The decline of the New York Times

The quality of writing in the New York Times has diminished in recent years — since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It may be merely a chance overlap of two different factors.

Or, also, I may be wrong.

But I'm sure that a deterioration in the logic of the consequence of words, and an increase in typographical errors, coincided with a New York Times complicity in the U.S. government's fabrication of rationale for war in Iraq.

The dishonesty of the George W. Bush administration during this period, and its criminal intent, would have been clear to any observer with integrity and sense. Or so it seemed.

The news media played along with nearly perfect lock-step accord in the nation's advance toward war. The New York Times, famed in its history for acts of honorable dissent, reported little about the chasm between reason and rationalizations within the Bush administration war party. There was little inquiry about the real mechanisms behind progress toward unnecessary war.

Assuming that the quality of the text in the New York Times has declined in the last few years, it is tempting to draw a correlation with its failure to report on the invasion of Iraq. Tempting — but not testable.

And, indeed, all newspapers of this era have been in decline, or at least in transition, as the industry faces economic changes.

I still read the NYT in the form of the International Herald Tribune,* here across the Atlantic.

But the paper is not what it was.