Ripping the mask off the New York Times

Oregon Muse writes today in the Ace of Spades blog,

"Today, I do not want to mourn the passing of the NY Times, but to jeer at the misshapen thing it has become. Or, perhaps, like so many things in the age of Trump, there is no 'becoming', it always was, and the mask has just been ripped off. They have gone public with who they really are, and they are taking American journalism down with them.
"I am not sorry to see it go. I'm watching with unabated glee while it is slowly being destroyed by its current editors. Presumably, the owners are fine with this, because the editors still have their jobs and are not being thrown out on their ears and replaced with serious journalists.

"Perhaps the death of the Times happened a long time ago. Perhaps it died the day that Times reporter Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for covering up The Holodomor in the 1930s Ukraine, and it wasn't returned when his perfidy became obvious to any serious observer. But with the leaked minutes of the meeting led by executive editor Dean Baquet instructing his staff to switch gears: they basically whiffed on the Russian collusion narrative (even though they didn't really do anything wrong, according to Baquet), so now they're going to concentrate on Trump's alleged racism.

"In other words, the Russian collusion narrative was an abject failure, so let's try another one. But I thought journalism was about reporting the news, not determining in advance what the news is going to be. That's just... dishonest.

"And they don't realize how they're destroying their brand. The NY Times used to be the "newspaper of record" even though it was mostly liberal. You could actually read around the bias and get news that wasn't fake. But no longer. Now, it has degenerated into a parody of itself. It's not even up to the quality of Slate, Salon, or even the Huffington Post. It's nothing more than a left-wing blog now, blue-state clickbait, indistinguishable from the Daily Kos. Only even more obnoxious and shrill. When the history of these crazy years will be written by competent historians, it is not going to treat the NY Times kindly. It will probably be compared to the yellow journalism of the 19th century - and not favorably."