Tag: New York Times

Why polling averages may not capture the depths of Trump’s growing unpopularity

The New York Times average of Trump polls.

For most of his first term and now his second, Donald Trump has been deeply unpopular. Both The New York Times and polling analyst Nate Silver track his approval/disapproval ratings based on an average of polls.

As of Monday, Trump was at 55% disapprove/41% approve using the Times’ methodology. Silver has him at a nearly identical 55.4% disapproval/41% approval. There are others who do the same thing, but the Times and Silver may be the best known.

Sign up for free email delivery of Media Nation. You can also become a supporter for just $6 a month and receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content.

Yet despite everything, Trump’s numbers don’t move as much as you might think they would given the corrupt and chaotic nature of his presidency. Indeed, on Monday, Trump’s disapproval rating actually nudged down by a statistically insignificant amount, from 56% to 55%. And no matter what, a rock-solid minority of just over 40% sticks with him. How could this be?

This morning I’d like to suggest one possible explanation. I’m not a polling expert, but this is obvious and starting us right in the face. The Times’ average is based on a number of polls, some of which it regards as highly reliable, some of which it doesn’t. And, for the most part, Trump is doing considerably worse when measured solely by highly reliable polls.

For instance, the most recent Gallup poll shows Trump at minus 24, with 60% disapproving of his job performance and just 36% approving. The American Research Group has him at minus 27, with 62% approval/35% disapproval. Beacon Research/Shaw and Co. reports that Trump is at minus 17, Ipsos at minus 22.

Now, as I said, the Times showed Trump’s disapproval rating ticked down slightly on Monday. And when you look at the chart, you see that it’s because a poll from TIPP Insights was added to the mix. TIPP, which does not meet the Times’ criteria for reliability, had Trump at just minus 4, based on 43% approval/47% disapproval.

Some of the less reliable polls, especially YouGov, do show Trump with a disapproval gap as wide as the reliable polls. But when you scan down the list, you see a number of less reliable polls showing that Trump’s disapproval rating is on the narrow side — Morning Consult (minus 7), InsiderAdvantage (minus 5), Big Data Poll (minus 5) and RMG Research (minus 7).

As I said, I’m not a polling expert, and it’s likely that the Times has weighted the reliable polls more heavily than the more dubious surveys. But Gallup, in particular, has been the gold standard for generations, and maybe we ought to take them more seriously than an index that includes both the good and the bad.

Why does it matter? Because if Trump is losing support, then the likelihood increases that House and Senate Republicans will be willing to stand up to him at least occasionally. Until recently, the Republicans have been utterly craven, cheering enthusiastically for Trump’s every incoherent pronouncement.

But now we’re starting to see a little movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one sign. Another is that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker the other day actually referred to Pete Hegseth as the “secretary of defense” rather than his cosplay role as the “secretary of war.”

A New York Times gift-link bacchanalia, from the hazards of AI to an aging Trump to chatty cats

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Photo (cc) 2019 by TechCrunch.

Here we go again. It’s the last day of the month, and I haven’t shared all of my gift links to The New York Times. Use ’em or lose ’em. These should continue to work for some time to come; what matters is when I post them, not when you access them. So here we go.

Continue reading “A New York Times gift-link bacchanalia, from the hazards of AI to an aging Trump to chatty cats”

Mark Arsenault is leaving the Globe to report on education for The New York Times

Mark Arsenault. Photo via LinkedIn.

A well-known Boston Globe byline will soon be appearing in The New York Times. Mark Arsenault, who came to the Globe in 2010, has been hired by the Times to report on education. He’ll leave the paper on Oct. 30.

An email to the staff from editor Nancy Barnes and deputy managing editor Francis Storrs, forwarded to me by a trusted source, says in part:

Mark started at the Globe’s DC bureau in 2010, and has been based in the Boston office since 2011. Amazingly prolific and adaptable, he’s covered Congress and politics, teen suicide, the rise of the state casino industry, national parks, and the US-Canada trade war, to name just a few subjects. He worked for years on the Spotlight Team, including on projects about men imprisoned for life, the housing crisis, an ousted MIT professor, and about patients who died amid the Steward Health Care collapse. He reported on the Marathon Bombing, as part of the Globe staff that won a Pulitzer, and was on the Steward team that recently won a Loeb, among many other honors.

Arsenault’s recent Globe stories include a report from the border (sub. req.) between Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick, on how residents in both communities were faring during Donald Trump’s second term, and a story on the long-running battle (sub. req.) between Trump and the Pritzker family. Penny Pritzker, a senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, has helped lead that university’s fight against Trump’s depredations.

A reminder that George Santos was exposed by a local news outlet whose reporting was ignored

Photo taken from the George Santos for Congress Facebook page via Talking Points Memo.

Weeks after the 2022 congressional elections, The New York Times exposed George Santos as a world-class fraudster, documenting a trail of deceit that eventually led to prison. The Times is still bragging about it today, and the Santos saga is sometimes held up as an example of the rot that can fester when local journalism fails.

Sign up for free email delivery of Media Nation. You can also become a supporter for just $6 a month and receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content.

But as I wrote in December 2022, it was the Times that failed — and, to an even greater extent, Newsday, a daily newspaper that purportedly covers Long Island, including Santos’ district. Both papers ignored reporting by a local news outlet, The North Shore Leader, showing that there were massive plumes of smoke emanating from Santos’ campaign headquarters and that maybe someone ought to take a look and see if there were any flames coming out as well.

Continue reading “A reminder that George Santos was exposed by a local news outlet whose reporting was ignored”

Three gift links: helping a troubled teen, homeless in Santa Monica, and important frog-related news

Madison County, N.Y. Photo (cc) 2011 by Doug Kerr.

It’s almost the end of the month, which means that the free September shares that I still have for The New York Times will disappear. So here are gift links to three stories that caught my eye earlier today. Enjoy!

► “To Get People Off the Street, He Pays for a One-Way Ticket Home,” by Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff. John Alle is a wealthy businessman in Santa Monica, California, who’s taken the vexing problem of homelessness into his own hands by paying people living on the streets to go back to where they came from. Alle himself was the victim of a severe beating at the hands of a homeless person, and he counts Stephen Miller as one of his heroes. Is Alle a good guy or a bad guy? There are no definitive answers here, but the article and accompanying visuals will make you think.

No, Jeanine Pirro’s vile op-ed is not further evidence that Jeff Bezos is wrecking The Washington Post

Jeanine Pirro. Photo (cc) 2021 by Gage Skidmore.

Because Jeff Bezos has taken a wrecking ball to The Washington Post’s opinion section, critics have become sensitive to any hint that the billionaire owner is paying obeisance to Donald Trump.

Which brings me to an op-ed the Post published Tuesday evening (gift link) by newly confirmed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro about Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., in order to crack down on a crime wave that, by all credible accounts, does not exist. I haven’t been able to find any media commentary criticizing the Post for running Pirro’s piece, but I have seen grumbling on social media along with yet another round of vows by readers to cancel their subscriptions.

Sign up for free email delivery of Media Nation. You can also become a supporter for just $6 a month and receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content.

Deciding whether to run such a piece is not just a journalistic decision but also an ethical one. Pirro’s major qualification for her job as D.C.’s top prosecutor is having served as a Trump-worshipping talk-show host on Fox News, although it has to be said that she served as both a prosecutor and a judge many years ago. Her op-ed defends an authoritarian president who is militarizing the nation’s capital just because he can. Should the Post have just said no?

The Post itself editorialized against her appointment (gift link) back in May. Part of the paper’s objection was over process, but the editorial also called out her judgment and noted that her executive producer at Fox News had referred to her as a “reckless maniac” in promoting the voting-machine conspiracy that led to a $787.5 million libel settlement by her then-employer.

Which is to say that the Post’s editorial board, compromised though it may be, saw fit to stand up to Pirro and Trump as recently as three months ago. No doubt the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, decided to run Pirro’s op-ed for the most ordinary of reasons: it was submitted (if not necessarily written) by a high-ranking government official with responsibility for a significant issue in the news.

In that regard, it’s useful to remember the mess over The New York Times’ decision to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton back in 2020 in which Cotton endorsed the use of military force to crush violent Black Lives Matter protesters. As I wrote for GBH News, the Times shouldn’t have run the piece for several reasons. Among other things, the editors did not insist that Cotton address an earlier public statement he’d made suggesting that violent protesters should be killed on the streets, and he was allowed to make an entirely unsubstantiated assertion that antifa was involved in the protests.

We later learned that editorial-page editor James Bennet hadn’t even bothered to read Cotton’s screed before publishing it. Bennet, whose miscues were piling up (including his inserting a false assertion into an editorial that led to Sarah Palin’s endless libel suit against the Times), was soon fired.

Pirro’s op-ed strikes me as unremarkable right-wing boilerplate about what she describes as a need to crack down on youthful offenders. She calls on the D.C. Council to amend or reverse three laws that would strip those offenders of important rights and protections. The op-ed says in part:

Unfortunately, young criminals have been emboldened to think they can get away with committing crime in this city, and, very often, they do. But together with our local and federal partners, our message to them today is: We will identify you, prosecute you and convict you. For any juveniles: We are going to push to change the laws so that if you commit any violent crime, I have jurisdiction to prosecute you where you belong — in adult court.

Don’t get me wrong. This is terrible, vile stuff, but the question is whether the Post should have run her op-ed. I think the answer is yes. It’s a newsworthy piece by a public official who’s close to the president. If I were editing the piece, I would have insisted that she address the falling crime rate in D.C. (As a general principle, I think editorial-page editors need to insist on standards of truthfulness and accuracy in outside contributions.) Overall, though, I don’t think Pirro’s piece is nearly as objectionable as Cotton’s was five years ago.

The Post, given its location in the nation’s capital, has always been a favored landing spot for op-eds by high-ranking government officials. The best way to have prevented Pirro’s op-ed from running would have been to keep Trump out of the White House. But it’s far too late for that.

Newsworthiness aside, The New York Times slipped up on ethics in its not-so-big Mamdani exclusive

Zohran Mamdani. Photo (cc) 2024 by Bingjiefu He.

I’m inclined to believe that any information about a major political figure is newsworthy, especially when they are new to the spotlight. Still, I think it’s important to analyze some of the ethical issues that have been raised by last Thursday’s New York Times report (gift link) that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani identified himself as “Asian” and “Black or African American” on a Columbia University entrance application when he was 17 years old.

Become a supporter of Media Nation for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive commentary, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.

The story sparked outrage on social media, with many Mamdani supporters arguing that the Times made it seem like the candidate had done something wrong when, in fact, he was being entirely accurate: Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents. I’m old enough to remember that Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, identified herself as African American. Though white, she was born and raised in Mozambique. Heinz Kerry was mocked in some circles, but, like Mamdani, she was not wrong. (It’s fair to note that both Heinz Kerry and Mamdani ignored the generally accepted meaning of “African American.”)

Liam Scott’s detailed overview in the Columbia Journalism Review of both the Mamdani story and the fallout provide most of what you need to know, but I want to expand on a few of the issues that have been raised.

Continue reading “Newsworthiness aside, The New York Times slipped up on ethics in its not-so-big Mamdani exclusive”

The Washington Post’s web traffic, once competitive with The New York Times’, is collapsing

Photo (cc) 2013 by Esther Vargas

Back during the heady early years of the Jeff Bezos era at The Washington Post, the paper competed head to head with The New York Times for web traffic. Generally CNN would come in first, with the Times and the Post battling it out for second place. For instance, in April 2017 the Times recorded nearly 89.8 million unique visitors and the Post 78.7 million. Among news sites, they were outranked only by CNN.com, with 101.2 million.

But though the Times has thrived in the years following Trump’s first term, the Post has struggled, and has been in free fall since Bezos suddenly transformed himself from a model newspaper owner into the mogul from hell, starting with his decision last fall to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election.

The latest numbers from Similarweb, reported by Press Gazette, tell an ugly tale. The Times recorded 444.9 million unique visitors in May 2025, finishing first among U.S. news websites. CNN was second, with 311.7 million. And the Post was all the way back at 17th, with 72.2 million.

Most of the sites recorded a drop compared to 2024, but the Post’s decline was especially steep — down 24% versus just 8% at the Times. (CNN was down a whopping 28%.) The Post was only a little ahead of The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian and behind The Associated Press and Newsweek, which it once owned.

Last week I dismissed as irrelevant a steep decline in print circulation at the Post. The erosion of web traffic, though, is a much bigger deal. The goal is to sign up paid digital subscribers, and web traffic is how you get those subscribers. In business terms, those monthly visitors are at the top of the conversion funnel and paid customers are at the bottom. If there are fewer visitors to pull through the funnel, then there are fewer opportunities to sell them subscriptions.

As for the Times, we all know that its success in selling digital subscriptions has a lot to do with its non-news offerings such as games, food and consumer advice. That has nothing to do with raw web traffic, though. The reality is that dramatically more people are enticed to click on New York Times links to check out its journalism. Both the Times and the Post offer 10 gift links per month, yet five times as many people are accessing the Times compared to the Post.

Bezos has single-handedly transformed the Post from one of the newspaper business’ great success stories into a disaster. And he’s too rich to care.

Will Trump’s war halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions or lead to disaster? A roundup of smart commentary.

The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo of mural in the city of Qom (cc) 2013 by David Stanley.

I think the most rational response to President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is to hang back a bit — that is, to acknowledge that he’s the wrong leader to do this, that he was more likely acting on ego and personal pique than out of any strategic vision, but that it’s too soon to tell whether this will be a disaster or might actually accomplish some good.

Become a supporter of Media Nation for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive commentary, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.

One starting point is that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Another starting point is to understand that what led to this really is all Trump’s fault. President Barack Obama painstakingly negotiated an agreement with Iran that significantly slowed Iran’s race to get a nuclear bomb, and Trump undid that in his first term for no discernible reason other than to disrespect Obama.

Continue reading “Will Trump’s war halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions or lead to disaster? A roundup of smart commentary.”

Find the missing stories in The New York Times’ sloppy Today’s Paper listings

The print newspaper, anachronistic though it may be, is one of the most reliable antidotes to news overload. Once a day, editors decide what the most important news is and, even more crucial, what isn’t. This fixed object is a welcome relief from the endless scroll of a news website or app.

But The New York Times consistently fails to get it right. We take Sunday delivery, but I often prefer to read it on my iPad, because the type’s bigger, the background’s brighter and the photos are better. I use the Today’s Paper view, both in the app and on the web. And, frustratingly, it usually doesn’t entirely match what’s in print.

Take today. The print edition has six stories on the front page. Two of them, one about efforts to revitalize George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, the other about the effect of tariffs on iron miners in northern Minnesota, are omitted from the online list of front-page stories. (Do the editors have something against Minnesota?)

Scroll through the list and you won’t find those stories anywhere. But searching the site reveals that they were indeed published online. The story about the iron miners appears on the homepage, barely noticeable; the George Floyd Square story is currently invisible, although I imagine it will have a star turn on the homepage later on.

To add to the frustration, the Times does not have a decent replica edition — that is, a PDF of the print paper through which you can easily navigate. It does offer one through PressReader, but it’s difficult to get to and the experience is worse than mediocre. By contrast, The Boston Globe offers several good replica options.

Perhaps Times executives are finding that so few people want the digital Today’s Paper offering that they just don’t put much effort into it. I mean, it’s not even available anymore in the mobile app, though it persists in the iPad version and on the web.

But all we’re talking about is a list of stories in that day’s paper. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask that they get it right. Otherwise, why bother?