Tag Archives: NYT

by - 0 comments

Identity Politics is Alive And Well at The New York Times

I’m a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, one of the largest men’s collegiate fraternities in North America.  If I ran for office, would you assume all 12,000 voting-age collegiate members of my fraternity and all the living TKE alumni would support me?  

Ronald Reagan was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, too. When he ran for president, did the news media assume the votes of all his TKE fraternity brothers were a sure thing?

The New York Times seems to think that members of all the Black Greek-letter sororities and fraternities at US colleges are a ready-made bloc of Kamala Harris supporters in her quest for the presidency because she’s been a member of the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha since her undergraduate days at Howard University. 

“As Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign rushes to shore up its base, its efforts will be bolstered by a ready-made coalition: the more than two million members of Black Greek-letter organizations who have quickly united to mobilize Black voters nationwide,” the Times reported today.  

“A united Black Greek front has the potential to offer even more significant political advantage, as their voter engagement programs reach millions every four years,” the Times added. 

Maya King, the Times reporter who wrote the story, says in her bio, “As a native Southerner, I have been most fascinated by the ways the region has changed politically, culturally and demographically over the last few presidential election cycles — and how those changes are connected.”

But King barely acknowledged those changes in her article. The cheerleading article barely mentioned that there have been signs of deteriorating Black support for the Democratic ticket and growing Black consideration of Donald Trump. 

In November 2023, the Times reported that Black voters were  more disconnected from the Democratic Party than they have been in decades, frustrated with what many saw as inaction on their political priorities and unhappy with President Biden, a candidate they helped lift to the White House. Polls by the Times and Siena College found that 22 percent of Black voters in six of the most important battleground states said they would support former President Trump in the 2024 election, and 71 percent would back President Biden.

Erosion of Black support for the Democratic Party has also been found by the Pew Research Center. The Center reports that although the majority of Black voters across education levels are Democrats, there has been a decrease in affiliation with the Democratic Party in recent years. While 93% of Black voters with college degrees identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party in 2012, that number decreased to 79% in 2023.

Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential contest and Harris’  ascension may well change some Black voters’ preferences, but it’s not likely to be a universal shift. Harris, for example, is a progressive Democrat, but only 28 percent of black Democrats consider themselves liberal, according to the Pew Research Center, while 70 percent identify as moderate or conservative.

On June 25, the Times reported on data  captured by a new Harvard study that shows Black voters  have slightly shifted toward Trump since 2020. “One possible explanation is that some Black voters’ economic gains have allowed them to focus more on noneconomic issues — such as abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights — on which they are more conservative than typical Democrats,” the Times said.

The fact is, Black candidates can’t rely on group solidarity. “It’s certainly true that black voters support black Democratic candidates at higher rates, … but analysis of past elections and campaigns shows that black voters have never prioritized simple descriptive representation over other factors, like party affiliation, campaign viability, candidate electability, preexisting relationships with the black community and a sense of authenticity,” according to the New York City-based Brennan Center for Justice. 

For the New York Times to publish a story assuming Black solidarity for a Black presidential candidate who’s a member of a Black sorority is irresponsible journalism.

As James Bennett, who was the editorial page editor at The New York Times from May 2016 until his forced resignation in June 2020 over a controversial op-ed, has said, “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.”

by - 0 comments

Confronting Chaos: Today’s New York Times

NY Times Book Review interview with Brontez Purnell, 02/25/2024:

NY Times – “What’s the last book that made you cry?”

Purnell – “The newspaper is the only thing I read that makes me cry.”

Excerpts from the Sunday New York Times, Feb. 25, 2024

Predators Leer as Moms Put Girls on Instagram, NY Times
  • Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.  Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.

          “It’s like a candy store 😍😍😍,” one of them wrote. 

  • A record number of people across the country are experiencing homelessness. The federal government’s annual tally last year revealed the highest numbers of unsheltered people since the count began in 2007.
  • …the principal challenge has come at home, where additional U.S. military assistance to Ukraine has been stymied by Donald Trump-aligned House Republicans who question the importance of Ukraine for American security and in some cases even the centrality of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance itself.
  • “You feel totally helpless, totally abandoned by authorities and society in general. You feel like nothing,” said Araceli Gatica, a 32-year-old who left San Luis Acatlán, a mountain village in Guerrero (Mexico). A local gang threatened to kill her after she refused to keep paying $200 a month in extortion. She arrived recently with her three children in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, hoping to seek asylum in the U.S.
  • Bombs that struck houses, markets and bus stations across Sudan, often killing dozens of civilians at once. Ethnic rampages, accompanied by rape and looting, that killed thousands in the western region of Darfur. And a video clip, verified by United Nations officials, that shows Sudanese soldiers parading through the streets of a major city, triumphantly brandishing the decapitated heads of students who were killed on the basis of their ethnicity.
  • Ms. Haley’s loss in South Carolina follows a string of early defeats. She argued in her speech that the nation needed new leadership in the midst of “a world on fire.” “It seems like our country is falling apart,” she said, adding that she was worried “to my core” for its future. “America will come apart if we make the wrong choices. “
  • Prominent epidemiologists have estimated that an escalation of the war in Gaza could cause up to 85,000 Palestinian deaths over the next six months from injuries, disease and lack of medical care, in addition to the nearly 30,000 that local authorities have already reported since early October.
  • And yet, even if parts of society came to terms with natural bodies, the same cannot be said for the natural process of women aging. Wrinkles are the new enemy, and it seems Gen Z — and their younger sisters — are terrified of them. Gen Z-ers are being introduced to the idea of starting treatments early as “preventative” treatment. They are growing up in a culture of social media that promotes the endless pursuit of maintaining youth — and at home, some of them are watching their mothers reject aging with every injectable and serum they can find. But considering the speed at which social media is pushing ever more unattainable beauty standards onto children, it’s time for us to consider our moral obligation to minimizing damage for the next generation.
  • … increasingly in recent months, scrolling the (Tik Tok) feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space…(T)he malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.