The ‘Gold Standard’ in Journalism is Functionally Illiterate
"It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the North American Treaty Organization"
Remember when the New York Times was dubbed the ‘gold standard’ in journalism? Remember when there was even such a concept? And remember when after Trump won the first time, the media decided to browbeat Big Tech into paying it to be in charge of censorship, which it called ‘fact checking’, even as it stopped doing any actual fact checking of its own content?
Combine all that with DEI and political clickbait even at the top papers and you end up with a level of incompetence that has to be seen to be believed.
“A correction will appear in tomorrow’s print edition: “A headline with an article on Friday about President Trump’s threats to leave NATO misstated the full name of the body. It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the North American Treaty Organization” the New York Times tweeted.
This wasn’t some random misprint on line 49, this was a massive header.
Everyone makes mistakes. The New York Times and major papers had layers of ‘fact checkers’ and ‘editors’ to see that didn’t happen. But that hasn’t been the priority in a long time.
When Sarah Palin sued the New York Times over the latest iteration of the ‘target’ map smear, what was really shocking was that top personnel at the Times genuinely did not know it was a lie and had done no fact checking even though all of this had played out for years already.
“Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times exposed how shoddy the paper’s process that led to it repeating the ‘bullseye’ smear against her was. Former editorial page editor James Bennet sourced the widely discredited claim that her election map had somehow led to the shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords by a mentally unstable man from an old column by a former restaurant critic.”
They quickly checked their own archives, saw a column from one of their people, and went with it.
Could I make a mistake like that? I’m certainly not perfect. But I’m also not a $600 million media operation.
Assuming NATO stood for ‘North American Treaty Organization’ isn’t political. It just shows that the paper is hiring people who don’t know anything, but probably check the right identity politics boxes, and that there’s no one to catch mistakes because that doesn’t matter anymore. What does matter is being on the profitable side of culture war social media debates while still convincing the upper middle class readers with professional class status that its views are worth paying attention to because it’s on the right side of history and will destroy Trump.