The lead, front-page news article in today's New York Times begins:
WASHINGTON — President Trump upended America's traditional, bipartisan trade policy on Monday as he formally abandoned the ambitious, 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership brokered by his predecessor and declared an end to the era of multinational trade agreements that defined global economics for decades.
The headline over the continuation of the article inside the paper is "Upending Bipartisan Trade Policy, Trump Abandons Trans-Pacific Deal."
Nowhere in the lengthy article accusing Mr. Trump of "upending bipartisan trade policy" is any acknowledgment whatsoever of the fact that both of Mr. Trump's Democratic opponents, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, also publicly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In other words, if the trade policy was "bipartisan," so was the opposition to it. The article makes Mr. Trump sound like some sort of outside-the-mainstream extremist, when in fact the opposition to the TPP was common, across party lines, in the recent presidential campaign. It would have been a better story if the Times had acknowledged that fact rather than omitting it.
The Times willingness to criticize Mr. Trump on the issue in a skewed way extends also to the editorial page, which published an editorial faulting Mr. Trump for withdrawing from the TPP. This is pretty humorous, because until Mr. Trump took the office, the Times itself hadn't been exactly beating the drum in favor of the agreement. It published an editorial about the pact in 2015 that is one of the limpest examples of the editorial craft in the history of editorial writing. The Times enthusiasm for this trade treaty is newfound and appears to relate more to the paper's aversion to Trump than to any enthusiasm for unfettered trade; back in the summer of 2016, a Times editorial said, "While trade is not the cause of all or even much of the wage stagnation or increased income inequality in the past several decades, there are real problems with trade agreements, as Hillary Clinton and her former rival Senator Bernie Sanders have pointed out."
Got that? In the Summer of 2016, the Times editorial position was to agree with Clinton and Sanders that 'there are real problem with trade agreements." But now that it is January 2017, the editorial position is to condemn Mr. Trump for protectionism for scrapping the agreement. It's almost enough to make you think that what they really care about isn't trade but Trump.
I personally favor the TPP and am sorry both that Mr. Trump scrapped it and that the Republican Congress and President Obama didn't enact it last year. But even as someone who agrees with the Times' current view on the substance of the thing, I find the slanted, breathless nature of the news coverage and the selective outrage of the editorial board's position to be just really cringe-worthy.