Peter Coviello explains how the New York Times enables right-wing billionaires to push their agenda.
Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this. It’s so offhand you can think you’re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.
... [W]hat this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage. For no matter how unhinged the position you’ve taken, or paid someone marginally credentialed to sketch out on your behalf—“Can Woman Think?: We Investigate,” “Is the Negro a Man: A Reconsideration”—that opinion will, by virtue of such provenance, possess all needed evidentiary gravity for the Times. And then some. (Only yesterday the Times ran this actual story, which is not parody.)
George Monbiot points out that the same forces are in action at the BBC.
This also describes the BBC’s understanding of “impartiality”. While it no longer provides a platform for outright climate denial, almost every day it breaks its own editorial guidelines by hosting Tufton Street junktanks (which often argue against environmental action) without revealing who funds them. Shouldn’t we be allowed to know whether or not they are sponsored by fossil fuel companies?
