TEXT JOIN TO 77022

Old News is Good News

Our Democratic friends know so little; we should rejoice at every chance they have to learn.

On Friday, April 4, 2025, The New York Times finally got around to reporting that Hunter Biden had made his living peddling his influence in the pay of foreign oligarchs. The Old Gray Lady deemed that the story was “fit to print” five months after the 2024 election and nine months after Mr. Biden dropped out of it.

One can understand why the New York Post editorialized that the Times “only published the story now that it doesn’t remotely matter anymore.”

True, if we think of the Times as an honest news outlet, presenting all the relevant facts and letting the reader apply his or her own judgment, the paper’s decision appears unconscionable. But whatever The Times’s stated ambitions, that is not its actual function. The Times tells our media, educational, and administrative elites what to think. It sets the agenda for essentially all of the American establishment media on national and world news, which is almost all the news available now that we readers are not willing to pay for effective local coverage.

The Times was a Democratic paper when the Democrats were pro-slavery and is a Democratic paper today. Republicans in office will never get a fair shake from the Times, and Democrats in office will never get fair scrutiny.

Yet The Times reporting late is better than The Times reporting never. To those of us who get our news from the New York Post, from X, from Tucker Carlson, or from Fox, these look like headlines from a distant pre-revolutionary past. Only now, we scoff with the New York Post; only now it can be told that Joe is senile, that Hunter is taking payola from foreigners, and that COVID-19 was probably a lab leak from Anthony Fauci-funded “enhanced pandemic potential” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

We need to open our hearts and pity our Democratic and Never Trump opponents: they have no comprehension of what is happening today. Because they boycott more reliable outlets, they will only begin to understand the present and the future when enough of the relevant past is far enough gone that the New York Times and the mainstream media that follow its lead actually report it.

To us, these stories are old news, but to our progressive fellow Americans, they were right-wing conspiracy theories suddenly credible because the New York Times has given them credit. We have to share a country with these people, and so we should rejoice, with as little snickering as we can manage, at every bit of reality they permit themselves to consider.

The Hunter Biden story is as dead as news as the Credit Mobilier scandal or Walter Jenkins’s arrest for indecency in a public men’s room or the Biden Administration’s defeat in the First Houthi War. Yet we Americans are going to be able to move on into America’s new Golden Age only insofar as the lies, corruptions, and disasters of the last generation are generally perceived and understood. We should welcome every new article that helps our fellow citizens achieve that understanding, even in “the failing New York Times.”

Get the news corporate media won't tell you.

Get caught up on today's must read stores!

By submitting your information, you agree to receive exclusive AG+ content, including special promotions, and agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms. By providing your phone number and checking the box to opt in, you are consenting to receive recurring SMS/MMS messages, including automated texts, to that number from my short code. Msg & data rates may apply. Reply HELP for help, STOP to end. SMS opt-in will not be sold, rented, or shared.

About Michael S. Kochin

Michael S. Kochin is Professor Extraordinarius in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. He received his A.B. in mathematics from Harvard and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, Princeton, Toronto, Claremont McKenna College, and the Catholic University of America. He has written widely on the comparative analysis of institutions, political thought, politics and literature, and political rhetoric. With the historian Michael Taylor he has written An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States (University of Michigan Press, 2020).

Notable Replies

  1. My question is? Who gives a rat’s ass WHAT this faithless, lying rag writes or thinks?

    Going all the way back to WWII when it downplayed or, outright hid, the truth of the holocaust it’s been playing the same treasonous, monstrous song.

    Which is why, you must never use the NY Times to line your bird cage according to The American Society of Bird Keepers because, if your bird learns to read it will become a Communist.

Continue the discussion at community.amgreatness.com

Participants

Avatar for SamsaraGuru Avatar for system