So here's the thing: the New York Times regularly laughably mischaracterizes Canada, a country with much the same language and culture and it's right here. It really doesn't seem like much of a reach that its reporting on countries like Iraq and Syria would be inaccurate https://twitter.com/benyt/status/1315412167856971776

Sometimes they are mistakes, like calling a lake a river. Sometimes they seem to be mad up, like claiming without evidence Canadians were calling the day cannabis was legalized. And sometimes it is taking a few snatches of this and that and passing it off as a national trend

(yes I have receipts on this trend https://twitter.com/i/events/1271284816776814592?s=09)

Everytime one of these stories comes out, Canadians on twitter start to raise their eyebrows and question: if the Times is doing this about Canada, what other countries are they misreporting on?

The stakes of claiming watching the PM's hair grow is a national pastime are lower than some of the things @benyt outlines here, but it's a solar pattern: journalists with a foreign beat create stories built on shaky narrative foundations https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/business/media/new-york-times-rukmini-callimachi-caliphate.html#click=https://t.co/6qOrXQRd5O

I genuinely hope this leads to a broader review of how the Times oversees it's foreign reporters: it's a good paper with important work to do. But every time a story from Bizarro World NYT Canada comes out, the foundation of what it does is shaken