Quick, nurse! Those boss-eyed Brit-bashers at the New York Times are at it again! The antics of America’s least reliable news source continue to amuse and irritate in equal measure, with the NYT concocting an image of Britain for its readers that seems strikingly at odds with reality. In the fevered imaginations of the average NYT reader, the UK is a quasi-dictatorial kingdom, where locals huddle round bin fires on the streets of London, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps.
That is thanks to a series of bizarre editorial choices by the NYT, including the continued employment of former Russia Today star Tom Walker, better known as fictitious news reporter Jonathan Pie. For six months now, Pie has pumped out five-minute clips in which he rants on screen about the many failings of Brexit Britain, Boris Johnson and those dastardly Tories. Such ‘opinion’ pieces are of course catnip to the self-flagellating Remainers who fund the newspaper’s coffers. But are they putting the NYT’s much-vaunted reputation for accuracy at risk?
One of Walker/Pie’s claims in the clip is that ‘You can’t get in or out of the country because of airline staff shortages and queues at border control’, a claim that is just categorically untrue. As Josh Glancy of the Sunday Times asks would the Times publish similar ‘videos of a third rate US comedian doing a skit about 6 January and the erosion of American democracy’? Or is it only Britain which gets to endure such sloppy coverage. Still, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by such editorial choices. After all, this was the paper that disgraced itself in the aftermath of the Salman Rushdie attack by declining to publish any defence of free speech, even though the attack took place in New York itself.
For a news organisation that fulminates so much about ‘false information, sketchy digital ads and other deliberate efforts to mislead’, perhaps the NYT could start tackling this problem by addressing its own issues close at home?
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