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.
Donald Trump does not speak from conviction. He does not speak from belief or at least any belief other than self-obsession. He certainly does not speak from anything we might recognize as reason; when he’s holding forth at a microphone, even the most careful students of Trump the rhetorician will struggle to find the light of complex thought.
You should think of Trump instead as a purely instrumental speaker. It does not matter to him whether a statement is true or false. It does not matter if one statement contradicts another in the same speech or in the same paragraph or in the same sentence. What matters to Trump is whether the words serve the purpose at hand. He will say anything if it’s what he feels an audience wants to hear or if it moves him one step closer to a personal or political goal.