What accounts for The Great Awokening that began in roughly 2013? Why did vast numbers of white Democrats suddenly subscribe to theories that only Grievance Studies majors took seriously before?
Over the past few weeks, two academics working separately, Zach Goldberg and David Rozado, have documented how extremist The New York Times, once known as The Gray Lady for its decorum, became during Obama’s second term.
Quantifying the Times over time offers the single best way to measure increasing media wokeness because of the newspaper’s breadth and its influence on other journalists, who traditionally look to it for guidance on what they are supposed to be worked up over.
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Before you declare the “failing New York Times” irrelevant, note that its number of paid digital subscribers grew from 800,000 in early 2014 to 2,850,000 in early 2019. And the percentage of voters saying they regularly read the NYT roughly doubled from 2012 to 2016.
Sure, Carlos Slim had to bail out the Sulzberger family in 2009, but Slim, who has managed to extract an absurd amount of money out Mexico, is a very smart man. He’s done well off his investment, both financially and, more important, by ensuring that his monopolistic exploitation of his Mexican telephone customers wasn’t much covered by the Times and thus was generally considered in the U.S. to be Not News.
Goldberg and Rozado are more or less extending to a much larger scale the methodology I invented for my 2018 Taki’s Magazine column “The Emmett Till Effect.” I pointed out that you could graph The New York Times’ use of politically tendentious terms to measure how hard the propaganda machine was pushing particular themes.
For example, Emmett Till was a black teenager murdered in the South in 1955 by whites, who were acquitted due to their white privilege. In 1980, the Times didn’t see any reason to mention Till, his having been dead for 25 years, whereas in 1990 his name came up twice, and in 2000 four times. But by 2017, a full 62 years after his tragic death, the name “Emmett Till” was referenced 72 times.
This winter, for example, the Times responded to the embarrassing Jussie Smollett hate hoax by cranking up the Emmett Till hubbub once again.
