Why does the New York Times keep calling the left ‘divisive’? |
“El-Sayed and Stevens Project Party Unity After Divisive Race,” announced the New York Times on 5 August, the day the democratic socialist Abdul El-Sayed beat out his centrist Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, in the Michigan senatorial primary. “Divisive” is now the Times’s favorite attack word, deployed repeatedly to disparage and try to undermine the astonishing recent advances by self-identified democratic socialists and other progressive candidates.
Four days after that first story, the Times again landed “divisive” under “Obama and El-Sayed Discuss Unity After Ugly Michigan Primary.” El-Sayed, it asserted, had “narrowly prevailed in a divisive primary after campaigning on a progressive and anti-establishment platform”.
On 12 August, the Times reported that David Crowley, who narrowly beat out Democratic socialist Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, “promised to leave behind the divisive Democratic primary and focus on Mr. Tiffany”, his Republican opponent. Other stories slip it in more subtly. That same day, in a piece about representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez allegedly distancing herself from “Woke 1.0”, the Times cited Middlebury College professor Erik Bleich, who “pointed to the calls to defund the police as a divisive goal”.
“Polarizing”, a close cousin to “divisive”, appears regularly, too. The........