The
Times is a paper for the East Coast rich. If that doesn’t describe you, the paper is not making editorial decisions with you in mind.
“
Times readers in the New York metropolitan area are upscale, affluent, Jewish, liberal and identify with New York’s culture, its museums and its art,” a former
Times circulation editor
said in a 2013 interview. The company’s
media kit—the PR materials designed to convince brands to purchase ads in the paper or on their website—tells a similar story: “The NYT Weekday ranks #1 with Opinion Leaders, reaching 57% of this elite group.” It reports a median household income of $191,000 for readers of the paper and
$96,000 for the website.
I am an urban professional, living in New York, making a good living, and
The New York Times is barely even for me. Take a surgeon, making $400,000. That is, more or less, the
intended reader of the
Times, which consigns
a mere family practitioner making $200,000 to the “middle class.” Indeed, the
Times itself helpfully clarified its own upward-skewing vision of social class in
a delightfully unselfaware Opinion section piece about “the middle class in America” made up almost entirely of subjects with six-figure household incomes. When readers criticized the paper’s apparent redefinition of “middle” and “class,”
the Times braintrust explained the editorial process that led to the creation of that piece: They simply tasked reporters to ask
Times readers who self-identified as middle class; not surprisingly, these open-ended inquiries yielded a handful of objectively wealthy people who simply don’t feel that rich.
The paper’s target audience explains everything from its bizarre fixation on elite private universities and the behavior of the students attending them to its
unshakably windshield-obsessed perspective on transit issues, despite covering the only American city where a majority of households don’t own a car. It explains the entire real estate section, and “Vows,” and why a significant portion of
the Gray Lady’s op-ed page is given over to people who only exist to troll a sort of imagined effete elitist caricature of Manhattan liberalism. It even
explains the crossword puzzle.
Source:
https://newrepublic.com/article/154726/heres-better-reason-unsubscribe-new-york-times
