Michael Goodwin: New York Times Strikes While the Irony Is Hot

Last week was not a good week for the American left. The curtain was pulled back on two of its key captive institutions and the pictures of sanctimonious, self-dealing ideologues were not pretty.

The Manhattan strike by 1,100 newsroom employees at The New York Times lasted only one day, but that was long enough to better understand why the paper has gone astray. Supporters of socialism-like tax-and-spending policies, many reporters and editors wore red for the occasion and urged solidarity from readers.

No word on whether they called each other comrade.

Already the Gray Lady has turned so far left that she’s barely recognizable to generations of readers, but to the radical staff, the paper is just another racist rag. Black employees as a group reportedly do not score well on managers’ evaluations, and a union leader insisted it was only because of discrimination.

“It turns out that they are weighted against employees of color at The New York Times,” Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, told Fox News. “For example, no black employee at The New York Times has ever received the highest rating possible. Nikole Hannah-Jones is in our unit. Tell me how she is not doing that caliber-type of work.”

DeCarava’s citing of Hannah-Jones is telling, though not in the way she intended. The maven of the ahistorical 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her error-riddled essay, and the Times is pushing its false claims into schools.

Yet apparently her editors secretly have problems of their own with Hannah-Jones’ work. Now they tell us.

The Times is not just racist, it’s also cheap, the strikers say, pointing to a paltry newsroom median salary of — get this — $120,000. That’s nearly double the national figure.

Not surprisingly, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the socialist with three houses, feels the strikers’ pain. “The staff at The New York Times are fighting for a living wage and fair pay — something that is not so radical when the company just approved $150 million in stock buybacks for its investors,” he said in a statement. He added ominously that “it is long past time in this country that we explore new ways to empower media workers to effectively collectively bargain with large corporations like The New York Times.”

In fact, the employees’ union and the company are bargaining, but with the left, the system is always broken unless they get everything they demand. It’s good to see that, at least at the Times, they are finally eating their own.

There are also heaps of irony in the union’s citing inflation and the cost of living in the New York region to justify demands for big salary hikes. It doesn’t occur to the strikers that their paper endorsed Joe Biden and all the region’s big spending, high-taxing Democratic governors — the very people who are largely to blame for stratospheric living costs.

Perhaps the Times staff should do what so many other New Yorkers have done — get a tax cut by moving to Florida!

Meanwhile, the other left-wing comeuppance is taking place at Twitter, where new owner Elon Musk is boldly revealing how employees secretly limited the reach of conservative users even as they publicly and repeatedly denied doing so, including to Congress.

“Teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts,” independent journalist Bari Weiss wrote after getting an inside look at the ­operation.

She said conservatives such as talk-show host Dan Bongino, Stanford University’s anti-COVID-lockdown advocate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and activist Charlie Kirk were among those targeted for suppression by Twitter.

The moves were all part of a sweeping system of “visibility filtering” that used a series of anodyne words to mask the intent and impact. For example, Weiss writes that Bhattacharya, “who argued that COVID lockdowns would harm children, was placed on a ‘Trends Blacklist,’ which prevented his tweets from trending.”

Bongino was secretly restricted with a “Search Blacklist,” Weiss wrote, while Kirk’s account got “Do Not Amplify” instructions. Another journalist with Musk’s blessing, Matt Taibbi, followed with a report on the internal discussions that led to Donald Trump eventually being banned from the site.

What is not yet fully in focus is how much of an ongoing role FBI agents played in all those decisions. We know agents warned the big social-media platforms against The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop revelations in 2020 on the false claim they could contain hacked material or Russian disinformation, but whether agents played a similar role in restricting conservative users at Twitter is unclear.

What is beyond dispute is that the Times’ strike and the Twitter releases show how a relative handful of spoiled, bigoted ideologues have been warping America’s political and cultural discourse.

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Catch up on Twitter’s censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story

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Even allowing for the fact that large social movements almost always begin with small groups of fanatics, it is remarkable how far off center the left has been able to push America in just a few short years. From the 1619 Project to endless COVID lockdowns to pushing transgender advocacy in elementary schools, these radicals have managed to force-feed their ideas widely into general circulation while using the government, Big ­Media and Big Tech to suppress contrary evidence and views.

And they haven’t stopped yet. In the Times’ Saturday edition, a supposedly straight news article about Musk’s Twitter releases said his “critics,” (translation: leftist Democrats) feared “he would make the social network more susceptible to right-wing misinformation.”

Perhaps unwittingly, the writer’s construct is right out of Orwell’s “1984.” There, and now to the Times and its fellow travelers, facts are right-wing misinformation, while left-wing misinformation is truth.

This is who they are.

Tax and spend again

For many New Yorkers, both the city and the state are at a tipping point. Problems are growing faster than solutions, creating the feeling that 2023 could be a make-or-break year.

Yet in Albany, the all-Democrat government appears locked in a time warp, as if these are the days of wine and roses. In the weeks since the election, the business-as-usual approach included talk of fare hikes in the transit system and on Thruway tolls.

With a crushing congestion tax in Manhattan already on the table, the Legislature couldn’t resist the urge to dip its beak into this river of new money. Naturally, it’s going to give itself a raise.

Also naturally, Gov. Hochul is all for it.

Before you ask, no, they have no shame.

‘Intel’ slip is showing

Reader John Capano raises a good question about the 51 former intelligence officials who warned in 2020 that the crucial emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian disinformation. Capano writes: “You would think these officials would be more alarmed now that the emails have been authenticated and Joe Biden is in office. Why aren’t they expressing concern that Biden is compromised?”

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