Ignoring Its Own Advice, the New York Times Joins the Reflexive Resistance

Newspaper attacks Trump for celebrating Christmas

A ridiculous New York Times news article reflexively attacks the Trump administration for celebrating Christmas without providing context that President Biden and Obama also celebrated Christmas.

Earlier this year the New York Times offered this wise advice in an editorial:

Americans have lost their patience with the status quo and their faith in the ability of many institutions — including public health agencies, financial and business institutions, the Democratic Party, the courts, elite universities and, yes, the news media — to improve their lives and communities. In playing their unique roles in our democracy, institutions should also be wary of falling into a reflexive resistance posture, in which everything Mr. Trump proposes is implicitly wrong or dangerous or in which any tactics to oppose him are implicitly right and virtuous.

In at least a couple of recent instances, the Times own news pages have ignored the reasonable advice of the editorial. Instead the newspaper has been “falling into a reflexive resistance posture,” eroding trust.

The first example has to do with Christmas. A Times news article by Ashley Ahn, a 2022 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, reported that “The Trump administration celebrated Christmas on Thursday by posting a series of religious messages from official government accounts, using language that drew criticism from those who pointed to the country’s separation of church and state.”

The Times treats this as a dramatic change, claiming, inaccurately, that “Government officials have traditionally steered clear of such overtly religious language, as the Constitution bans an official state religion.”

Yet during the Biden administration, President Biden regularly issued an Easter message. Here’s the one from March 31, 2024: “Easter reminds us of the power of hope and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection. As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice.” Here’s the one from Biden for Orthodox Easter, May 5, 2024: “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ reminds us of God’s abundant love for us and the power of light over darkness.” Here was Biden’s December 22, 2022, Christmas address to the nation: “we look to the sky, to a lone star, shining brighter than all the rest, guiding us to the birth of a child — a child Christians believe to be the son of God; miraculously now, here among us on Earth, bringing hope, love and peace and joy to the world….From the silence of space, on a silent night on a Christmas Eve, they read the story of Christmas — Creation from the King James Bible. It went: ‘In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.’ That light is still with us, illuminating our way forward as Americans and as citizens of the world. A light that burned in the beginning and at Bethlehem.”

Here was a Christmas message from President Obama on December 23, 2016: “Tomorrow, for the final time as the First Family, we will join our fellow Christians around the world to rejoice in the birth of our Savior. And as we retell His story from that Holy Night, we’ll also remember His eternal message, one of boundless love, compassion and hope.”

The Times let all that slide without any news articles rounding up condemnations from “Americans United for Separation of Church and State” or from the Cato Institute or fretting that it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Imagine how the New York Times would have covered Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, with its overtly religious language:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered ~ that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Imagine how the Times would have covered Kennedy’s inaugural, with its overtly religious language: “the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God….let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

The Times should run a correction, pointing out that the alarmist article about Trump and Christmas misled readers by failing to acknowledge that Presidents Biden and Obama also used Christian religious language in their holiday messages. If there was a meaningful difference between what Trump did and what Biden and Obama did, the Times doesn’t explain or define it.

The Times made the same error—failing to acknowledge a Biden-era precedent—in its news coverage of Trump’s use of the word garbage. Here’s how the Times news article—not an opinion piece, but a news article—put it:

President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday, calling them “garbage” he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.

Even for Mr. Trump — who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries — his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry….

Robert Pape, a professor at University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years, said such language from the Trump administration was dangerous.

“They’re not just like nasty metaphors — they’re especially dehumanizing metaphors,” Mr. Pape said. “‘Garbage.’ You’re not thinking of something that is human, you’re thinking of it as something that can be easily thrown away, so that is exactly the kind of metaphor we have just found for really decades is likely to increase support for violence.”

The Times news article failed to mention that President Biden had used the term “garbage” in 2024 to refer to President Trump’s supporters, a statement that prompted Trump to get in a garbage truck while wearing a sanitation worker vest for a campaign photo opportunity.

The same Times reporter, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, who wrote the story about Trump’s “xenophobic tirade” covered the Biden “garbage” remarks in 2024 and soft-pedaled them. When Biden used the “garbage” term, there was no hauling out of political scientists to predict that the dehumanization would lead to violence. “Republicans seized on the seeming gaffe,” the Times wrote then, under a headline that said, “Biden Appears to Insult Trump Supporters as ‘Garbage,’ but Quickly Tries to Clarify.” If there was a meaningful difference between Trump and Biden’s usage of the term garbage, the Times doesn’t try to explain to readers what that difference was.

What’s garbage here is the Times trying to harvest clicks from its audience of Trump-hating readers, while eroding what remains of its reputation for accuracy and evenhandedness.

Some of this is about Trump. Some of it is just blatant anti-Republican partisanship. For example, an alarmist front-page Times news article about the University of Texas complained, “The campus is no longer led by an academic, but a Republican lawyer who worked for the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton.” The Times failed to mention that the president of the University of Massachusetts is a Democratic lawyer, Marty Meehan, who is a former member of Congress. A previous U. Mass president was William Bulger, a Democratic lawyer who had been president of the Massachusetts state senate.

A front-page Times news article Saturday paraphrased “Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an organization that monitors harmful content online,” to the effect that “there was little consequence for being wrong. On the contrary, the business model of social media rewards those whose content spreads widely, encouraging more sensational or provocative content.”

The Times intended that as an attack on the X platform and on Bill Ackman and Shaun Maguire. Yet with New York Times company stock above $70 a share for the first time in a decade, and up 34 percent year to date, it might also be read as an unusually self-aware description of the Times company’s own business model. My own view is that the paper had a better approach in the editorial warning against joining the resistance, but my sense is that I am not the typical Times customer.

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