Out of touch? More like losing control.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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It's the New York Times.💁
If I were the Liberal Paper of Record I would try to ensure some level of future stability for my paper as a going concern, and not turn away my entire customer base.
Especially in an increasingly unstable media landscape where even the big dogs can barely afford to keep their doors open after the death of print media
Are the people who read the propaganda really the customers? Or are they the product being sold to the billionaire class?
Which is more useful to you as a manager at NYT who has an interest in NYT and your paychecks continuing? The billionaire class (who hates you and also doesn’t actually give that much money to NYT) or the middle class liberals who pay for subscriptions to read that garbage?
The point of the NYT isn't to speak to the interests of middle class liberals, it is to shape the opinions of middle class liberals and bend them towards acceptance of power and the idea of limited capitalist reform, and establish themselves as a separate cultural entity from the conservative media sphere, despite ultimately repeating the most egregious lies it peddles.
Yes, but if you’re anyone who works there who actually depends on a paycheck from NYT to pay your mortgage, that wouldn’t be the pressure you feel.
The billionaires do not actually fund NYT in a substantial way. The money that is in your paycheck as an employee there is coming from middle class liberal subscribers.
I would think that those people would feel some level of pressure to not drive away their entire readership base and eliminate the utility of their own job.
You are misunderstanding what exactly a newspaper is, and how it and journalists actually function (it's utility) in a market. You are confusing it with the very propaganda that has been pushed by the media.
While it is ostensibly to 'sell subscriptions', this is wrong. If the job was to sell subscriptions they would just copy and improve on the USA Today formula. The utility of their job is to find a way to convince their middle class subscriber base that they hold the opinions that the owners and editors of the newspaper hold, under the premise that all the other subscribers must also hold this opinion, otherwise they wouldn't subscribe. They are selling the illusion of control of a newspaper.
If you are a journalist and you fail to thread that fine line, there are a thousand journalism majors who will do it instead of you. Just because they are failing the sell doesn't mean that the sell can't be made. Especially if your subscriber list is mostly liberals, just issue a lukewarm apology, be better with dog whistles and they will come right back.