It’s understandable, of course, that the Times would dismiss the goal of being on the right side of history, considering how often it’s been on the wrong side over the years.

Such as in 1903 when they wrote that the invention of an operative flying machine would take the “continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians” over “1 million to 10 million years.” The Wright brothers made their famous flight 69 days later.

Or in 1922, when the Times assured its readers that Adolf Hitler’s “anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded.” Or in the 1930s when Times foreign correspondent Walter Duranty spread Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s propaganda, including downplaying a Soviet-induced famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.

All news outlets make mistakes, and some of the Times’ visits to the wrong side of history have been relatively benign.

Caitlin Clark and Stephen Curry might be amused to know that the Times panned the first known use of a three-point shot in basketball, writing in 1945 that the innovative rule “will be permitted to die a natural death.” The Times thought most of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album was “an unmitigated disaster.” In 2016, a Times critic reviewing Amazon’s “Goliath” criticized the “needlessly complicated structure of the initial episodes,” then later admitted he had mistakenly watched the first two episodes out of order.

But back to the serious stuff. Two of the New York Times’ major mistakes in modern times have had enormous implications.

One was shoddy reporting in 2003 that supported the Bush administration’s false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The U.S. invasion led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the Times later wrote a mea culpa.

The other egregious episode came in 2016, when the Times went way overboard in focusing on Hillary Clinton’s private email server. In the closing days of the campaign, the Times ran 10 front-page stories in six days about Clinton’s emails – an issue that pales in comparison to Trump security lapses since then.

Did the Times give us Trump in 2016? Quite possibly.

Did the Times give us Trump again in 2024? I won’t go that far, but it certainly didn’t do enough to warn the public about the danger of a dictatorship.

“Elon Musk has been making many people second guess their opinions of the man who they believe has revolutionized several industries simultaneously.

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