NY Times Opinion Page is a Fact-Challenged Disaster

Narratives override evidence at the newspaper where America's liberal elites talk to themselves about an America that doesn't even exist.

9 minute read

Writing in the Washington Post in October 2022, media critic Erik Wemple admitted something that is almost verboten in today’s journalism: the New York Times is a screwed up outlet that fired opinion page editor James Bennet to appease Democratic Party partisans now staffing the once-esteemed newspaper. Wemple’s confession came “875 days too late,” he wrote, because he had been too afraid when Bennet was fired to tell the truth and defend journalism from eroding values.

“Our posture was one of cowardice and midcareer risk management,” Wemple wrote. “With that, we pile one more regret onto a controversy littered with them.”

Kathleen Kingsbury replaced Bennet as the Times’ opinion page editor—and the opinion page remains a hot mess of nonsense and poor standards, such as Zeynep Tufekci’s fact-challenged treatise attacking the Cochrane review as part of her mask advocacy. I’ve written for the Times opinion page, so I’ve experienced their former rigorous standards of reporting and fact checking, yet two recent essays underline that journalistic norms no longer apply to today’s Times.

The first essay catching my attention was by Times columnist Michelle Goldberg who castigated Republican House members for banning newly elected transgender Congresswoman Sarah McBride from women’s bathrooms. For a reason that still baffles most Americans, Democratic party activists continue to ignore issues that most concern the public and have placed transgender disputes as a central focus in their party’s belief system.

The day before the September presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, CNN reported a crazy 2019 Kamala Harris campaign pledge to support “taxpayer-funded gender care and transition surgeries for detained immigrants.” After losing the election, Democrats now realize that their transgender obsession doesn’t sit well with most Americans, but Times columnists remain oblivious.

“Trans rights don’t just resemble reproductive rights,” wrote Golberg’s colleague at the Times, M. Gessen. “Trans rights are reproductive rights.”

Goldberg tried to plot a less ideologically fervent middle grounds on trans controversies—she’s worried about transgender girls outcompeting real girls in sports, and doesn’t like the silly wordplay like “gender assigned at birth” that avoids biological reality—before jumping to her final conclusion: on bathrooms, Democrats must “stand and fight.”

Maybe Kamala Harris should have campaigned on lavatories?

I’m not sure I have a preferred side in the Goldberg bathroom wars, but one factoid she deployed caught my attention: “Anti-trans rhetoric was a central part of the Trump campaign; between Oct. 7 and Oct. 20, more than 41 percent of pro-Trump ads promoted anti-trans messages.”

Intrigued, I clicked on the link for “41 percent” and it took me to an interview by PBS journalist Laura Barrón-López with transgender activist Erin Reed. Reed shot to fame as a “reporter” in liberal media circles because—despite the endless articles published on transgender matters—there aren’t that many transgender activists for reporters to interview. Plus, Reed seems to be the only one who writes a newsletter.

The opening of Laura Barrón-López’s PBS interview begins with this alleged fact, “From October 7th to the 20th, Trump's campaign and pro Trump groups spent an estimated $95 million and more than 41 percent of those ads were anti-trans.”

But PBS doesn’t tell us where this fact comes from. Did some advertising firm that tracks campaign ad spending release it? Was it from an academic research center that studies American politics? Because PBS didn’t cite a source, I was suspicious this “fact” came from Erin Reed, who has a history of fact-addled reporting.

So I emailed reporter Laura Barrón-López, asking her to explain. PBS doesn’t define what the term “anti-trans” means. PBS also doesn’t disclose to their audience if the 41% claim means “41% of the $95 million” Republicans spent on campaign ads were considered anti-trans, or if 41% of the all the Republican ads were considered anti-trans.

“Did this fact come from Erin Reed?” I wrote to Barrón-López. “And if yes, does this mean 41% of the money spent on ads, or 41% of the ads?”

Barrón-López did not respond to my questions, reinforcing my suspicions that this “fact” was something Erin Reed made up and PBS then reported as gospel. In sum, it appears that PBS reported this “fact” out of nowhere and this “fact” then burbled up to the New York Times’ opinion page. Most likely because this “fact” buttresses the Times’ political ideology.

The second New York Times essay that caught my eye was “The MAGA Science Agenda Reveals America’s Future” by M. Anthony Mills. Mills is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative nonprofit in DC that functions as “think tank” and corporate influence peddling operation.

Back in 2019, a whistleblower leaked documents to ProPublica showing that Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma paid AEI hundreds of thousands of dollars over several decades.

During this same time period, AEI resident scholar Dr. Sally Satel published multiple essays downplaying the dangers of opioids in various outlets, including one in the New York Times: “Doctors Behind Bars: Treating Pain is Now Risky Business.”

Here's a section of ProPublica’s investigation discussing Satel’s essay in the Times:

The Times identified Satel as “a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.” But readers weren’t told about her involvement, and the American Enterprise Institute’s, with Purdue.

Among the connections revealed by emails and documents obtained by ProPublica: Purdue donated $50,000 annually to the institute, which is commonly known as AEI, from 2003 through this year, plus contributions for special events, for a total of more than $800,000. The unnamed doctor in Satel’s article was an employee of Purdue, according to an unpublished draft of the story. The study Satel cited was funded by Purdue and written by Purdue employees and consultants. And, a month before the piece was published, Satel sent a draft to Burt Rosen, Purdue’s Washington lobbyist and vice president of federal policy and legislative affairs, asking him if it “seems imbalanced.”

On the day of publication, Jason Bertsch, AEI’s vice president of development, alerted Rosen to “Sally’s very good piece.”

“Great piece,” Rosen responded.

Purdue’s hidden relationships with Satel and AEI illustrate how the company and its public relations consultants aggressively countered criticism that its prized painkiller helped cause the opioid epidemic.

In his recent Times essay, Mills skipped across his employer’s cozy ties to Big Pharma to deceive the American public about opioid risks, writing:

When it came to health agencies, many of Mr. Trump’s picks — Scott Gottlieb for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Alex Azar for secretary of health and human services — had impeccable reputations in the Republican establishment. The criticism from the left was mostly the tired refrain that they were too cozy with the pharmaceutical industry.

Mr. Mills’ attempt to shield Scott Gottlieb and Alex Azar for their own cozy ties to Big Pharma as a “tired refrain” is deceptive and dishonest, if not outright fabrication. Gottlieb and Azar have both served as Big Pharma servants, and these financial links have been widely reported. And the criticism is definitely deserved. Before we get into the details, know that the Times’ opinion page failed to disclose one relevant fact in Mills’ essay.

Both Mills and Gottlieb work at AEI—Purdue Pharma’s favored DC “think tank.”

Mills also omitted another tiny detail from his essay defending Gottlieb from the “tired refrain” that he’s too cozy with pharma. Gottlieb is on the board of Pfizer.

One other microscopic oversight by editors at the New York Times who commissioned and fact-checked Mills’ piece. Gottlieb has also been caught with his hand in the opioid industry cookie jar. During his 2017 Senate confirmation process as Trump’s pick to run the FDA, Gottlieb divulged raking in almost $45,000 in speaking fees from companies that manufacture and distribute opioids.

Not to engage in a “tired refrain,” but Gottlieb’s cozy ties with the opioid industry didn’t vanish once he became FDA Commissioner. House investigators released an April 2022 report on the consulting firm McKinsey, which was caught advising the FDA on drug safety while also advising Purdue on strategies to increase Oxycontin sales. Seriously, this happened.

If you dig through the House’s 53-page report (which I did), you’ll find a few paragraphs on McKinsey employees emailing about success they had influencing a 2018 speech on opioid safety by Gottlieb while he was FDA Commissioner.

“McKinsey had nothing to do with my speech,” Gottlieb emailed me, after the report became public.

“It’s his word against McKinsey’s,” retorted Dr. Andrew Kolodny, medical director of the opioid policy research collaborative at Brandeis University. “But we have strong evidence that they would have been capable of influencing a Gottlieb speech, because they were working so extensively with the FDA.”

But it wasn’t just Gottlieb. In his Times essay, AEI’s Mills also defended former Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar from the “tired refrain” that he was “too cozy with the pharmaceutical industry.” Let’s examine that claim.

When the Senate confirmed Azar in 2018, he became the very first HHS Secretary who had worked in the pharmaceutical industry. Azar had previously served as HHS’s general counsel and then HHS Deputy Secretary, before leaving HHS in 2007 to become Eli Lilly’s lobbyist. Eli Lilly then promoted Azar to run their operations in the United States. In total, Azar spent almost 10 years at Eli Lilly; before leaving to found a consulting firm for pharmaceutical companies, the job which he had during his Senate confirmation process.

None of this is hidden from either Mills nor the editors at the New York Times opinion section. I found it on Alex Azar’s LinkedIn page.

What Azar doesn’t note in his LinkedIn biography: during his time running Eli Lilly, Attorneys General in five states issued subpoenas to his company regarding Azar’s pricing of insulin. Today, Azar sits on the board of a slew of healthcare companies, including Foresight Capital, a pharmaceutical investment firm.

While the New York Times might print that it’s a “tired refrain,” I would say Azar’s ties to the pharmaceutical industry are pretty damn cozy.

I can’t really explain what is going on at the Time’s opinion page and why facts don’t seem to matter much anymore. What I can do is caution readers seeking ideas there, because narratives seem more important to their editors than facts and accurate reporting. Last December, Bennet sought to illuminate why the paper had removed him as the opinion page editor and the problems that pervade the Times to this day, including their inability to acknowledge mistakes or challenge staff with ideas that contradict their own world view.

“The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist,” Bennet wrote in the Economist.

Bennet’s essay is lengthy essay, running almost 20,000 words, but I’ll leave you with one more passage:

The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.

FINAL NOTE TO READERS: In case you’re still uncertain about the quality of essays that the New York Times puts out for their opinion section, I forgot one more example. After ProPublica exposed AEI’s Sally Satel for publishing an essay in the Times to downplay the dangers of opioids—the draft of which Satel ran past Purdue’s lobbyist—the Times did nothing to Satel. Instead, the Times opinion page has continued to publish essays by Satel, including one in 2022.