The New York Times appears throughout The Bob Zadek Show as a recurring reference point rather than as a subject of its own. Guests and host cite it as a source of book reviews, op-eds and foreign reporting, and treat it as the archetype of the mainstream press — influential, widely read, and, in their accounts, prone to groupthink. No episode in the excerpts examines the paper’s ownership, history or internal operations.
Cited as a source
In a 2009 episode on hate crimes legislation, Bob Zadek invoked the paper to introduce a book on identity politics in criminal law. He told Jacob Sullum that a review in the New York Times, commenting on Criminal Law and Identity Politics by Jacobs and Potter, observed that hate crimes are not meant to be enforced but are legislated and dispensed by politicians eager to award symbolic attention and protection to particular interest groups. Zadek characterized this as the crassest form of pandering Hate Crimes Legislation (2009).
In a 2017 episode, Zadek described reading an article in the paper — “For Trump and GOP, the Welfare State Shouldn’t Be the Enemy” — by that morning’s guest, Will Wilkinson, and said that reading the New York Times is always a hazardous activity. He framed the article as calling into question beliefs he had thought inviolate, and introduced Wilkinson as Vice President for Policy at the Niskanen Center Will Wilkinson: G.O.P. Should Embrace the Welfare State (2017).
As evidence in foreign policy
Ivan Eland, discussing the partition of Iraq in a 2014 episode, cited an article in the New York Times published that day which said that Vice President Biden had been right about partition. Eland noted that he, Biden and two others had advocated partition and been looked at as crazy, and that after Biden became Vice President the US government was not for it, so Biden had quieted down. He added that Biden and Obama still could not bring themselves to the solution and were still hoping for an inclusive government, which he called crazy in Iraq United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Michael Strong, in a 2017 episode on governance innovation, criticized the paper’s coverage of the Arab Spring. He said that when the street merchant burned himself alive, he expected everybody to report on the lack of economic freedom, but that the media — the New York Times, CNN, NPR — all talked about the need for democracy instead. Democracy, he said, can be a useful thing, but if it does not address economic freedom it does not address the heart of the issue. Strong said that although he comes from the left, he has zero patience for the reporting of NPR and the New York Times when they do not identify lack of economic freedom, and that we need to hold their feet to the fire Michael Strong on Creating a World in Which All Humanity Flourishes (2017). In the same episode he gave the paper credit where credit was due, saying he thought it was last year that the New York Times reported on two young women who had left a village in India to work in a city in a sweatshop, contrasting that with the expectation in the village that the young women wash their in-laws’ feet every morning and drink the water.
As the archetype of the mainstream press
In a 2021 episode on the Capitol riot, Nick Gillespie resisted any attempt to create a golden age of American journalism, asking whether the New York Times was better, more fair and more objective in the mid-60s than it is now, or CBS News with Walter Cronkite. He said he was glad those days were long past when any single source had that much power, and described a media environment in which people seek out something that gives them a warm feeling about their preferred vision of the world. He grouped MSNBC and the New York Times together as outlets on one side of the aisle that confirm an existing sense of the world, alongside Fox News in a less extreme way and an Alex Jones-type character The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
In a 2023 episode on foreign policy reporting, Zadek asked Ted Galen Carpenter to define terms, noting that “press” captures everything from the New York Times and CNN to a blogger blogging on foreign affairs, and asking whether the commentary applied to a broader group than the mainstream media. Carpenter answered that the reach is still pretty much dominated by large-scale entities in newspapers and television, that something like CNN and the New York Times reaches millions, and that the entities with the greatest influence all tend to have groupthink — they pretty much think alike, see the world the same way, and see it the same way government officials do, with meaningful dissent rare Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
Across episodes
The paper is touched on in six episodes spanning 2009 to 2023 — the hate crimes episode, the Iraq partition episode, the Will Wilkinson episode, the Michael Strong episode, the Capitol riot episode and the foreign policy press episode — and the excerpts show no development in the show’s treatment of it. In every instance the paper functions as either a cited source or an example of mainstream press influence; the 2023 episode’s discussion of groupthink and reach is the closest the excerpts come to a sustained treatment, and it arrives at the same characterization of scale and conformity that Gillespie offered in 2021.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the paper’s founding, ownership, editorial leadership, business model or internal practices, and they do not name any reporter, editor or publisher. They contain no discussion of the paper’s coverage of any domestic policy area beyond the hate crimes review and the welfare op-ed, and no assessment of its accuracy beyond the general charge of groupthink. Where an excerpt breaks off mid-sentence — as in the 2014 and 2023 episodes — the sources stop there.