All media outlets are “mainstream” within the universe of their target audiences
IT sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true: Reading the newspaper has been good for my ruchniyus.
A year ago, I accepted a discounted offer for a digital subscription to the New York Times that enables me to peruse the daily paper on a filtered device. I don’t usually spend lots of time reading, but instead skim the descriptions of the day’s articles to see if there’s anything of interest or that might be useful.
The Times’ long reputation for anti-Israel bias, both subtle and overt, has contributed to making the paper slightly less popular among Orthodox Jews than heart disease, and deservedly so. It has also often been accused of a slant against religious Jews and Judaism, and over the years I’ve written a number of pieces debunking and defending against Times reportage and punditry of that sort.
Still, the case for the latter contention is a bit more complicated, because some of what we insiders see as conscious bias is simply the cluelessness of outsiders toward any culture foreign to them, which is an occupational hazard of journalism in general. And the fact that the paper has run its fair share of positive, even warm pieces about our religious communities, and religion in general, might indicate that it’s more about the particular writer than the institution as a whole.
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