How the New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People ⇥ thedissident.news

While I am criticizing the New York Times’ odd framing choices, here is a more substantial critique from Alejandra Caraballo:

Over the last several years it has become readily apparent that there has been a shift in the editorial framing and focus of the New York Times when it regards issues relating to transgender people. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to issues of gender affirming care for transgender youth. The Times has contested this accusation of bias or editorial shifting of their priorities and framing, often by pointing to individual stories and claiming that the stories are rigorously fact checked and true. The issue is that any particular article can be argued about in isolation about whether or not the framing is biased against transgender people but when viewed in the aggregate the shift can become much more pronounced and difficult to defend.

To assess the framing of thousands of articles, Caraballo ran the text through three different large language models plus VADER. Caraballo notes the LLMs fared better at interpreting words in a greater context.

Setting aside the technology, it is alarming to see the Times’ coverage shift, and so noticeably in 2022. Caraballo attributes this to several predominantly internal factors, including losing the paper’s only openly trans writer, but I stumbled across another possible external influence.

Hope Pisoni, Uncloseted Media:

[The Manhattan Institute’s] attacks on education also target K-12 schools. Starting in 2022, it began frequently demonizing schools for teaching “radical gender” ideology and “transitioning kids without parental consent.” Wuest says this is because disparaging public schools supports its longtime policy goals related to school choice. She cites a 2022 speech by [Christopher] Rufo at Hillsdale College.

The links in the quoted paragraph primarily go to the innocuous-seeming City Journal, though it is a publication of the Manhattan Institute. It ran loads of articles in 2022 from Rufo taking things out of context to, as Pisoni writes, advance the broader conservative policy goals of the Institute and stirring up a broader panic about trans people. And the Times loves taking direction from Rufo.