Could you justify that claim a bit more? I downloaded the report and the phrase New York Times doesn't seem to appear in it.
The whole report is actually a bit odd. It talks about the "five core values of journalism" and claims only super-liberal people support all of them, but the list of values appears to be basically a list of left wing priorities and worldviews, e.g. the last two values are "giving voice to the less powerful" and "social criticism". Factualism is defined not as an absolute value but merely a tradeoff, given that "the truth is more than just the matter of adding facts and this emphasis on factualism can mask bias". So that would appear to be tautological - all they've done is ask a bunch of journalists what they feel is important, got a bunch of left wing priorities, discovered that only left wing people agree with the full list, and the only thing people across the spectrum agree in is that facts are important. Surely these findings are true, but so what? It's just a dozen different ways of telling people things that are already obvious, rephrased in terms of Haidt's moral foundations theory. US journalists are much more left wing than the population as a whole, that's a widely published result for many years already. The fact that the AP felt a need to do a research study to prove it is sort of indicative of why the media has such deep problems.
The final section is quite telling. They do an experiment where they take a test story and rewrite it to be less left-biased and contain more facts. They find the resulting story appeals more to everyone, not just conservatives. It's a sad indictment of the AP that this is actually presented as a novel finding.
In the info tsunami conditions we live in, what news orgs think or push constantly get diluted by literally thousand other sources every second. They have great faith in their ability to capture the attention of the herd, but since everyone else is great at it too, there is no great value to it.
Therefore it doesn't matter what the NYT does in terms of critique, what they think or what they want people to think. Or who they take cash from. Be it Facebook or anyone or anything else.
Thats what the AP study reinforces for me. The NYT and its critics and fan clubs overestimate greatly the value of the NYT or any other mainstream news org in the current info tsunami environment.
The only contribution or "value" left for news orgs in an info tsunami, is surfacing new data through their networks and that the AP study calls facts. This is what google search bots do when they scour the network. Beyond that news orgs play no role, but they haven't realized that yet. And that wastes everyones time.
They would be much more useful to society if they acted more like search engines or gathering points for info exchange on the network and shed all the other baggage.
The whole report is actually a bit odd. It talks about the "five core values of journalism" and claims only super-liberal people support all of them, but the list of values appears to be basically a list of left wing priorities and worldviews, e.g. the last two values are "giving voice to the less powerful" and "social criticism". Factualism is defined not as an absolute value but merely a tradeoff, given that "the truth is more than just the matter of adding facts and this emphasis on factualism can mask bias". So that would appear to be tautological - all they've done is ask a bunch of journalists what they feel is important, got a bunch of left wing priorities, discovered that only left wing people agree with the full list, and the only thing people across the spectrum agree in is that facts are important. Surely these findings are true, but so what? It's just a dozen different ways of telling people things that are already obvious, rephrased in terms of Haidt's moral foundations theory. US journalists are much more left wing than the population as a whole, that's a widely published result for many years already. The fact that the AP felt a need to do a research study to prove it is sort of indicative of why the media has such deep problems.
The final section is quite telling. They do an experiment where they take a test story and rewrite it to be less left-biased and contain more facts. They find the resulting story appeals more to everyone, not just conservatives. It's a sad indictment of the AP that this is actually presented as a novel finding.