Former NYT Executive Editor ADMITS: Paper ‘Unmistakably anti-Trump’
Peter D'Abrosca
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The former executive editor of New York Times has slammed the paper for its anti-Trump bias and obvious work as a public relations arm of Hillary R. Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, according to excerpts from her upcoming book.
According to Fox News, who first published the excerpts, Jill Abramson describes the paper as “unmistakably anti-Trump.”
Abramson was the executive editor of the former paper of record from 2011-2014. She was fired after at least a year’s worth of turbulence with Dean Baquet, the paper’s managing editor at the time. She bashed Baquet for turning the paper into an “opposition party.”
“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson said in the book. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
Baquet has described Trump’s attacks on the press as “out of control.” But Abramson’s harsh criticism suggests that Trump’s criticism might be warranted. Baquet is now the executive editor of the paper.
Of his many clashes with Abramson, “Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom,” according to POLITICO. The piece also interviewed Times staffers who described Abramson as “impossible” and “very, very unpopular.”
Abramson blamed some of the paper’s biased reporting on “woke” liberal journalists and financial incentive for bashing Trump.
“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated,” Abramson said in the book.
“The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” she reportedly said.
Of course, Abramson was not completely contrite, claiming that the Times, which initially reported the Clinton email scandal, “made some bad judgment calls and blew its Clinton coverage out of proportion…”
Abramson’s book is called “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.”
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