<p>Jill Abramson is a former <em>Wall Street Journal</em> correspondent who led the <em>New York Times</em> as executive editor from 2011 until 2014, when she was fired and replaced by Dean Baquet.</p>
<p>According to a Fox interview, in her soon-to-be published book <em>Merchants of Truth</em>, Abramson criticizes the paper&#8217;s Trump coverage as biased, laments younger employees&#8217; willingness to criticize the president, and bashes Trump&#8217;s attacks on the media.</p>
<p>“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the <em>Times</em> to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” writes Abramson. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”</p>
<p><strong>The newspaper also “blew its Clinton coverage out of proportion.&#8221;</strong></p>
<p>The <em>Times</em> had a financial incentive to crank out stories on Trump, explains Abramson, noting that digital subscriptions jumped by 600,000 during his first six months in office.</p>
<p>“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward…in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.” However, &#8220;the more anti-Trump the <em>Times</em> was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Abramson also criticizes the paper&#8217;s younger staff for ignoring journalism&#8217;s longtime pursuit of truth. </strong></p>
<p>“The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the danger of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,&#8221; she writes.</p>
<p>At the same time, she slams Trump&#8217;s “fake news” comments as a “cheap way of trying to undermine the credibility of the <em>Times’s</em> reporting as something to be accepted as truth only by liberals in urban, cosmopolitan areas.”</p>
<p><strong>Author&#8217;s Note:</strong> We already knew the <em>Times</em> was biased, but to have a former editor say so is pretty incredible. I look forward to reading the book.</p>