I really dislike the NYT and this article pretty much sums up why
Trash newspaper does trash thing
www.findinggravity.net
It's a symptom of the real problem. Pick up a copy of the paper twenty-five years ago, and even the stuff buried on page 8 was good. Neutral, well-researched, well-written, informative.
I knew we were in trouble in the mid-oughts when the old guard of opinion columnists started retiring, only to be replaced by people comparatively writing in crayon. The ideas and the quality of writing just wasn't there. It seemed like the vocabulary of the opinion page dropped to late high school overnight.
Journalists have figured out that professional success comes from building a brand, and the Sulzbergers figured out they could sell any old trash under a NYT byline. It's not like the lesser papers where people built brands exist these days in a meaningful way, either. People got to the Times by doing good work for a much smaller paper for a decade or so.
Standards across journalism are in the toilet.