The New York Times Company is majority-owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through elevated shares in the company's dual-class stock structure held largely in a trust, in effect since the 1950s;[118] as of 2022, the family holds ninety-five percent of The New York Times Company's Class B shares, allowing it to elect seventy percent of the company's board of directors.[119] Class A shareholders have restrictive voting rights.[120]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Organization

What you’ve written here is very misleading, bordering on incorrect, but does this distinction even matter? Both a singular billionaire and a collective of rich owners will manage the business to enhance their personal wealth, not for the common good of ordinary people. If Trump creates an incentive structure where businesses are penalized for going against his will, I think both types of management are rationally going to choose to obey him.

There needs to be a completely different type of management structure if we want leaders in the press to weigh things like the health of our democracy in their decisions.

The second point was an aside, but the first point was the likely answer to your question. You were talking about the NYT doing a good job reporting on Trump but the person you responded to was almost certainly talking about their less honest, more propagandized reporting. I was offering the example of this that is at the forefront of everyone’s minds at the moment.

Not bickering, by the way, just clarifying.

I always liked this quote from Hunter S Thompson, from his scathing eulagy of Nixon:

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Someone needs to stand up and say that people like Nixion and Trump are scum human beings, are not worthy of the respect of objective journalism, and we should stop pretending otherwise.

Except news outlets get so caught up in being “neutral” and “fair” that they won’t accurately report on things when shit gets really fucking bad like now.

as the aphorism says, neutrality is not "five minutes for hitler and five minutes for jew". if a fact is that the candidate for president is scum, that should be indeed reported. the problem in today's journalism is the pseudo-neutrality, which in fact thwarts efforts for good reporting.

so i agree with you, but i still stand behind the fact that news should not take side. they should report facts and the problem is they are sometimes not doing that in the name of said pseudo-neutrality.

i see lot of problems, but "paying for news when it is on your side" is definitely not a solution. that just means you end up in some echo chamber like fox news audience.

this my reply to another comment covers the rest, so i am not going to copy and paste it - https://lemm.ee/post/45874842/15772730