New york times

The New York Times’ royal derangement syndrome

First it was Brexit, now it’s the Queen. That the New York Times has a near-pathological loathing for Britain is nothing new at this point; but it seems that the motivating factor for the ‘Gray Lady’s’ Anglophobia has switched in recent days from the 2016 referendum result to the passing of our beloved monarch. Barely had the Queen’s death been announced then the NYT was furiously publishing opinion pieces denouncing the woman as a symbol of British imperialism. This was just hours after her death and ignored the salient facts that Elizabeth’s reign coincided with the end of the British Empire and that she loved the multi-racial Commonwealth. Even Cyclops

Get ready for Liz mania

Here she is, then. Liz Truss is Britain’s third woman Prime Minister and she’s already suffering from the not-so-soft bigotry of low expectations. Almost everyone is looking at this woman the Tory membership has chosen to lead us all and feeling glum. She is someone widely seen in political and media circles as a lightweight and an embarrassment. The overly drawn-out and stale leadership battle between her and Rishi Sunak hasn’t helped either. Can Liz Truss ever hope to win a general election? But most new leaders enjoy a popularity bounce upon entering high office. Remember May mania? She experienced a five per cent surge in the polls in her

The New York Times blunders on Britain (again)

Quick, nurse! Those boss-eyed Brit-bashers at the New York Times are at it again! The antics of America’s least reliable news source continue to amuse and irritate in equal measure, with the NYT concocting an image of Britain for its readers that seems strikingly at odds with reality. In the fevered imaginations of the average NYT reader, the UK is a quasi-dictatorial kingdom, where locals huddle round bin fires on the streets of London, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps. That is thanks to a series of bizarre editorial choices by the NYT, including the continued employment of former Russia Today star Tom Walker, better known as fictitious news reporter

One worldview has taken over the historical profession

Professor James H. Sweet is a temperate man. He seeks to avoid extremes. But he also seeks to be bold in his temperance. You can do that by emphatically stating an opinion that seems above reproach. But Professor Sweet miscalculated. His emphatic bromide blew up, and he was left offering emphatic apologies. For those who have not followed this little academic circus, Professor Sweet, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is also the president of the American Historical Association (AHA). That’s an important post. The AHA has more than 11,500 members. It publishes the American Historical Review, ‘the journal of record for the historical profession in

The New York Times’ strange silence on Rushdie

The New York Times has never been shy about sharing its opinion – especially when it comes to bashing Britain. In recent years, Mr S has greatly enjoyed reading the London dispatches from America’s least reliable news source, in which Brexit Britain is re-imagined as an autocratic archipelago where plague-riddled, rain-drenched, swamp-dwelling subjects devour legs of mutton and fascistic propaganda. But now, Steerpike has rare cause to bemoan the ‘Gray Lady’s’ absence. For the NYT, whose staff proudly consider it to be the world’s leading liberal newspaper, has been strangely quiet on an area of intense local concern. The stabbing of Sir Salman Rushdie shocked the world last Friday, with expression

Why is The New York Times so obsessed with loathing Britain?

They’ve done it again in the grey building on 826 Eighth Avenue, New York City, NY, USA. They – the editors of the New York Times – have launched a tumultuous broadside against the most degraded, pathetic, hopeless, rancid, ugly, stupid, ridiculous, doomed and offensively anti-democratic country in the entire world. That is to say, the United Kingdom. This particular fusillade is quite something. Under the shouting headline The Fantasy of Brexit Britain Is Over, the author – Richard Seymour (and we shall come back to him) – serves up a grand, all-you-can-eat buffet of UK hatred. Britain, according to Mr Seymour, is ‘economically stagnant, socially fragmented, politically adrift’. The

The New York Times blunders (again)

It seems that the world’s most pompous newspaper has got it wrong again. This column has regularly reported on the caricature of Britain which exists in the fevered imagination of the New York Times and its correspondents. According to them, the UK is a plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole on the verge of democratic collapse where the trains don’t run on time and swamp-dwelling locals feast on legs of mutton. When it’s not denouncing Boris Johnson as a despot, it’s exploiting JK Rowling for subscribers or suggesting the UK’s vaccination plan amounts to pumping pensioners with a dangerous cocktail of Covid jabs. The NYT was, until recently, headed by Mark Thompson, the former director-general

Gavin Mortimer

Is the New York Times right to say Muslims are fleeing France?

Has the New York Times found a new bête noire? It was for a number of years Britain, damned for having had the temerity to leave the European Union. As Steerpike noted, the Sceptered Isle became a ‘plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole’. But now it is the turn of France to receive a finger-wagging from the Gray Lady. Last week the NYT ran a lengthy article entitled ‘The Quiet Flight of Muslims from France’, in which it claimed that a growing number of French Muslims are emigrating because of the hostility they have experienced since the wave of Islamist terror attacks in 2015 and 2016 that left more than 200 French

The New York Times takes aim at J.K. Rowling

It looks like the New York Times is at it again. In recent years, America’s least-reliable news source has developed a strange view of Britain — or at least since the Brexit vote in 2016. In the NYT’s world, the UK is a desolate place, where locals huddle round bin fires on the streets of London, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps during the summer, ever fearful of the despot Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Just last month the paper’s international edition ran a front-page comment piece claiming the country would ‘sleepwalk into tyranny’ thanks to our ‘ever more spiteful nationalism.’  Now though it seems the Brit-bashing has a

The decline of American journalism

The latest absurdity in American journalism is the forced resignation of the veteran New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr for uttering the word ‘nigger’ in front of a group of teenage tourists on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru. It has been justly ridiculed by many sane conservatives and even some courageous liberals. Although the infraction happened more than a year ago, calls for reason have had no practical effect against the demands online and inside the Times that McNeil be fired after the Daily Beast revealed the teenagers’ complaints. McNeil’s own defence is that he used the racial epithet as information with the high school students, not as an

The New York Times gets Britain wrong (again)

BREAKING: Britain is plunging into autocracy. Well, according to the New York Times at least. Steerpike has grown used to the witterings from America’s least reliable news source in recent years, as it seeks to portray the UK as a plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole on the verge of democratic collapse but where the trains don’t run on time and swamp-dwelling locals feast on legs of mutton. As a pastiche of foreign news coverage, it’s up there among the best – like Scoop without the fiction disclaimer. The latest dispatch from Perfidious Albion is an opinion column published by a little-known left-wing hack, splashed across the front page of the paper’s international edition. According

The poor are too busy to care about the rich

New York   ‘The City of London is hiding the world’s stolen money’, screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other examples of anti-white, anti-cop, anti-male and anti-Conservative platforms. (‘Bid the binary goodbye’ is another pearl.) Not that anyone any longer takes the Bagel Times seriously since it decided that whites are very bad people. Still, I found it amusing that London is responsible for the shame of the Pandora Papers, when most of the miscreants involved are Third World dictators and eastern oligarchs. Never mind. A newspaper that consistently shades the facts to suit its agenda — even book reviews are

The problem with the New York Times’ Gaza coverage

While war raged between Israel and Gaza, the New York Times published a powerful montage of 64 minors said to have been killed in the conflict so far. Under its famous motto ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, and with the headline ‘They Were Just Children’, America’s paper of record informed us that ‘they had wanted to be doctors, artists and leaders’, and invited us to read their stories. It was impossible to look at those innocent faces without feeling deeply distressed. This was the human cost of the Israeli war machine, brought directly to your breakfast table, in a way that the vicious Turkish assault on the Kurds

Shock as NYT praises Britain

In recent years Britain has become something of a Bermuda Triangle for the New York Times. Since voting for Brexit in 2016, the UK has become reimagined in the reporting of the Gray Lady’s esteemed reporters. It is a strange, desolate place, where locals huddle round bin fires on the streets of London, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps during the summer, ever fearful of the despot Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. But has all that now changed? Mr S was minded to call the Tower to check on London’s ravens after seeing an article published today titled: ‘Britain’s ‘One-Jab’ Strategy’ with the subheading ‘Britain’s “one-jab” strategy is working, offering

Revelatory and grubby: Framing Britney Spears reviewed

The most headline-grabbing of these three pop docs was Framing Britney Spears, part of the New York Times Presents documentary series, and a bit of a worldwide sensation. It was both revelatory and grubby. As many have noted, the footage of interviews with Spears as a prepubescent and teenager was so deeply unpleasant, so unrelentingly sexual, that it seemed to come not from 20 years ago, but from Neanderthal times. The simple accumulation of the public record was horrifying. No wonder people such as Jimmy Savile were able to thrive. If television interviewers could ask a teenage girl about her breasts, about whether she was having sex, then is it

The NYT’s royal blunder

Trebles all round at the New York Times after another dose of anti-British bile. Mr S last week noted that the Gray Lady’s news reporting of Covid in the UK mixed misrepresentation with outdated figures. This week the newspaper has followed this up with the inevitable crowing comment piece to follow Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview. Titled ‘Down with the British Monarchy’ it mocks the Queen as ‘some utterly random rich wastrel’ and claims her own ‘claim to legitimacy’ is being ‘the child of the child of the child of someone who was, centuries ago, the nation’s biggest gangster.’   Leaving aside the question of whether Sophia of Hanover qualifies for such a title and indeed

The New York Times’ orgy of British despair

The New York Times seems to have developed a strange view of Britain in recent years – or at least since the Brexit vote in 2016. In the NYT’s world, the UK is a desolate place, where locals huddle round bin fires on the streets of London, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps during the summer, ever fearful of the despot Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. So Mr S was not exactly surprised to see that the paper’s latest missive from the Covid frontline in Britain, published today, veered on the negative side, detailing the ‘crushing onslaught of a pandemic’ in hospitals, in what can only be described

What has the New York Times got against Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not an easy person to cancel. She has survived the brutal murder of her colleague Theo van Gogh, lived through more than two decades of serious threats to her life and fled more countries than many people have visited. Perhaps it is for these reasons, rather than in spite of them, that she generates such hatred from what used to be called ‘liberal’ quarters. Hirsi Ali has a new book out this week. ‘Prey’ is a forensically detailed, careful and brave analysis of (as the subtitle says) ‘immigration, Islam and the erosion of women’s rights’. It looks at questions that most people turn away from: horrors

NYT’s rare praise for Brexit Britain

Hold on to your hats. In recent years, the New York Times has rarely if ever missed an opportunity to bash Brexit Britain. Whether it’s spreading false claims over ‘mix and match vaccines’, identifying Britons as mutton-munchers or simply linking the UK’s decision to leave the EU with bad Covid etiquette.  So Mr S must admit he nearly choked on his cornflakes on seeing the latest front page of America’s self-styled paper of record. Not only was the subject the UK, but the report was a positive one – with the headline: ‘In vaccines, UK has a pandemic win at last’.  While the report still managed to find apparent downsides to a fast vaccination programme

Pleasant, cheerful and a little exhausting: Graham Norton on Virgin Radio reviewed

In my parents’ house, the radio is always tuned to one of two stations: Magic FM and LBC. When Magic is playing, it wafts through the kitchen like an over-scented camomile candle. LBC, by contrast, hits you like a strong gust of Novichok: it is undiluted poison, carefully synthesised from the DNA of hysterical US shock jocks. At times, they feel like the two paths for modern radio: a draught of herbal tea or a fit of apoplexy; James O’Brien having kittens or ‘Broken Strings’ playing constantly, for ever. Where does that leave the chatty host, the one who natters cheerfully while you potter aimlessly, who rabbits on while you