Why I Unsubscribed from the NYTimes

Background

I’ve been subscribed to the NYTimes for at least the past 8 years. I first subscribed as an undergraduate, back when it felt good to support press media during the Trump presidency, when he was disparaging all media. Unfortunately, I didn’t know much and subscribed to the first high-brow news media org. I found, the NYTimes. They had a wonderful discount for students, only $4 per month, amounting to ~50 a year.

Things going downhill

The NYTimes Opinion section has always prided itself as a bastion of free speech, but the uncritical acceptance of pieces from bad faith writers has been getting worse over time. The (in)famous (NYTimes Pitch Bot) helped open my eyes to some of the more hilarious trends in the opinion section.

The opinions piece is mostly folks who are liberal in name only, who espouse ideas around equality and such, but then both-sides issues of equality and take both sides of a political spectrum as serious, when one side is clearly a clown.

Tom Cotton Opinion Piece

I think the choice to publish this piece was a huge mistake. For context, during the 2020 BLM movement, Tom Cotton, the Republican sentator from Arkansas, wrote a piece arguing that use of force against peaceful nonviolent protestors.

The piece was idiotic and evil to publish and full of nationalistic and fascist jingoism. It was cruel white supremacy and fundamentally anti-thetical to the principles of democracy.

Trans-Coverage

NYTimes has had a long history of covering LGBTQ issues, sometimes with rather cruel overtones. Transgender rights has been especially fraught for NYTimes. Though transgender rights coverage has generally become better as the decades has gone on, the NYTimes coverage, including on non-opinion pages, often gets important scientific facts entirely wrong, or recontextualizes them into abhorrent narratives against the trans community.

Puberty blockers have been demonized as ruining the bone structure of youth,and preventing the natural gender confirmation of a “real” puberty in (ostensibly science based articles)[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/health/puberty-blockers-transgender.html]. Nevermind that the bone structure matter little to dead youth, or that forcing a child through a puberty that amplifies there gender dysphoria amounts to a forced trans-conversion therapy, the fact that the article continues to use children as just a game piece in a larger argument against trans people, similar to other Republicans, is truly abhorrent.

There are now (open letters to the NYTimes)[https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/new-york-times-trans-coverage] denouncing their coverage. Soon after, a transphobic opinion piece (“In Defense of JK Rowling”)[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/opinion/jk-rowling-transphobia.html] was given, arguing that one of the richest, most powerful people in the UK actually deserves sympathy for the attacks she lobbies against transgender people.

The Singularity

NYTimes coverage of AI has also been hilariously lacking. Directly quoting the company CEOs who buy in to the long-term cult of AI taking over the world, NYTimes has allied itself with billionare tech CEO interests. There are now multiple articles around letters by non-ethicist tech researchers claiming that AI is the biggest threat to society. Silicon Valley works under the principle of “Faking it til you make it”, and these letters are insane marketing tools to help funnel and attract money and attention to tools and companies that otherwise would be unremarkable.

This coverage only furthers long-termism, a weird pseudo-philosophy where tech-bro millionaires without real humanities or historical training attempt to forecast the future of the world. (See Elon Musk and his bizarrely twisted view of life). For context, Long-termism and all its other variously weird counterparts ((TESCREAL)[https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1635313838508883968?lang=en]) are the “rational” endpoints of philosophy popularized by techbros who are not really interested in actual people.

I highly recommend (Timnit Gebru)[https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1667921419823460359?s=20], who has documented and worked to identify the weirdest trends in AI and TESCREAL.

The end of this

All news media has biases, but during the Trump era, it felt like the NYTimes, at the very least, had begun to reckon with “both-sidism”, and with calling out BS by weird clowns for what it is.

Now that there is a real president back in the White House who is not representing the worst ideas in humanity, the NYTimes has taken upon itself the job of platforming said ideas. This is the fundamental flaw in news media coverage and the economics of coverage today. We have a press that is far more interested in presenting conflict in truth where consensus may already exist, which hides behing the curtain of “no-activism jounalism” to avoid exposing real injustice, and which is far more interested in the flashy sci-fi ideas of elite tech-ceos and their elevated and paid off researchers, rather than the real work of actual ethicists.

I do not suspect that I will be resubscribing to the NYTimes anytime soon.