The New York Times has a massive, almost hegemonic influence on the political discourse among liberals in America. That’s a bold statement, and not one I can easily prove. But I think that’s the reality. The Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones’s piece on her struggles to find a racially diverse and academically strong school for her child single-handedly created a weeks-long debate about the state of K-12 education that eventually Mayor Zohran Mamdani was forced to weigh in on. Ezra Klein’s podcasts and columns are often quoted by Democratic activists and elected officials. Pundits treat the polls that the Times conducts with Siena University as the definitive account of who’s ahead in key races and how various demographic groups are shifting politically. Maggie Haberman is considered the nation’s chief authority on President Trump’s thinking. The guest op-eds in the Times are widely quoted and debated.
And while I know that the overwhelming majority of Democrats don’t subscribe to the Times, they are still influenced by the paper’s perspectives. Why? Because other news outlets that Democrats consume, both left-leaning places like MS NOW and more centrist ones such as ABC and CNN, take their cues from the Times on what to cover and how. (The Times isn’t so important among Republicans, who tend to distrust both the paper itself and other mainstream media.)
The power of the Times isn’t new. But American politics has changed in fundamental ways. And that makes the American left’s attachment to the Gray Lady more problematic. A liberalism that forcefully confronts authoritarianism, oligarchy, climate change, and the numerous other enormous challenges that we face will almost certainly be one that is less attuned to the views of America’s most influential paper. The Times implicitly and at times explicitly advances a centrist, status quo politics, and that’s exactly what liberals must abandon to save the country.
The Times has been the most influential news outlet in America for decades. But when I started out in journalism in the early 2000s, that power was more contested. Back then, I remember people would say a story was really important if it were “on the front page of the Post or the Times.” But The Washington Post’s influence had waned even before owner Jeff Bezos shifted the op-ed pages rightward and the paper laid off dozens of journalists the last couple of years. I worked at the Post from 2021 to 2025, and our pieces got nowhere near the same attention from the public or follow-up from other outlets as those in the Times.
I am not sure exactly how or why the Times became the national news outlet. My theory is that the American political economy of today creates one megawinner in every industry. That’s Google in web search, Apple in smartphones, and the Times in national media.
But the problem isn’t that lots of people read the Times. The problem is that lots of liberal activists and elites are having their perspectives shaped by the Times in 2026. The Times believes deeply in the nonpartisan, nonideological form of journalism that has dominated in the United States for the last eight decades or so. In prior eras, news outlets were more open about their ideology and policy preferences. Even as television networks and newspapers such as the Post and the Times embraced this more neutral approach in the twentieth century, Black-owned newspapers in particular took a different tack, leaning into their concerns about segregation and white supremacy.
Times leaders describe their approach as being an “independent” news operation. They don’t explicitly state this, but I suspect those leaders are quite aware the paper’s audience is largely Democrats and otherwise left-of-center readers. So the paper is signaling that it’s independent from the Democratic Party. But the coverage of the Times is best described by other words and phrases: nonpartisan, bipartisan, centrist, neutral, a “view from nowhere,” and, at its worst, false equivalence.
However we describe this vision, in practice the Times’ news coverage (meaning outside of the opinion section) avoids consistently describing the Trump-era Republican Party as antidemocratic, Islamophobic, racist, and plutocratic. The paper seems interested in portraying conservatives and liberals as equally problematic, or at least implying that there are major excesses on the left as well as the right. The paper’s coverage of higher education and transgender rights in particular leans into the idea that the left has gone too far, as opposed to centering the right’s authoritarian conduct on those issues (e.g., bans on gender-affirming medical care and the study of ideas like critical race theory). The overall product is a factually accurate portrayal of American politics that misses the big story: The Republican Party is a far-right entity at war with democracy; the Democrats are a normal party in a liberal democracy.
The paper’s opinion section, while overall left-leaning, similarly often whitewashes the political conflict in the United States. The correct treatment for Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind all the bans on teaching about racial issues in schools and universities, should be constant columns and editorials blasting him as an authoritarian, not extended interviews that treat him as a normal political actor. Klein’s infamous column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” encapsulated this approach.
The Times has the right to cover America in 2026 this way. And there is nothing inherently wrong with centrist, nonideological media, or coverage that doesn’t use blunt language to describe today’s Republican Party. The problem is the paper’s coverage approach combined with its huge influence on Democrats and liberals. The mistakes that Democrats have made in fighting the MAGA right have been numerous and deeply costly: believing that Trump won in 2016 largely because of economy anxiety, trusting that Joe Biden’s conciliatory approach would bring politics back to normal, refusing to push Biden to stop fully supporting Israel’s war in Gaza, spending much of last year not fighting hard against Trump’s destruction of federal agencies and radical immigration policies.
In my view, the Times helped lead Democrats to all of those fateful decisions. The paper’s coverage hints that the Republican Party is reasonable and parts of the Democratic Party base are unreasonable. That approach pushes Democrats away from the reality: The MAGA right must be defeated, not negotiated with.
If the biggest problem is that the Times’ approach is ill suited for liberals fighting against a radicalized GOP, a smaller but important problem is the Times’ approach to skepticism toward progressives. As progressives gain more influence, the intraparty fissures among Democrats are more important than at any time in decades. And the Times, in my view, is very much on the side of an ineffective center-left.
The paper’s editorial board has strongly embraced the center-left argument that moderate candidates reliably do better in general elections, despite research from scholars Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach and others that question that conclusion. The paper’s skepticism toward Mamdani during his campaign was obvious. The editorial board, which had previously announced it would no longer endorse candidates in local races, published a column urging New York Democrats not to rank the socialist upstart among their top five candidates in the ranked-choice election. The paper’s news section used documents obtained from a hack of the computer systems at Columbia University to write a story that implied Mamdani was being deceitful because he checked “Black or African-American” on his application to the school. Mamdani was born in Uganda and was not admitted to Columbia.
The Times coverage of the post–October 7, 2023, conflict was heavily skewed toward Israel’s perspective, according to reporting from journalist Adam Johnson. For example, the paper used terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” far more to refer to Israeli deaths than those of Palestinians.
Again, there is nothing wrong with a newspaper, particularly its opinion section, having points of view. The problem is that Democratic activists and politicians are taking their cues from the paper. The Democratic left has been prescient and correct on so many issues in the Trump era: the dangers caused by billionaires, the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency, and local police departments; the weaknesses of Biden’s political approach; the electoral challenges caused by his Gaza policy; the problem with so many of the party’s leaders being in their seventies and eighties; Mamdani himself. I think the Democratic Party would have listened to progressives more had the Times not regularly cast the left as unrealistic and impractical.
For America to right itself, we need changes on the scale of Reconstruction and the New Deal. And I worry that’s not going to happen if Democrats and the broader anti-Trump left are taking their cues about what’s necessary and politically possible from the Times. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg win a few of the early primaries in 2028, will the paper portray Democrats as facing a choice between a candidate who will clearly win the general election (Buttigieg) versus one who will clearly lose (Ocasio-Cortez) or acknowledge Bonica and Grumbach’s research and the inherent uncertainty of projecting election results? I worry the Times will take the former approach.
To be sure, the Times provides reliable and impressive coverage of events in the United States and abroad. It often breaks news. The paper’s news and opinion sections have at times been a critical bulwark against Trump. I say this as both a reader of the paper and occasionally a contributor to it. (I am part of a group of political analysts writing short pieces each month about the midterms for the paper’s opinion section.)
What I am calling for is for liberals to expand their news diet. If the Times is implicitly and at times explicitly pushing an incrementalist, centrist, MAGA-tolerant agenda at a time when America needs a fundamental shift in the direction that Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez are urging, liberals largely relying on that paper to shape their worldview are misguided.
So if you’re listening to Klein’s podcast, make sure to listen to Johnson’s Citations Needed too. Hannah-Jones writes brilliantly on race and racism, and so does Michael Harriott. The New Republic’s breaking news team doesn’t have much access to Trump and his aides. And that often means its coverage of the president is more blunt and frank and prescient than that of Haberman and people who talk to Trump’s team. If you want another catchall news source, The Guardian covers everything without seeming to worry much about being too mean to Republicans.
The correct way to practice politics in 2026 is to read The New York Times but remember that much of the essential news to save our democracy has been fit to print elsewhere.
