Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about new data exposing a major media outlet’s journalistic malpractice.
A new database of all the New York Times articles published in the past 25 years provides empirical evidence of some of the biases that many of the newspaper’s critics have long suspected.
The developer of the database, Ted Alcorn, is not a media critic but a former policy analyst for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He’s a freelance journalist who does some work for the Times and also teaches at Columbia and NYU. Alcorn this week launched “Below The Fold,” a dashboard that allows readers to parse and sort a database of 25 years’ worth of New York Times articles in ways that concretely quantify the paper’s quirks and record the way the coverage has changed over time.
For example, the dashboard allows for sorting coverage by country and sorting that by population, to get a Moneyball-style statistic called articles/million residents/year, or AMRY. The tiny Pacific island of Nauru is tops because of climate change coverage, but Gaza is next with an AMRY of 104.4, followed by Israel at 55.7 and the West Bank at 41.14. Countries that the Times is less obsessed with include Japan, with an AMRY of 1.32, Germany, with an AMRY of 2.78, and Singapore, with an AMRY of 2.33. In raw number of articles, the Times tagged 14,483 with coverage of “Israel” over the quarter century from 2000 to 2025. India, with a vastly larger population, generated 10,678 Times stories.
The dashboard also allows a similar sorting of states by how much attention they get from the Times, adjusted by population. The early presidential primary and caucus states of Iowa and New Hampshire attract a lot of Times coverage, as does the District of Columbia. Sparsely populated Times summer vacation destinations like Vermont and Maine also do well. The states that get the least attention from the Times relative to their populations include Alabama, Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey, and Arkansas.
