA, the journalists’ union that has 1,500 Times journalists among its 26,000 members divided among 300 American media companies, also went against Bennet.
In the article, Bennet stated that today in the U.S. “the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred.”
At the same time, however, he quoted his former boss at the Times, Dean Baquet, who acknowledged “that the Times did not understand the views of many Americans.”
Bennet’s article made clear why the Times is no longer readable, which is a real shame when compared to the Times of just a decade ago, excluding the Sports section, which was always unreadable (and now no longer comes as a separate section of the newspaper).
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