Don Feder on why The New York Times is dying

Don Feder, you will recall, is the head of something called Jews Against anti-Christian Defamation, and used to write for the Boston Globe and is a wingnut crackpot who seems to have a worm snuggled in his brain.

Today he's busy trying to get people to boycott The New York Times which he feels is a bad, bad newspaper because it's way too liberal and who needs a way too liberal newspaper in the bad, bad city of New York?

His boycott, as we noted previously, is a project of AIM (Accuracy in Media - which is a misnomer if there ever was one) and you can visit his boycott site here.


Feder would have us believe that The New York Times is in dire straits. It is going down. He claims that advertising revenue is dropping and the paper's stock values are plummeting - "its shares have lost 66% of their value this year."

Why would this be? Feder says part of the reason may be the economy. Duh. It's not like The NYT is the only paper riding rough seas. But there's more to it, says Feder. The paper has seen a steady decline in readership over the past 15 years. Duh. It's not like the same thing isn't happening everywhere. Even in our little central Florida town the local newspaper is in such trouble that it has revisited just about everything it does, including the formatting of the paper, and finally merged with a paper from another nearby town.

That's the story of newspapers all over the country, whether one deems them "liberal" or "conservative."


But Feder sees something bigger here. The New York Times is sinking fast because of its "palpable bias." Feder says "As time goes by, The Times has swung further and further to the left - not just in editorials and commentary, but also in what purports to be news coverage." And that, dear friends, has led to such "disgust" that readers stopped reading it.

Feder, being a right winger and kook, wanted McCain and Palin to win the election. He is really pissed at the Times' "slanted coverage" of this year's presidential campaign, which he claims was "biased, brutish and business as usual. Its reporting here was on par with its coverage of gay 'marriage,' domestic energy exploration, judicial activism, illegal immigration, gun ownership, abortion, taxes, the $700-billion bailout - you name it."

Well, that about covers the right wing's playing field!


Feder is flying blind. He offers no facts to back up his assertions. In fact, as I recall, other writers have argued that The New York Times is, at times, too conservative. I'm one of them.

Feder is just another wingnut with the bolts coming loose. And like loose-bolted wingnuts everywhere, he thinks that if he hollers long and hard enough, what he asks us to take on faith will become reality.

Finally, one might argue that readers aren't quitting on the Times because it is too liberal. The majority of people in this country did elect Barack Obama! Thus, one could argue the reason The New York Times is losing readership is that it's too conservative and no longer in touch with the political beliefs of most of the people in the United States. That argument becomes stronger when one realizes that New York City, where the Times gets most of its readers, is even more liberal than the rest of the country.

So, not only is Feder wrong. He's really wrong.

And that's a good thing. It's also typical.