The New York Times Is Getting Really, Really Ridiculous

Each day brings new evidence that the New York Times is abandoning nonpartisan independence and instead embracing the hard left.

It’s not entirely clear whether this is intentional or accidental. The “intentional” interpretation sees the shift as a deliberate business choice aimed at achieving revenue growth by courting an international far-left audience of paying subscribers. The “accidental” interpretation sees it as a failure of the paper’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, and his well-intentioned if imperfect top editors to enforce their old-fashioned standards on the younger and more ideologically motivated staffers who make the day-to-day decisions that shape the news and opinion coverage.

Whatever the reason, it’s increasingly and glaringly apparent.

The latest example comes with the paper’s advice on what to watch on election night. Under the heading “Election Night Coverage,” the “This Week on TV” column recommends NBC News and notes, “ABC, CBS and CNN will also carry live coverage and analysis, beginning at 8 p.m.” Fox News doesn’t get a mention? It’s strange—as if the Times is trying to pretend that Fox News, which gets significantly higher ratings than CNN, doesn’t even exist.

The TV column appears under the byline of Shivani Gonzalez.

Here is Ms. Gonzalez, according to her Instagram account:

Her LinkedIn profile lists her as a volunteer for the Liberal Party of Canada, basically Canada’s equivalent of the Democrats, and the rival to the more pro-American Canadian Conservative Party.

Her LinkedIn profile also lists her as having served from June 2019 to February 2021 as a communications coordinator and director of communications in the New York State Assembly. State government records show she worked for a member of the Assembly, Yuh-Line Niou, who was a Democrat and also a candidate of the far-left Working Families Party. In a May 2026 interview in connection with a campaign for state Senate, Niou said “We have seen government that has become more fascist daily” and said she was running to “fight this fascist regime.” Niou added, “We have to tax the rich.”

“The politics job allowed me to go back into journalism, understanding the impact of the stories that were being told and how stories can really garner support for legislation. Politics and journalism are really cyclical,” Gonzalez explained to her college newspaper, which described her as “living every creative’s dream in New York.”

Gonzalez did not reply to my email about why Fox News was left off her list.

I don’t want to pick on some lowly news assistant from Canada. It’s not her fault if she doesn’t understand the difference between news and politics. But where is the Times management? A.G. Sulzberger and Times executive editor Joe Kahn take themselves super-seriously. It seems like every other day they are giving a lecture at a journalism school or participating in a podcast interview about how irreplaceable and valuable the Times is, in this, its 175th anniversary year, precisely because it is independent and nonpartisan and therefore credible. Where is the adult supervision?

And it’s not just the television listings. Today’s Times front page includes two above-the-fold articles boosting the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. Both articles carry the byline of Tim Balk, who in 2015, as the assistant opinion editor of the Daily Northwestern, called Donald Trump a “clown” and declared, “In a Republican primary field littered with climate-change deniers, xenophobes and out-of-touch political dinosaurs, Trump might be the worst.”

One Times article by Balk declares, “in Michigan, Republicans have targeted the Democratic Senate nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, with Islamophobic attacks. President Trump has described Dr. El-Sayed as a ‘vicious, violent jihadist.’” The Times, which is constantly reminding us that not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, can’t seem to wrap its mind around the possibility that not all criticism of an extremist Senate candidate who is Muslim is Islamophobic.

Another front-page Times article by Balk, about a Democratic member of Congress from Michigan endorsing El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, was originally headlined online by the Times as “Democratic Feud in Michigan Escalates as Senate Primary Loser Joins Republican.” That one bends over backward to euphemize and soft-pedal El-Sayed’s positions. For example, it says, “Ms. Stevens, a moderate and a strong supporter of Israel, often clashed with Dr. El-Sayed, an outspoken progressive critic of the country, during their contentious primary race.” El-Sayed is not just a “critic” of Israel; he’s falsely accused it of genocide, said it’s as bad as Iran, said he’d cut off all arms to Israel, and has been refusing to condemn a bizarre commercial aired by his allies that groundlessly blames the U.S.-Israel relationship for the cost of groceries in American supermarkets. Josh Gottheimer, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, called it “the Jew-hating ad.” Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, called it an example of El-Sayed’s “fixation with Jewish money.”

As if all that were not enough, Sunday’s Times book review carried a review of a book by Sequoia venture capitalist Michael Moritz about his Jewish family’s history as refugees from the Nazis. The Times review, by Julian Borger, a journalist from the far-left British Guardian, manages to fault Moritz’s family Holocaust memoir for, of all things, failing to include condemnations of Israel’s war in Gaza.

The Times review reports, “Moritz does not mention considering moving to Israel, never having ‘felt kinship with the odious Israeli settlers and their vile political representatives’ who have ‘plundered’ the lands of the Palestinians.”

Even that denunciation, though, doesn’t go far enough, in the Times reviewer’s view: “A memoir of the Holocaust is under no obligation to assess current events, but Moritz’s book explicitly sets out to find contemporary parallels. It seems important how we, the descendants of the victims and survivors alike, confront the ongoing conflict in Gaza.”

The review concludes, “Moritz says that after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, he felt ‘emotionally connected with Israel’s fate’ for the first time; he doesn’t linger on the wholesale destruction of Gaza that followed. Given the book’s contemporary framing, I would have liked to learn Moritz’s views of his former company Sequoia Capital’s investments in an Israeli defense industry start-up dedicated to integrating artificial intelligence into military hardware, for instance. The omission feels striking in an otherwise thoughtful work on coming to terms with the long shadow of the Shoah.”

Unbelievably, the Times machine-generated content-suggestion system, based on the text of the review of a Jewish family Holocaust memoir, serves up “See more on: The Israel-Hamas War, Donald Trump” and “More on Gaza and the West Bank.”

This is gross and just the latest example of how the Times has become ridiculous.