You’re a typically busy New York Times reader and you don’t have hours to waste on bad TV. Between gallery openings, analyst appointments, transgender poetry slams and molecular gastronomy cooking lessons, who has time to navigate the“ever more complex streaming video landscape” to ensure an ideologically wholesome TV diet?
Thankfully, the Times has you covered. A soon-to-be-launched website will tell you which shows should be your next “binge-watching obsession,” and how they align with your liberal principles. The Times announced this “film and TV recommendation tool,” on it’s job postings page. (Who says journalism is a dead-end career?)
The Times will review movies and TV shows, including Netflix and Amazon series, to increase its service journalism and bring in more digital revenue.
Users should beware of turning off their judgement entirely, however.
Time and again the New York Times’ entertainment and media coverage has proven its devotion to left-wing ideals while ignoring other representation in American culture.
The Times’ book reviews and bestseller list are particularly infamous for fudging sales numbers to leave out successful conservative books authored by such as Ted Cruz, Mark Levin, and David Limbaugh. Meanwhile it touts obscure books claiming to debunk conservatism.
Movie reviews by the Times make sure to include obscure films like “Southside With You,” a film celebrating the Obamas.
The new reviewing tool debuts first as a newsletter released a few times a week, but it will be upgraded this summer to a website updated daily by “pop culture savants” and “movie and tv obsessives.”
The feature is more service-based, different from the Times’ traditional criticism and coverage of pop culture and media already covered by names like Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, James Poniewozik, and Wesley Morris.
“Its goals will be to help users decide what movies and TV shows are worth their limited time, and make it easy for them to find and watch them,” the newspaper said.
The Times promises to answer such questions as, “What are the best David Bowie movies currently streaming? What are the seasons of the West Wing to check out if I’ve never seen the show before?”
While we are sure the New York Times will put star critics on its team who can provide nuanced and incisive reviews, we also anticipate just a tad of that familiar liberal bias.
Too bad that undermines all the Times’ hard work and talent.
