Protesters outside New York Times demand newspaper 'stop normalizing Trump'

The New York Times has garnered criticism over the year for its reporting on Donald Trump and the 2024 election. On Wednesday, that criticism led to in-person protests outside the building.

Readers left online complaints and cancelled subscriptions before direct protests began. Their demand, according to one civil rights lawyer, is to stop "sane-washing" Trump.

The activists had bright yellow signs with words the Times has avoided using in reports such as "lies," "convict" and "felon." The group had one large black banner across the group reading "stop normalizing Trump."

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As Oliver Darcy wrote for CNN in March, "Critics have also argued that The Times covers Biden and Trump with disproportionate standards, placing false equivalence on issues surrounding the current president to those of the former president, who is facing 91 criminal counts and fantasized about being a dictator on 'day one.'"

Among the concerns, earlier this year was the Times' obsession with President Joe Biden's age, only a few years over Trump. In a poll conducted with Siena the paper asked whether Biden was too old to be effective.

“That they even asked this question is evidence of the bias — the agenda — in their poll. Who made age an ‘issue’? The credulous Times falling into the right-wing’s projection. This is not journalism. Shameful," Jeff Jarvis posted on Threads. He's currently the Leonard Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation at the CUNY Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, Darcy pointed out.

Complaints grew more recently after the Times paraphrased Trump's rambling non-answer while speaking to The Economic Club of New York. In the report, the Times reshaped his language to make sense of what he said. The reality of the comments was that none of it made sense, according to critics.

They were accused of "sane-washing" Trump's comments.

Ultimately, the Times confessed in an article published at the time, "Often his mangled statements are summarized in news accounts that often do not give the full picture of how baffling they can be."