by SONALI KOLHATKAR
The elite newspaper has a long history of undermining progressive causes. Its position on Biden’s viability as the Democratic nominee needs to be seen within this context.
The New York Times, long considered the “newspaper of record” in the United States, has in recent weeks made no secret about its chief concern: President Joe Biden’s ability to defeat Donald Trump in November 2024. And, it has done everything it can to promote the idea that the Democratic Party ticket needs a new headliner. For those of us who read the paper not only to understand how elites think, but to glean how elites—in the words of Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky—“manufacture consent,” the time since the debate has been sharply instructive.
A day after the June 27 CNN debate between the two candidates, the newspaper’s editorial board published a stunning essay seeking to persuade Biden to leave the race. When a paper’s editorial board takes such a clear position on an issue, it is an institutional consensus, and in its June 28 opinion, the Times revealed that it considered Biden to be “reckless” in remaining in the race. Further, it concluded that “he failed his own test” by challenging Trump to an early debate and then crashing under the pressure.
Most stunningly, the paper’s editorial board proclaimed that replacing Biden with another candidate was, “the best chance to protect the soul of the nation…from the malign warping of Mr. Trump.”
But who will “protect the soul of the nation” from the New York Times? In the months leading up to the debate, the Times rarely, if ever, criticized Biden’s morally indefensible position of fueling Israel’s relentless genocide in Gaza. In February 2024 the editorial board published an opinion essay titled “A U.S. Call for a Humanitarian Cease-Fire in Gaza,” which certainly sounds anti-genocide. But the paper actually applauded Biden’s veto of a United Nations ceasefire proposal and justified his alternative proposal, giving Israel full discretion—one that the editorial board admitted “does not have sharp teeth.”
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