Such blatant disregard for standards would have gotten a high-schooler fired from the school newspaper, but the Times merely issued an editor’s note and moved on to the next.

It’s sad, really. I know the newspaper of record had a troubling history in the 1930s, basically apologizing for Hitler and the Nazis and pretending that their genocide against the Jews wasn’t happening, but that was way before my time. 

Unfortunately, this isn't the first time I've had to call out the NYT for misleading its readers; they've made a sport of downplaying violent assault, murder, and shoving people in front of moving subway cars:

Gaslighting Brought to You by the New York Times

In the era when I was a teen in the Big Apple during the 1980s, though, the Times was regarded by many as the apex of fair reporting and solid journalism. My stepfather had two copies delivered every morning—with one set aside for him and only him because he knew other family members would be eating up the day’s news, and he wanted his paper unsullied. 

I remember the smell of the newsprint, which one author has described as the "combination of guaiacwood, cedar, musk, spice, with 'a powdery note and velvet nuance.'" That's quite the mouthful, and I'm not sure I took in any of that, I just know that the smell pleased me, along with the feel of the pages and the awe I would feel reading foreign coverage by mystical-sounding reporters like R.W. Apple. It was the gold standard.

Those days are long gone. 

In their latest attempt to gaslight the American public and brazenly deceive their readers, their editorial board printed an op-ed Saturday that professed stunned surprise that the COVID lockdowns which kept schoolchildren out of class for months—and in some cases, years —have left lasting issues. They present these findings as if somehow nobody foresaw this, that everybody was on board with the draconian, often unconstitutional responses from authoritarians like President Biden, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and California Governor Gavin Newsom. 

But millions of us were not on board and saw early on that much of the official response during those times was nothing more than a naked power grab. RedState, but especially our Scott Hounsell and Jennifer Van Laar, was on top of many of these stories long before the mainstream press would deign to explore them.

Now the Times, like so many politicians, is lamenting the damage and acting like their hands are clean (emphasis mine):

In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sent $190 billion in aid to schools, stipulating that 20 percent of the funds had to be used for reversing learning setbacks. At the time, educators knew that the impact on how children learn would be significant, but the extent was not yet known. 

[Not true. Many of us noted early on that the extent would be severe, yet we were censored by the Biden administration’s collusion with social media companies and newspapers like… the NY Times. Everone with a brain knew what was happening was disastrous, but now they act like, “how could anyone have known?”]

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.

No joke, Jack. 

⚠️ I never tweet anything remotely profane, but I’m making an exception for this: 🖕🖕🖕 F YOU to NYTimes, Gavin Newsom & everyone else who demanded we close schools for over a year to save millions of kids and who now say, as the NYT editorial board said today: “The evidence is… pic.twitter.com/UpkWgM3Xf1

— Houman David Hemmati, MD, PhD (@houmanhemmati) November 19, 2023

Okay, Gray Lady. You're sounding the alarm now. But where were you when it mattered when people's lives were being destroyed, when American liberties were being trashed?

Here was their stance in 2020:

Despite its current concern over the closures’ harm to American students, New York Times reporting in 2020 advocated for school closures despite the risks. 

In a March 2020 piece, the Times wrote, "More and more schools have chosen to close in the past few days, reflecting a growing consensus that the benefits of closings outweigh the harms, especially since many of the harms can be mitigated."

But they didn’t stop there:

The immediate goal is to flatten the curve so that the peak infection rate stays manageable. With better testing and screening, it’s possible to imagine keeping schools open and still protecting families. Failing that, and we in the U.S. have been failing so far, school closures and significant physical distancing are starting to look like the best bet.

Here are some of the NY Times headlines from those dark days:

• The Upside of a Lockdown
• Loving the Lockdown
• America Could Control the Pandemic by October. Let’s Get to It.
• Lockdown Was Our Romantic Bubble

And yet, like an abusive spouse who brings you flowers, here they are today:

The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.

I love how this is a shock to them. I wrote anonymously about what was happening to our children way back in August 2021:

Dear Gov. Newsom: Globe Reader Writes Op Ed on Behalf of his Suffering Kids

And yet, to them, this is all unexpected. Where were all their intrepid reporters, their vaunted correspondents? The writing on school closures has long been on the wall, and the predictable results have come in for a while now—the Times is just late to the party:

Pandemic Kids Head to College, and, Shocker, It’s Not Going Well

ACT test scores drop to lowest level in 30 years

Media Shows Surprise at Reports COVID Lockdowns Led to Massive Learning Loss

It’s sad watching something venerable beclown itself over and over, but the Times has simply become an untrustworthy rag that isn’t much better than Pravda or North Korea’s Central News Agency. 

Many of us knew at the time that what was happening was wrong, and many of us stood against it. Most of America's corporate media, however, were not among that group and cheerleaded the effort to take away our liberties and impose their authoritarian will upon the populace. To read the NY Times now agonizing over the predictable results is frankly nauseating.  

It’s unfortunate that so many people still treat it like a Holy Book, and the loss of trust in institutions like this is a major reason why we’re watching the slow-motion decline of America.

RIP, journalistic standards in the U.S.