NY Times Jettisons the Texas Trib Right Before the Election

The New York Times has offered a trick to the Texas Tribune on Halloween. And it’s not even the usual sort of trick that the Times plays, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

At Newsbusters, P.J. Gladnick wonders aloud…

Is this just a coincidence that the Halloween announcement which appeared in the Texas Tribune is happening just before the election in which it appears that the campaign of Democrat gubernatorial candidate appears to have imploded, destroying what many suspect was the not so subtle effort by the Texas Tribune to turn that state blue?

An interesting question indeed.

The Trib blames it on the challenging media environment.

This was supposed to be a proud and grateful acknowledgement of the anniversary of our content partnership with The New York Times, which began four years ago today. Well, we interrupt this blog post to bring you some late-breaking news.

Yesterday afternoon we learned from our pals at the Times that our work together will come to an end, sadly but not entirely unexpectedly, at the conclusion of the calendar year — a casualty of the challenging economic times that continue to bedevil the media industry. You may have read or heard recently about cutbacks at the paper: the elimination of newsroom jobs, the shuttering of mobile apps, the imperiling of whole sections. Even the Times’ budget, larger than those of its peers, has not been able to withstand the impact of precipitous, disruptive changes to nearly every aspect of the newspaper business. In that environment, anything on the periphery, not central to its core mission or functions, was vulnerable. The Trib partnership, while innovative, ambitious and, relatively speaking, cheaply produced, was objectively an expendable line item.

True enough, though media just might do better if they didn’t dismiss and outright insult a good half of the country. In addition to being unfair, that’s not a healthy business model. Trust in media overall, which the New York Times consciously leads, is at an all-time low for a reason.

Even in Texas, media continue to ignore little things like the fact that the “controversial” and “anti-woman” HB2 that Wendy Davis filibustered to fame was sponsored in both sides of the state legislature by women — one of whom is an emergency room physician. Mainstream media treat gun owners and Second Amendment advocates as uniformly dangerous, and anyone who sees the lack of border security as a national security problem in the age of transnational terrorism as a racist first and last. Even if those so concerned are Hispanic and work in law enforcement in border counties.

In short, only liberals and Democrats truly get a fair shake in media such as the New York Times. And because of that, it’s never truly fair.

The Times-Trib partnership was always a interesting one. The Tribune is a non-profit, and as such should not directly compete with commercial entities. That fact wasn’t lost on commercial media entities in Texas who saw the Trib as taking up space that they could fill.

As long-time and vocal critics of the New York Times, obviously we are not talking about PJ Media here. We’ve never been under any illusions at all regarding the New York Times, a paper that omits as much real news as it sees fit to print. And what it does print is often so one-sided that there should be re-prints to fix the misprints.