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Why Do People Love to Hate the NY Times?

The newspaper which has the moniker "All the News Fit to Print" - the venerable NY Times - rarely escapes the public and critical gaze. Whether it really does print all the relevant critical news is questionable. It's "coverage" of matters foreign [that is outside the US] is woefully slim and inadequate.

Matt Pressman, writing in Vanity Fair, considers why it is that people love to hate the NY Times:

"It’s such a given in the media business that few even stop to notice it: people love to hate The New York Times. They read the paper every day, and seemingly could not function without it, yet they never tire of, and often seem to delight in, pointing out its errors, biases, and various other real and imagined shortcomings. They’re a bit like the callers on sports talk radio—hopelessly devoted to an institution, but wanting nothing more than to voice their (often very loud) opinion about how awful and disappointing it is.

To plumb this phenomenon, VF Daily consulted a handful of people who know a thing or two about Times hatred: V.F. columnist and veteran media-watcher Michael Wolff, Slate press critic Jack Shafer, Gawker editor Alex Pareene, National Review contributing editor and author of Liberal Fascism Jonah Goldberg, and Times media columnist David Carr (who took on the paper’s most prominent conservative hater, Fox News, in a pull-no-punches article last week).

The most commonly cited explanation was that same nagging emotion that makes the French love to hate America and computer geeks love to hate Microsoft: envy and resentment. “The Times is the coxswain, the one setting the pace for the entire culture,” Jonah Goldberg says. “Sociologically, it just matters more.” (“Ideologically, it drives me fucking bonkers,” Goldberg couldn’t resist adding.) “It occupies a position that no other newspaper does,” adds Alex Pareene. “So you get more offended when they’re using that platform to promote David Brooks or something.”

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