Trump Endorsements: Acclaimed Author ‘Mathematically Certain New York Times’ Will Endorse Trump


Donald Trump endorsements are few and far between since the GOP front-runner began his steep slide down the general election polling. A turning point for this lack of support stems from when he took aim at Khizr Khan and his wife, a Gold Star family who criticized him at the Democratic National Convention.

Since then, the former Apprentice star has been getting clobbered by Hillary Clinton in every poll from national to state battlegrounds. One such poll even had the Donald at 25 points behind Clinton, who has struggled herself with problems of trustworthiness.

Media coverage of the GOP nominee has also appeared just as brutal, and one of the most critical news organizations has been the New York Times. Even so, one writer believes that the newspaper’s editorial board is on the verge of throwing its weight behind the candidate.

Yes, that’s correct. Add the New York Times to the flailing Trump endorsements that are already out there, says John Bloom, or as he is otherwise known, Joe Bob Briggs.

As Briggs, Bloom hosted MonsterVision on TNT, but before, during, and after that time period, he has been a widely respected author and film critic.

In a recent piece for Taki’s Magazine titled “New York Times Endorses Trump,” Briggs made a seemingly tongue-in-cheek yet thought-provoking case as to how the NYT might become the next in line for existing Trump endorsements. He also demonstrated how the paper may “have to” in order to put its money where its mouth is.

The piece itself is well worth a read as Briggs launches into a detailed analysis of the last 86 days of Trump and Clinton coverage to demonstrate a clear bias against the Donald.

According to his analysis of the op-ed page, there are two types of articles that appear — guest columns and regular contributing columnists. Counting up both, Briggs found 102 anti-Trump, 0 pro-Trump, 22 pro-Hillary, seven anti-Hillary, and six he considered “too wishy-washy to tell.”


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It’s here that Briggs makes the case of a Times endorsement.

“What does it all mean?” he writes, finding his answer from a 2004 quote attributed to David Shipley, a former NYT op-ed editor.

“If the editorial page… has a forceful, long-held view on a certain topic, we are more inclined to publish an Op-Ed that disagrees with that view,” Shipley said. “If you open the newspaper and find the editorial page and Op-Ed in lock step agreement or consistently writing on the same subject day after day, then we aren’t doing our job.”

Since the editorial page and the op-ed page can never be in agreement, Briggs reasons per a policy that has shown up in Times lore since 1970, they must be the next of the Trump endorsements.

“Therefore a Trump endorsement is the only way for the ecosystem of the Times to remain fair and balanced,” he writes.

Briggs continued, “If they don’t endorse Trump, they will be saying that every claim they’ve made about the op-ed page since 1970 was false. If they don’t endorse Trump, they will be saying that they don’t value the 40-plus percent of the electorate who intend to vote for him — they can’t find a single person in that group to write an op-ed column — and so every claim ever made about their liberal East Coast bias since 1969 is probably true.”

While Briggs almost certainly intended the piece as satire, he raises an interesting point about the position that the NYT and other mainstream media outlets have placed themselves in with regard to Trump coverage.

But what do you think, readers?

Can a news organization’s endorsement be taken seriously if the op-ed content and editorial content they publish are heavily weighted in a certain direction?

Is the NYT becoming next of the Trump endorsements the only way that the newspaper can avoid accusations of liberal media bias? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Image via Gage Skidmore | Flickr Creative Commons | Resized and Cropped | CC BY-SA 2.0]

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