Not so long ago, The New York Times was the most trusted newspaper in America, maybe even the world.

People bought it and read it because they believed it was a straight shooter.

The quaint Page 1 motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” promised superior judgment and taste. The paper was often boring because it presented the news in a dispassionate fashion and didn’t take sides, but that restraint was the source of its credibility.

Because of its plodding thoroughness, it was dubbed the “Gray Lady” and the “paper of record.” A popular joke about its importance held that you weren’t dead unless your obit appeared in the Times.

Oh, for the days.

The world has changed and the media with it, but no news organization has changed more than the Times.

The mandate of opinion-free news coverage was tossed overboard during the heated 2016 presidential election, and the paper now displays its bias on every page.

The quaint motto is still there, but these days the Times doesn’t cover the news as much as promote an agenda. As it says repeatedly, the paper has a “mission.”

The mission is obvious: The Times aims to elect left-wing Democrats to virtually every office in the land and transform America culturally, educationally and politically.

As such, it operates as the chief cheerleader for the left, and one result is that many of its readers buy it because they agree with its politics. Specifically, they like the Times because they believe the paper hates President Trump as much as it does.

That became crystal clear last week when online readers erupted over a front-page headline they viewed as too kind to the president.

“Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism” was how the first edition described the president’s consoling speech in the aftermath of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. He had denounced hatred, bigotry and white supremacy and vowed to pursue measures that would keep dangerous people from getting guns.

The speech hit all the right notes on a day of national fear and mourning. But it infuriated a small army of Times readers. The facts be damned, they demanded their daily fix of Trump hate — and the paper quickly complied.

Editors rewrote the headline to “Assailing Hate but not Guns,” but it was too late. Lefty journalists called for readers to cancel their subscriptions and many people did, enough for a spokesman to acknowledge a “higher volume of cancellations” than normal.

The incident could not have happened in the era when the Times adhered to rigorous standards of news gathering and the separation of news and opinion. Both the sense of entitlement among readers and the editors’ craven response shows that the rot has reached critical levels.

In effect, the Times has become a victim of the monster it created. Instead of informing readers and challenging them to question their own views, an approach the paper was proud of under legendary editor Abe Rosenthal, it now provides comfort food for the committed.



That historic mistake is biting the people who made it. The business model, which has thrived by being a bullhorn for the Trump resistance, now depends on a willingness to deliver a certain point of view without the slightest deviation.

That upends the Times’ tradition of journalism and makes the paper a very different enterprise than it was for the first 120 years that the Sulzberger family owned it. Given the unleashed partisanship among editors and reporters, there is no reason to think the paper could return to its old standards even if the owners wanted to.

The man most responsible for this disaster is Dean Baquet, the executive editor. He broke the mold for fairness during the 2016 election when he authorized reporters to express their intense dislike of Trump.

“I think that he’s challenged our language,” Baquet (inset above) told an interviewer by way of justification. “He will have changed journalism, he really will have.”

As I have written, the claim is treated as one of those intellectual insights about a new paradigm that liberals spot about five times a week. In fact, it is another example of the Times missing the story.

Trump didn’t change journalism — Baquet did. And because the paper remains the bell cow for much of the media, many organizations followed the Times into the abyss of Trump hatred.

The consequences are disastrous. A June poll found that 72 percent of Americans believe most outlets “report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading,” at least sometimes.

Yet the Times, while often wrong, is never in doubt. Despite failing to miss the possibility Trump would win the election and understand why, the paper quickly dived headfirst into the Russia, Russia, Russia swamp. It became the errand boy for crooked FBI agents and CIA leaders who had turned against ­democracy, and thus America.

The paper cheered on special counsel Robert Mueller and, when he failed to recommend criminal charges, quickly pivoted to embrace the Democrats’ impeachment fantasies. And it hasn’t stopped.

A typical unfair and unbalanced Page One appeared two days after the headline flap. When Trump traveled to El Paso and Dayton to meet with first responders and survivors, the top story declared that “President Uses A Day of Healing To Stoke Discord” but obscured the key fact: Democrats had attacked first by calling Trump a racist and white supremacist, and he was responding.

A second front-page story flatly declared: “El Paso Says Trump Doesn’t ‘Know Who We Are.’ ”

The story presents comments from six selected people as the unanimous view of an entire city of nearly 700,000. The “who we are” phrase in the headline came from a leader of a Texas municipal union whose Web site shows it to be a hotbed of pro-Democrat, anti-Republican politics.

Welcome to the new New York Times, where only the news that fits the mission is fit to print.

‘Expert’ terror punditry

Count this as a nutty new special-interest group.

A press release says an “expert” declares that “video games are not a stimulus for mass murder” and demands that “politicians stop looking for straw-men to blame for their inaction.”

This know-it-all “expert” is identified as Gary Brubaker, the director of Southern Methodist University’s Guildhall, which the release says is “a graduate program for training video-game developers.”

Obviously, humility is not a course requirement.

Hunting down H’wood half-wits

Announcing it will not release “The Hunt,” Universal Studios said it had made the decision “after thoughtful consideration.”

Too bad there was no “thoughtful consideration” before deciding to make a film about elites killing “deplorables” for sport.

Only in Hollywood would the idea even pass the smell test.

‘Doing’ little for NYC

If you Google “Bill de Blasio,” one of the questions under the “people also ask” section is this: “What does Bill de Blasio do?”

Damn, that’s exactly what every New Yorker wants to know!