Adam Rubenstein, a former editorial editor at the NY Times, stated that employees were worried that concurring with the story about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” would damage Joe Biden and the Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 race.
Rubenstein said they were not being journalists; they were being activists.
During the height of the 2020 presidential campaign, the Times notably called the Biden laptop controversy “Russian disinformation” and later in 2021 said that The New York Post’s coverage of the matter was “unsubstantiated.”
The Times verified that Hunter Biden’s laptop was authentic long after his successful election in 2022.
However, Rubenstein had other grievances with his previous employer than the Hunter Biden scandal. He said that leftist writers’ work faced a lower bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher-ups compared to submissions from authors on the political right.
In addition, Rubenstein shared that he was reprimanded for gushing over Chick-fil-A’s spicy chicken sandwich at a new hire orientation at The New York Times.
Numerous former Times leaders, including Rubenstein, have accused the publication of promoting a culture of liberal groupthink.
Last year, James Bennet, the Times’s former opinion editor, was compelled to retire in 2020 because of a scandalous Tom Cotton op-ed piece. He wrote an extended essay for The Economist describing the newspaper’s dominance of liberal ideology.
According to Bennet, the paper has “lost its way.” Bennet’s assessments of the Gray Lady were similar to those of Bari Weiss, a former editor and opinion writer for the New York Times. In 2020, Weiss issued a harsh resignation letter in which she claimed to have been pressured by people working in an “illiberal environment.”
The Washington Post and The New York Times, with mottos like “All the news that’s fit to print” and “Democracy dies in darkness,” were involved in censoring laptop reporting by The NY Post eighteen months ago, highlighting biased assertions that the laptop’s content was “Russian disinformation.”
