Dear The New York Times Company:

I am writing this letter to express my opinion about your company and its future.  While I have no claims to expertise in these matters, I offer my external observations for what they may be worth to you.  Personally I have no concern over the financial success of your corporation and in fact, I believe in corporate eugenics, may only the “fit” survive e.g. those companies which fail to provide the services and products their customers or who relegate themselves to a dying niche should fail so that the resources they utilize can be redistributed to companies which better serve the needs of their customers.

However, the New York Times is more than a corporation, it is a social and political institution.  It was once one of the premier journalistic institutions in our country and the world.  As such it has, in addition to serving its subscribers and advertisers, been of great service to the public.  It is the degradation of this service that is of concern to me and which motivates this letter.  While I would be happy if you referred some or all of this letter to your editorial staff it is not my specific intent but rather, I speak to the corporate leadership of the company.

While the Times has long been classically liberal in the best sense of the term the illiberal leftward trend it has taken in recent decades is undeniable.  While I disagree with this political position, I do not seek here to proselytize my own views.  I rather wish to address what I see as a trap into which the NYT may be falling which I see as undermining its role as a public institution.

There have been two driving factors affecting the behavior of the NYT over recent history.  The first has been technical, the explosion of the internet and the resulting emergence of new journalistic and content paradigms.  The second, possibly driven by the first in some ways, is the polarization of the public political rhetoric.  This in spite of the fact that when polled on specific issues (that’s issues not political identities) the vast majority of the public is generally in agreement on a majority of issues.  However, the minority of ideological extremists, especially on the left, have a very loud voice and I believe this is the mechanism where the technical trend has driven the social one.

Here then is how I see the effects of these trends on your newspaper. 

Firstly, you have, it appears to me, successfully begun to make good use of the new technology as your increasing revenues show.  However along with this adaptation your attention to public feedback has shifted to the physical mail which requires the investment of at least the price of a stamp and the effort to type/pen a physical letter and send it, to electronic communication, and disproportionately to the anonymous social media mobs, as on Twitter, who take only moments to send out a gut reaction and must expend no more resources than a moments passion.  I am thinking specifically of the example of your recent headline change with regard to President Trump as a pointed example.

Secondly, your editorial and reporting staff has shifted leftward in political ideology well beyond the original meaning of the term “liberal” to the position of increased government intervention in personal and social issues which is contrary to the definition of liberalism.  Again, I am not arguing the righteousness or wrongness of that position though you may correctly imagine my stance.  My point is that you should recognize that this is the fact and further that the mean position of your staff is well left of the current population in our country.  This would not be a problem if, ideally, their bias is restricted to the Op Ed pages of your publication.  The problem is that this is not the case and indeed not the case to an ever-increasing degree.  I believe that the staff cannot see the degree to which this is occurring given their monolithic political bent.  There has been a self-amplifying filtering process in the training and selection of journalists which comes into play here and relates to the same process in academia which also concerns me.

Finally, the principle issue is the degradation of journalistic integrity of your institution.  As your staff’s biases manifest to a greater and greater degree your readership also shifts as you gain more from the extreme end and lose more from the center and right.  Here then is the trap.  More and more your readership will not merely disagree with your politics but respect your journalism and accept factual reporting.  Instead they demand you be an advocate in all ways to the determent of journalism and facts and you will be more and more financially dependent on a monolithic radical readership.  At some point you will no longer be able to brush off the extremists and survive the financial hit you would take.  The moderates will have left long ago.  You will cease to be an institution of journalism and become yet another partisan newsletter publisher.  That can be done cheaply, and you will have to compete much more vigorously against the ocean of tweeters and YouTube rants out there.

Keep in mind that now, while you are succeeding financially is the time to reclaim your journalistic integrity.  You feed off of the reputation of your past only so long before you’ve eaten all the seed corn and there’s nothing to do but starve or sell your souls into bondage.

As a final note let me talk about my own political position.  I voted for Trump over Clinton because he promised to rebalance the Supreme Court (and because I believe Hillary is utterly corrupt).  I thought that, if he fulfilled his promise on only this, we could survive anything negative he was likely to do while in office given the exiting constitutional guardrails.  The alternative promised to further imbalance the court to the point which could easily become a real existential threat to our constitutional republic.  While I find him dislikable and abrasive, I do not think that relevant to his competence and have been pleasantly surprise at how well he has done for the most part on policy.  This even as I wince at his tweets.  I have also delighted at how he has thumbed his nose at the pseudo journalistic media who treat him with open contempt.   While apprehensive about Trump when he was elected, I am in full support of him for his second term and, based on the opposition’s total lack of positive individually empowering policies, I fully expect he will be reelected.

What worries me however is that I do see the press as a vital institution in the preservation of our country as a free and prosperous nation.  A free press is essential to keeping in check those in office.  Once the press is almost unilaterally partisan against the current administration and refuses to respect the validity of the political and philosophical views of its base then it will cease to have any influence over those in office.  You can always have a voice but when your integrity is gone who will listen?  As you would justifiably distrust the positions of a lobbyist organization for some corporation, I am justifiably distrustful of your paper as it becomes merely a lobbyist for the ever more radical left. So, I have written to you now because I do still believe the New York Times wishes to stand for journalistic integrity and with all due respect to the true journalism you have demonstrated in the past and strive for in the present and future.

Sincerely,
James Baugh