1. That the traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media, and "even the NYTimes" came to a conclusion that advances a social media friendly narrative is exactly the point. If we are talking about the historical biases of the NYTimes, their reporting has consistently had a bent critical of the Citizens United decision (pertaining to paid political speech) and in this particular case, overstating the impact of Cambridge Analytica. That the NYTimes would then go on to conclude that CA's impact on the 2016 election was overrated is absolutely worthy of special remark.
2. Calling NYT "squarely center right and not left in any meaningful sense" is pretty odd. The left-right spectrum is created within the polity in question. It's of no use to an American to classify the American political spectrum from the locus of European politics, because Europeans have no say in American politics. It literally doesn't matter that Joe Biden is "to the right of" Corbyn, because the two will never run against each other in a political election, and British voters have no say in American elections. So while you're technically correct that, on a global scale, the NYT is "center right", that fact is not meaningful at all to their readers, the vast majority of whom are American voters participating in the American political spectrum.
3. Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. On social issues, I think you'd have a pretty difficult time arguing that the NYT is "squarely center right". The issues of election integrity, paid speech, and campaign finance are decidedly social in nature.
> Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views.
Even breaking views down as "social" and "economic" encodes a lot of biases. In reality political views seem to align more based on a matrix of dimensions like "openness to novel experiences" or "preference for structure/stability." The system we use often surprises people with how often the Individualist Lefties (of the hippie variety) and Far Right align on both social and economic policy. It turns out their main differences are just about things like sexual mores and recreational drug use, but the general orientation on most other dynamics is the same. They just end up on different ends of the spectrum because of how factional alliances manifest in our political system.
> the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views.
It's not really in the US, where it's been studied and the main dimensions of political variability were a strong economic left-right axis and a weaker racial policy axis (Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy), and since that study it's pretty clear that divisions on the race axis have aligned more tightly with those on the economic axis, making the US political spectrum even closer to a unidimensional one.
1. That the traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media, and "even the NYTimes" came to a conclusion that advances a social media friendly narrative is exactly the point. If we are talking about the historical biases of the NYTimes, their reporting has consistently had a bent critical of the Citizens United decision (pertaining to paid political speech) and in this particular case, overstating the impact of Cambridge Analytica. That the NYTimes would then go on to conclude that CA's impact on the 2016 election was overrated is absolutely worthy of special remark.
2. Calling NYT "squarely center right and not left in any meaningful sense" is pretty odd. The left-right spectrum is created within the polity in question. It's of no use to an American to classify the American political spectrum from the locus of European politics, because Europeans have no say in American politics. It literally doesn't matter that Joe Biden is "to the right of" Corbyn, because the two will never run against each other in a political election, and British voters have no say in American elections. So while you're technically correct that, on a global scale, the NYT is "center right", that fact is not meaningful at all to their readers, the vast majority of whom are American voters participating in the American political spectrum.
3. Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. On social issues, I think you'd have a pretty difficult time arguing that the NYT is "squarely center right". The issues of election integrity, paid speech, and campaign finance are decidedly social in nature.