For me, it's not about just breaking news, but questioning their editorial focus during the election (and from all these recent events, their editorial focus now). I would give this study from the Columbia Journalism Review a read: Don't blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media. They studied the coverage from the mainstream media in general, but do focus quite a bit on the NYTimes itself. From it:Except that the NYT broke or corroborated almost every major scandalous story about Trump, and they only had one major story on Clinton emails last year and it was when James Comey factually wrote a letter to congress about the email issue in relation to the Anthony Wiener investigation. This was news, and it was days before the election. They reported it because it was a major story, even if the original pretense "Her emails!" is a fart in the wind (which, the NYT reinforced that narrative that 'the emails are nothing' with their reporting from 2013-2016). Nearly every other major investigative story about Trump, his ties to Russia, and his dangerous history were either reported first by the NYT or the details were corroborated almost immediately (most reporters at the Times, WaPo, NPR, etc check their work with each other... They want to break the scoop, but they also get the same sources and they check their work against each other).
Almost all of the major NYT stories on the in 2016 were negative investigative exposes on Trump, his taxes, assaulting women, collusion with Russia, discord in his transition team, his draft record, his fallout with Republicans.
Only one story of all of their major political stories in 2016 are about Hillary Clinton's emails, and it was about Jim Comey's late October letter to Congress, which... happened.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-clinton-emails.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/politics/trump-transition.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/us/politics/donald-trump-draft-record.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-party.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html
The Dossier story was broken by BuzzFeed or whoever it was because neither the Washington Post, NYT, NPR, ABC News, or any legitimate news agency could corroborate any of the details of it... and with good reason, it was highly classified intelligence that also had a bomb shell sexual scandal in it that is probably not real. This isn't "Truthiness," "False equivalencies," or "Statist positions" (I'm not sure what you mean by the last one? Is that like an anti-Deep State argument?). But that wasn't good reporting by BuzzFeed, or whoever uploaded the leak. That site just leaked the document, but almost all of the details of it were quickly provided by the NYT, WaPo, NPR, The Atlantic, Slate, and other publications who had actually vetted the story and decided that the details were too salacious (largely, the pee tape, which is still MIA 18 months later) and too difficult to verify. BuzzFeed put it out there as a mic drop because they knew they couldn't actually do any legitimate investigation into the details of it and if it was going to be taken seriously it'd be because serious reporting agencies do the work verifying those stories.
If you look at the major stories broken by The WAshington Post or ABC News, two other organizations that had Trump bombshells in 2016, and continued through 2017, almost all of these were corroborated by the NYT or had a NYT source as a major piece of their article (and vice versa). Other news "agencies" generally don't break news, or they're not original sources for a story, they present opinion or make connections between stories that the New York Times (and also WaPo, or WSJ when it comes to financial stories most often) does original reporting on... Or some partnership with the Times (like ProPublica, who is a tight partner with the Times).
What did all these stories talk about? The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton's emails, Trump's taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump's scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.
To reiterate, these 65,000 sentences were written not by Russian hackers, but overwhelmingly by professional journalists employed at mainstream news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump's, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news.
To shed more light on this possibility, we conducted an in-depth analysis of a single media source, The New York Times. We chose the Times for two reasons: First, because its broad reach both among policy elites and ordinary citizens means that the Times has singular influence on public debates; and second, because its reputation for serious journalism implies that if the Times did not inform its readers of the issues, then it is unlikely such information was widely available anywhere
...
Of the 150 front-page articles that discussed the campaign in some way, we classified slightly over half (80) as Campaign Miscellaneous. Slightly over a third (54) were Personal/Scandal, with 29 focused on Trump and 25 on Clinton. Finally, just over 10 percent (16) of articles discussed Policy, of which six had no details, four provided details on Trump's policy only, one on Clinton's policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates' policies. The results for the full corpus were similar: Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton, 291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidate's positions. In other words, comparing the two datasets, the number of Personal/Scandal stories for every Policy story ranged from 3.4 (for front-page stories) to 4.2. Further restricting to Policy stories that contained some detail about at least one candidate's positions, these ratios rise to 5.5 and 4.85, respectively.
...
In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate's policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.
In this context, 10 is an interesting figure because it is also the number of front-page stories the Times ran on the Hillary Clinton email scandal in just six days, from October 29 (the day after FBI Director James Comey announced his decision to reopen his investigation of possible wrongdoing by Clinton) through November 3, just five days before the election. When compared with the Times's overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton's emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton's approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election.
And I haven't even mentioned their article before the election basically absolving Trump of any Russia ties. But I'll be happy to elaborate on my concerns if you're interested.
