Global warming and the failure of the US media

The New York Times is the most important newspaper in the US. Does this make it the most important newspaper in the world? If one measures the importance of a news organisation by the scale of its influence, then you could argue that the Times is both the world’s most important newspaper and its most appalling journalistic failure.

The intellectual establishment in the US views The New York Times as the gold standard of  American journalism. ‘The Times remains the most important and, on balance, the best newspaper in the world,’ wrote The New Yorker’s prominent political commentator, Hendrik Hertzberg, in May 2003. Actually, Hertzberg went even further. ‘The Times’ authority… isn’t just journalistic,’ he said. ‘It’s downright ontological. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the Times defines public reality [in the US].’

A month later, another...

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