Practically every day on the socials, under the hashtag #BrokenTimes, I bring receipts to my claim that The New York Times is failing us and democracy. I do not wish to join in the cacophony from the Trumpists about “fake news.” To the contrary, I do this hoping to hold The Times to account and make it better. As we approach the critical midterm elections, here are just a few examples of The Times’ failures so far on one day — October 30, 2026.
In the lamentable tradition of The Times and #ButHerEmails, the paper has been harping this week on its story about two Dan Sullivans in the Alaska senatorial election. Its primary source for the supposed investigation of perfectly legal acts retracted all that she told The Times, but it went ahead with the story anyway. On this day, the Democrat, Mary Peltola, responds to its accusations and says she knew nothing about “tricking voters.” Look at the home-page block above — with a magnifying glass — and you can see how The Times played that: hidden as an also-ran heading under its live blog. By midday, even that small note had fallen off the home page, where earlier in the week the original story was emblazoned all the day long. So determined is The Times to deliver its hatchet job.
The Times looks at the world through Republican-colored glasses. You can see that on the home page and above in its coverage of the South Carolina senatorial race, covering it from the perspective of Darline Graham rather than that of the opponent that could pull off this upset, Dr. Annie Andrews.
That is even more the case in The Times’ coverage of my congressional district, NJ-7, where the paper devotes a long puff piece about disappearing nepo-Rep. Tom Kean Jr., even though they could not get an interview — or returned email — from him. The Times calls him “press-shy.” He’s also constituent-shy. His opponent, Rebecca Bennett, is not mentioned until the very end, after much ink about the “esteemed” Kean family’s history starting the nation, about Kean’s “grasp of policy and an instinct to work back channels, if not a mic”, and his “mild, under-the-radar manner.”
And through whose lens is The Times covering California’s gubernatorial race this day? Through that of the Republican, Steve Hilton.
In Michigan — as my cohost on our Breaking the News podcast, Julie Roginsky, said today — The Times is setting the Democrats up for a fight or fall by portraying Abdul El-Sayed as the standard-bearer for “the left’s potency heading into the next presidential contest.” This critical race isn’t critical enough, it has to represent something bigger: a trend.
The big story after election day will be whether elections still stand: whether the Republicans will undermine or refuse to accept the vote. This is where The Times fails us most profoundly: by refusing to recognize the dire gravity of democracy’s fall. Here, it covers the merely “unusual” election-year activity of the Justice Department. It’s far more than unusual. It is election interference, voter disenfranchisement, authoritarianism. But if The Times refuses to call lies lies, it is even more adverse to calling fascism fascism and reporting on it.
Instead, The Times leaves it to the alien oligarch in our midst, Elon Musk, to declare the risk to democracy if … [checks notes] … Democrats win. Who the hell decided that The Times should give such serious, indeed even-handed coverage of Mr. Musk’s “extensive rationale for his involvement to date” in attempting to buy elections? Editors like to think that their super power is what we call “news judgment.” That is terrible judgment.
The Times loves polls and predictions. I contend that prediction is not journalism; it does nothing to inform the electorate but could influence elections. And as for polls, I often quote the late Columbia Prof. James Carey, who cautioned that opinion polls preempt the public discourse they are intended to measure. I wrote about that in The Gutenberg Parenthesis:
Now is prime season for polls. The day before, The Times had Nate Cohn putting forth four predictions for how the Congressional races could turn out, all signifying nothing. And today:
This would imply that the pollsters do not want to believe polls that do not show Trump winning.
The real issues that concern voters, the polls tell us, are corruption and prices. On this day, The Times acts as if it is representing the Little People by counting how many millionaires there are in the Senate. Well, if any of them own a home and are lucky enough to have a 401K these days, that might put them over the line to be called millionaires in an inflationary economy. I wonder how many editors at The Times are millionaires.
Let’s round out this day with The Times with another angle on the news: Melania Trump. It’s not enough that The Times has swallowed her propaganda whole, giving her credit over the Pope for a local cease fire in Ukraine. They wanted another excuse to repeat it over again, so they turned to the reliably cringe-inducing Vanessa Friedman to break the news that Melania’s new coat is not black and white but brown.
The republic may be teetering on the razor’s edge of fascism, but at least it’s comforting to know that she wasn’t wearing a tan suit.
And as I write this, The Times’ day is not yet done.
See also this very good video by journalist Jonathan Katz. We are singing in harmony, in a minor key.