I Canceled My NY Times Subscription

And other tales of the failure of legacy media

I don’t know exactly when I started subscribing to the New York Times. I used to buy the physical paper when I was in high school in the early ‘80s. But just the Sunday one so I could do the crossword. And not every Sunday because there was only one place near my house in Vegas that sold it, and sometimes I didn’t get there before it sold out.

Not sure if I got the Sunday subscription in college, or if I just bought it every week. I drove for a limo service during college, so I had a lot of waiting time. It was so thick and chock full of information, it would take me a week to get through that one day’s paper.

What I loved about it, though, was the extensive foreign coverage. I learned so much.

One of the first things the Times did when newspapers came under financial attack, and the internet threatened their very existence, was to cut back on foreign news bureaus. That made me sad.

But by then I had had a subscription for a while - first through my business (a newspaper about Chicago’s theatre and film industries) and then personally. I was thrilled when the digital version was offered. It’s a weird thing for a former newspaper publisher to admit, but I really hate printed newspapers. I hate the way they feel. I hate the fact that my fingers get all inky. It’s only slightly less icky for me than fingernails on a chalkboard.

My estimation is that on and off, print and digital, I’ve been buying or subscribing to the Times for 35 years.

This week, I canceled my subscription.

I had been contemplating this for a while, and only kept the subscription because I write about journalism. And because my one daughter has a political major and really likes getting the daily email updates, while the other daughter has a theatre major and doesn’t have the time or inclination to go past the updates.

Then Kash Patel was floated as FBI director. Patel has a hit list of political enemies he wants to go after on behalf of Trump. This includes Alexander Vindman, who blew the whistle on Trump trying to blackmail Ukraine, and Hunter Biden.

In response to this, Joe Biden pardoned his son. I have a feeling, before he leaves office, he will pardon Vindman and others who stood up for democracy during Trump’s first term.

I’m not sure what good that will do if the rule of law is jettisoned. But, assuming it survives, Hunter’s pardon made perfect sense to everyone who doesn’t revel in the idea that cruelty is the point - and to the D.C. and New York press.

The Times didn’t even bother to note that the pardon was likely a reaction to Trump’s cabinet picks, which clearly fulfill his wish to punish his enemies.

The Times did not bother to note that Trump pardoned Jared Kushner’s father, who had already served his jail time for an egregious crime. The news team did not note that Trump pardoned Roger Stone and sprung him from jail just in time for Stone to help plan the January 6 insurrection. Same for Michael Flynn. And Paul Manafort.

The Times did not participate in days of hand-ringing over those problematic pardons. They didn’t have special sections dedicated just to those pardons.

But Hunter Biden? Well, the Times was going to hold old Joe accountable for that.

I mean, look at this December 3rd header. You would think that nothing else was going on in the world - that South Korea hadn’t just avoided a coup; that the New Yorker hadn’t just revealed that the proposed secretary of defense had a drinking and rape problem.

The story, itself, by “Washington insider” Devlin Barrett, is about how Biden gave Trump ammunition by pardoning Hunter.

It’s a NEWS story. Not an opinion piece. But it comes to the conclusion that Biden gave Trump ammunition. And Biden pardoning his son in the face of people coming to power who have threatened his son with extra-judicial punishment is the equivalent to Trump’s pardoning of friends and family members with problematic relationships to the law and foreign governments.

For the naysayers here… yes, Hunter Biden bought a gun when he was still using drugs. But prosecutors almost never use this charge unless the person is an imminent danger to the community. Hunter was not.

We know for certain Jared Kushner got a $2 billion investment deal from the Saudis. The idea that Hunter took money on behalf of Ukraine oligarchs has been debunked. But the lie has been repeated so many times, there are still people who believe it. And the inability of Republicans to pass that lie unchallenged is a big part of the reason a Trump-appointed prosecutor went after Hunter.

To my everlasting dismay, legacy journalists did not bring any of this up.

It was this piece by Barrett that finally made me realize that the relationship between the political press and the GOP is abusive, or at least toxically co-dependent.

Blaming Joe Biden for giving Trump ammunition is like telling your kid that his father wouldn’t have hit him if he had done what he was told to do. Or telling your wife that she deserved to be raped and beaten because she had the temerity to say no.

It goes without saying that nothing Biden does makes Trump’s fascism worse. Except that it needs to be said, because Barrett and his brethren live inside of a bubble so foggy that they don’t seem to know there’s a world beyond it.

The national political press has ceased to be relevant to anyone except each other.

That is not worth my time or money.

(Also, the one person I would miss, Paul Krugman, announced Friday that he is leaving the Times.)

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The Economic Tilt

I have not canceled my Washington Post subscription, because there is a lot of good stuff outside of the politics beat. I mean, I check their gun violence database often. But the hiring of Rupert Murdoch lackey, Will Lewis, as publisher and the refusal to back a presidential nominee has me rethinking.

I had missed this piece that Tom Scocca pointed out on Bluesky about how The Post framed the collapse of France’s government on the machinations of far-right ideologue Marine Le Pen.

This is an example of how the norm for the U.S. national (and, honestly, European) press is a rightward lens.

It wasn’t necessarily the machinations of Le Pen that made this happen. It was that - after centrist and left parties came together to form a coalition that kept power away from the far right in July - Macron then ignored the left part of that coalition, and appointed a right-leaning moderate to run the government.

Then the government championed budget cuts that the left strongly opposed, while opposing higher taxes on the rich that the left championed.

Le Pen took advantage of that.

But, here’s the thing, the default among Western governments, the economic agencies that serve them, and the press that covers them, is to assume that the right is a better choice than the left. Because Socialism.

“Hey,” the thinking goes, “Le Pen might be rabidly racist. Both she and Trump might put immigrants in concentration camps. But hell, it’s better than SOCIALISM.”

Which none of the press can actually define.

Back in 2002, almost all of South America fell into a financial crisis due to heavy debt burdens from the European-based International Monetary Fund.

In 2009, the country of Greece almost collapsed because of the worldwide financial crisis caused by lax financial regulations in the U.S., as well as high debt payment expectations from Germany.

The Great Recession was also partially caused by lower global taxes on the rich, who ended up with excess cash needing to go into some sort of investment, which ended up fueling the creation of highly risky investments that eventually collapsed.

That money could have gone into bridges and childcare and retirement. Instead, it went into Collateralized Debt Obligations, which we now know are as real as Santa Claus. (A rewatch of “The Big Short” might be in order this holiday season.)

So, of course, The Post could not note that Macron screwed over his coalition partners on the left. Then the paper would have to acknowledge that the left exists. It’s so much less mentally and emotional challenging to prop up the right.

Trump’s Crypto Scam Goes Unreported

Judd Legum from Popular Information has been writing this week about Trump’s relationship with “Justin Sun, a Chinese national currently being prosecuted for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

Sun invested $30 million into World Liberty Financial, the Trump-affiliated crypto exchange. Legum points out that this directly benefits Trump.

Per the terms of his deal with World Liberty Financial, Trump is entitled to 75% of proceeds from the token sale, but only after the first $30 million in tokens are sold.

So before Sun's purchase, Trump was entitled to nothing. Sun conveniently purchased enough tokens to meet the entire reserve, allowing Trump to collect 75% of the revenue of all other tokens sold [which was $22 million]. As a direct result of Sun's purchase, Trump netted over $18 million.

Legum notes that “The New York Times has not mentioned Sun's purchase of the tokens, even in passing. Other major outlets, like the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal, have briefly mentioned Sun's purchase in the context of other coverage.”

He then compares this to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Clinton Foundation in 2015 and 2016.

An analysis by Popular Information reveals that between January 1, 2015, and November 8, 2016 (Election Day), the New York Times published 79 pieces that were about or referenced foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. That is nearly one story a week for 22 months.

The Clinton Foundation - which did not even pay Hillary or Bill a salary - made all sorts of changes to ensure that there was not anything close to an appearance of a conflict of interest. But the Times and other legacy media thought it was the story of the year, next to her emails.

History has shown that both stories were simply untrue.

But Sun’s purchase of crypto tokens that netted Trump $18 million? Eh. Just the expected corruption. Nothing to see here.

I mean, at least crypto isn’t Socialism.

Also, I pay for my Popular Information subscription. They do good work. Much better place for my money to go than the Times.

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Carrie Kaufman is a veteran print and radio journalist who has always been more interested in what people are avoiding than what they are talking about. She founded and published PerformInk, a Chicago theatre and film industry trade paper, which covered economics, jobs, politics, racism, sexism, power, real estate - all through the lens of the artist. She then moved on to public radio, where she hosted talk shows in Vegas and Wisconsin, which is when she realized she was too old to do bad journalism.

Check out past and present work on Muckrack.

Follow on Notes, BlueSky and Threads.