New York Times (Opinion)
Important Note: AllSides provides a separate media bias rating for the The New York Times news pages.
This page refers to The New York Times opinion page, including op-ed writers and the Editorial Board. The Editorial Board’s bias is weighted, and affects this bias rating by roughly 60%. Not all columnists for the New York Times display a left bias; we rate many individual writers separately (see end of this page). While there are some right-leaning opinion writers at the Times, overall the opinion page and Editorial Board has a strong Left bias. Our media bias rating takes into account both the overall bias of the source’s editorial board and the paper’s individual opinion page writers.
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Mark Peterson and Bryan Anselm/Redux
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Monday’s purge of Tucker Carlson, from Fox News, and Don Lemon, from CNN, confirmed a belief that has been gnawing at me for years: We think about cable news all wrong.
The Friday episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that turned out to be his last drew only about 2.6 million viewers — a measly 1 percent of the American adult population. But on Monday, the news of his firing was one of the top stories in the country. That’s because the power of cable news is in its reach and repetition, not its ratings.
I learned this during my nearly nine years at CNN, where I anchored a weekly program about the media and reported on Mr. Carlson’s radicalization. The people who tuned in to his show at 8 o’clock sharp were only a subset of his total audience. When you count all the people who saw him on a TV at a bar or in an airport and all the people who watched a clip on the internet or heard radio talk-show hosts quote him, he had a monthly audience of surely tens of millions.