TOM LEONARD: Why DOES America's smuggest newspaper the nytimes have such a pathological loathing for Britain?
The eight-part podcast series finds time for myriad critics of those inquiries but not, for instance, the five Birmingham head teachers who later spoke of the bullying they suffered from hardline Muslim governors as the latter tried to impose Islamic practices.
Their investigation, Syed concedes on air, now looks like it’s in the hands not of ‘impartial journalists’ but of a ‘biased mob’. Does it matter? Yes, it does. The NYT is still read religiously by those in power in the U.S. — and as the UK seeks a U.S. trade deal, the message from America’s most self-important newspaper would be: What’s the point?
Indeed, Times readers have been reassured for years that the UK is on the brink of utter collapse. The privations of ‘Austerity Britain’ spawned its own series of articles in 2019 with doom-laden headlines such as ‘Shrinking Lives in the English Countryside’ and ‘In Britain, Austerity is Changing Everything’.
The paper has far more scope for unsubstantiated smears on its comment pages. An especially obnoxious example was published in October 2018 under the headline ‘I Didn’t Hate the English — Until Now’. ‘If you love metaphor, England used to be the spade. Now it is the seagull,’ she opined on the pages of the NYT. ‘No matter what Johnson says, nothing can dispel the sense that we are a country in decline, segueing to crisis.’
A wily political operator, Mr Thompson once described Brexit as an ‘ugly shambles’ and, in a 2016 book, compared the tactics of the Vote Leave campaign to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.