The New York Times blunders (again)

It seems that the world’s most pompous newspaper has got it wrong again. This column has regularly reported on the caricature of Britain which exists in the fevered imagination of the New York Times and its correspondents. According to them, the UK is a plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole on the verge of democratic collapse where the trains don’t run on time and swamp-dwelling locals feast on legs of mutton. When it’s not denouncing Boris Johnson as a despot, it’s exploiting JK Rowling for subscribers or suggesting the UK’s vaccination plan amounts to pumping pensioners with a dangerous cocktail of Covid jabs.

The NYT was, until recently, headed by Mark Thompson, the former director-general of the BBC. Thompson, who served as the paper’s CEO between 2012 and 2020, (successfully) strived to increase global subscriptions – including, of course, in Britain. It seems that one strategy to achieve this goal has been to mirror what the Guardian did 15 years ago when it launched an online site, focused on America.