The NYT covered up Stalin's purges in the 1930s. Moscow Bureau Chief Walter Duranty famously dismissed reports of the man-made famine in Ukraine—which killed millions—as exaggerated or false. Leftists who wanted to believe that the USSR was a successful socialist experiment looked the other way and were in denial. Similarily the paper was accused of relegating news of the Nazi genocide to the back pages. Despite publishing thousands of front-page stories on WWII, only a tiny fraction focused on the Holocaust, a failure the Times officially acknowledged in 1996. The NYT has promoted TDS since 2015. It promoted medical tyranny. It promoted the mass grave hoax in Canada. It is doing the same thing it did in the 30s: serving as propaganda for a Leftist worldview. I don't see how anyone can think of it as reputable. Bari Weiss wrote a scathing open letter about it that's quite good. The reporters who work there are not interested in the truth; they're there to push an agenda.
Another institutional failure on display. It's emblematic of the cascade of failures in all our truth-seeking institutions, and it starts with the poor education being served to our elites. None of the people who saw that headline pre-print saw anything wrong, and that tells us all we need to know. God help us when people with this level of historical illiteracy get into positions of power.
Thank you for a fuller picture of the headline debacle. And the gift link. I stopped paying for NYT and WaPo several years ago now and prefer to get much of my news from trusted Substack journalists.
All true, but the headline and much of the article is reflective of the other Times and msm subtext - anti-Trump at all costs. This article, aside from quoting Rubio, is entirely “Europe good, Trump bad”. There is no consideration of the policy perspective articulated by Rubio and at the heart of much of this - times have changed. The UK jails people for tweets. They aren’t automatically the good guys and us the bad. But the NYT can’t remotely contemplate anything but Europe good Trump bad.
The headline miss was egregious. I'm not so sure about the erroneous headline reflecting the tenor of the piece. I give Steve Erlanger the benefit of the doubt of knowing NATO is not an American-centered alliance and his piece focusing on Europe.
I remember reading the story online yesterday or the day before and it had the headline it has now, so it must have been corrected quickly. Or maybe the mistake was only in the print version. There is a note at the bottom of the online article that says, "A version of this article appears in print on April 3, 2026, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: A North American Treaty Organization Without America?." No note of a correction to the online headline.
I do agree that the New York Times has declined in journalistic quality in recent years. The facade looks much the same, but go behind that and it's scary to see how sketchy things look. It's not the newspaper it was.
The headline was also meant to be a play on words, which means that everyone down the line from the author, to the editor, to ways & means thought it was okay and could pass for something clever. That's how deep the rot is. They went for the messaging angle over accuracy.
When the whole pipeline replaces merit with identity and ideology, this is the result.
I was a Social Studies and Special Education teacher in NYC for ten years starting in 2014. I was shocked by how little common knowledge my students had, but that was fine. Teaching was why I became a teacher :)
I did not, however, handle with such grace my shock at how little interest colleagues and supervisors showed in imparting knowledge instead of keffiyehist ideology to students.
And, of course, it raises the uncomfortable question: if this slipped through, what else is slipping through?” Zooming in on the subject matter: Unless the reader is a subject matter expert on the topic discussed at hand, there is no way an average reader would know what is missing or shaded that is untruthful. We depend on a newspaper to produce the unvarnished truth on a subject matter and not a propaganda piece. Regarding this issue, time for the Times to employ a simple AI copy editor program to catch the obvious goofs. How hard is that? No excuses please.
The guy running the printing press could have caught this. Alas, a product of the public schools, most likely. Another institution in precipitous decline.
The NYT covered up Stalin's purges in the 1930s. Moscow Bureau Chief Walter Duranty famously dismissed reports of the man-made famine in Ukraine—which killed millions—as exaggerated or false. Leftists who wanted to believe that the USSR was a successful socialist experiment looked the other way and were in denial. Similarily the paper was accused of relegating news of the Nazi genocide to the back pages. Despite publishing thousands of front-page stories on WWII, only a tiny fraction focused on the Holocaust, a failure the Times officially acknowledged in 1996. The NYT has promoted TDS since 2015. It promoted medical tyranny. It promoted the mass grave hoax in Canada. It is doing the same thing it did in the 30s: serving as propaganda for a Leftist worldview. I don't see how anyone can think of it as reputable. Bari Weiss wrote a scathing open letter about it that's quite good. The reporters who work there are not interested in the truth; they're there to push an agenda.
Another institutional failure on display. It's emblematic of the cascade of failures in all our truth-seeking institutions, and it starts with the poor education being served to our elites. None of the people who saw that headline pre-print saw anything wrong, and that tells us all we need to know. God help us when people with this level of historical illiteracy get into positions of power.
Thank you for a fuller picture of the headline debacle. And the gift link. I stopped paying for NYT and WaPo several years ago now and prefer to get much of my news from trusted Substack journalists.
Thank you for giving us another great explanation for "why words matter."
All true, but the headline and much of the article is reflective of the other Times and msm subtext - anti-Trump at all costs. This article, aside from quoting Rubio, is entirely “Europe good, Trump bad”. There is no consideration of the policy perspective articulated by Rubio and at the heart of much of this - times have changed. The UK jails people for tweets. They aren’t automatically the good guys and us the bad. But the NYT can’t remotely contemplate anything but Europe good Trump bad.
The headline miss was egregious. I'm not so sure about the erroneous headline reflecting the tenor of the piece. I give Steve Erlanger the benefit of the doubt of knowing NATO is not an American-centered alliance and his piece focusing on Europe.
I remember reading the story online yesterday or the day before and it had the headline it has now, so it must have been corrected quickly. Or maybe the mistake was only in the print version. There is a note at the bottom of the online article that says, "A version of this article appears in print on April 3, 2026, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: A North American Treaty Organization Without America?." No note of a correction to the online headline.
I do agree that the New York Times has declined in journalistic quality in recent years. The facade looks much the same, but go behind that and it's scary to see how sketchy things look. It's not the newspaper it was.
The NYT uses plural pronouns for singular people based on the person's *preference*, not their actual grammatical number.
The NYT received a Pulitzer for its promotion of a hoax. It's been a rag for a long time.
The headline was also meant to be a play on words, which means that everyone down the line from the author, to the editor, to ways & means thought it was okay and could pass for something clever. That's how deep the rot is. They went for the messaging angle over accuracy.
When the whole pipeline replaces merit with identity and ideology, this is the result.
I was a Social Studies and Special Education teacher in NYC for ten years starting in 2014. I was shocked by how little common knowledge my students had, but that was fine. Teaching was why I became a teacher :)
I did not, however, handle with such grace my shock at how little interest colleagues and supervisors showed in imparting knowledge instead of keffiyehist ideology to students.
They don’t even know what they don’t know. Scary.
One incorrect adjective (not noun)
And, of course, it raises the uncomfortable question: if this slipped through, what else is slipping through?” Zooming in on the subject matter: Unless the reader is a subject matter expert on the topic discussed at hand, there is no way an average reader would know what is missing or shaded that is untruthful. We depend on a newspaper to produce the unvarnished truth on a subject matter and not a propaganda piece. Regarding this issue, time for the Times to employ a simple AI copy editor program to catch the obvious goofs. How hard is that? No excuses please.
Don’t blame the journalist. The headline comes from a subeditor.
The guy running the printing press could have caught this. Alas, a product of the public schools, most likely. Another institution in precipitous decline.
"American" is an adjective, not a noun.
Just sayin'.
world's most prestigious "mainstream" English language newspaper----really?