The New York Times appears throughout The Bob Zadek Show not as a topic in its own right but as a recurring reference point: a mainstream newspaper whose reporting is cited as evidence and whose institutional posture is treated with suspicion. Across the excerpts, Bob Zadek and his guests use the paper in two distinct ways — as a source of documented facts about government failure, and as an emblem of the concentrated media influence they criticize.
Government mandates and the quality of light
In a discussion of the Department of Energy, Bob Zadek cites an article he found in the New York Times that spoke directly to the department’s inefficiency. He reports that the Energy Department was mandated by Congress to create efficiency standards for appliances, was supposed to update those standards in 1997, and fell behind. Zadek’s framing is that an agency unable to meet its own deadlines cannot credibly dictate efficiency to anyone else The Age of Unenlightment (2010). The same episode returns to the paper later, when Zadek advises listeners to stock up on incandescent bulbs and notes that the New York Times reported in April, on April 24th, that in England the Brits were hoarding light bulbs. He gives the figures the article supplied: one store sold 3,000 100-watt bulbs in two months, thirty times the usual amount, at prices 50% higher, with consumers limited to 10 bulbs at a time The Age of Unenlightment (2010).
The paper functions here as corroboration for a claim Zadek is already making about congressional overreach. In the same episode he describes a Cape Cod woman, Wendy Howland, whose wind turbine was found to violate local zoning rules, and he quotes the Bourne County hearing’s language about an adverse effect on the character of the neighborhood. The New York Times is not the source of that story, but it sits alongside it as part of the same argument about green hypocrisy and the false premise of energy independence.
Student debt and the drag on growth
The New York Times reappears in a 2013 episode on extra-constitutional power, where Zadek discusses student loans and the argument for forgiveness. He cites an article, published just the other day, reporting that student loan debt makes it even harder for many graduates, delaying purchases of things like homes, cars, and other big-ticket items and acting as a drag on growth War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013). Zadek’s response is that the argument is absurd: if the goal is to stimulate big-ticket purchases, sending checks would do the same thing.
The same article supplies a concrete case. Zadek names Shane Gill, described in the New York Times article as a 33-year-old high school teacher in New York who does not have a car, owes $45,000 in student loans plus $40,000 to her parents, and cannot get married and have kids because of the debt. Zadek’s comment is “So what?” — his point being that she knew she would have to repay when she incurred the debt War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013). The paper’s reporting is thus used to introduce a sympathetic figure whose circumstances Zadek then declines to treat as a reason for relief.
Race, drug criminalization, and a 1913 article
In a 2020 episode on sex work and censorship, Zadek recalls an article he believes appeared in the New York Times around 1913, during the early criminalization of drugs at the federal level and thereafter at the state level. He says the paper published a news story, allegedly fact-based, reporting that marijuana should be criminalized because the evidence showed that when black men use marijuana they become better pistol shots and more sex-craved Of Sex Work and Censorship (2020). He notes the same tendencies with opium and Asians, and describes the pattern as racist tendencies dressed up in moral clothing so they are not overtly racist. The paper here is cited as a historical actor in the construction of racialized drug policy, not merely as a reporter of it.
The paper as an object of media criticism
Two episodes treat the New York Times as part of a broader media problem. In a 2021 episode on the Capitol riot, Nick Gillespie resists any attempt to create a golden age of American journalism, naming the question of whether the New York Times was better, more fair and more objective in the mid-60s than it is now. He says he is glad those days are long past where any single source has that much power, and he groups MSNBC and the New York Times together on one side of the aisle as outlets that confirm an existing sense of the world The Capitol Riot in Context (2021). Bob Zadek, for his part, tells listeners not to pick mainstream news in any form, calling it purely entertainment that satisfies emotional needs but not intellectual needs.
In a 2021 episode on the Radio Right and the Fairness Doctrine, Zadek raises the New York Times’ floating, after Biden’s election, of the concept of a “Reality Czar.” He calls it the Fairness Doctrine, if you will, and describes the trial balloon as urging Biden to appoint a Reality Czar, as if reality needed to be legislated. Paul Matzko responds that most bad ideas start with good intentions, that the people who proposed the Fairness Doctrine really did want stations to be fair and balanced, and that the question is whether the state is an appropriate tool for mandating such things — noting that the Fairness Doctrine was ironically used to promote a lack of fairness and to protect governmental lies The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021).
A 2023 episode on foreign policy reporting opens with Zadek asking Ted Galen Carpenter to define terms, observing that “press” captures everything from the New York Times and CNN to a blogger blogging on foreign affairs. Carpenter agrees that the reach is still dominated by large-scale entities in newspapers and television, that something like CNN and the New York Times reaches millions while a blogger may number in the thousands or tens of thousands, and that the entities with the greatest influence all tend to have groupthink and see the world the same way government officials see it Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
Across episodes
The New York Times is touched on in seven episodes spanning 2010 to 2023, and the excerpts show no development in how it is treated. In every instance it serves either as a cited source of facts — the Energy Department’s missed 1997 deadline, the British light-bulb hoarding, the student-debt drag on growth, the 1913 marijuana article — or as an example of mainstream media influence and groupthink. The earliest treatment, in 2010, uses the paper purely evidentially; the later treatments, in 2021 and 2023, add the media-criticism frame through Nick Gillespie, Paul Matzko and Ted Galen Carpenter, but the underlying posture — cite the reporting, distrust the institution — is constant.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the New York Times’ ownership, founding, editorial page, or internal operations, and they do not name any specific article title, byline, or author. No excerpt states what any cited article concluded beyond the particular sentences Zadek or his guests quote or paraphrase. The 1913 article is recalled from memory, with Zadek himself hedging on the date and content, and no excerpt confirms or disputes it.