"New York Times to Get Around $100 Million From Google Over Three Years" is the headline over a Wall Street Journal news article amplifying a brief February 6 Times press release ("The New York Times Company and Google Expand Agreement on News and Innovation") to the effect that "The New York Times Company and Google announced an expansion of their collaboration with a multi-year commercial agreement today. The companies will work together on tools for content distribution and subscriptions, using Google tools for marketing, ad product experimentation, and further on Subscribe with Google and Google Ad Manager."
Lo and behold, the entire top of the front page of today's New York Times print business section, with the headline "Deft Moves Help Google Make Gains on 2 Fronts," is devoted to boosterish coverage of Google, with publicist-quality subheadlines like "The tech giant's newest entry-level phone, the Pixel 7A, is just good as devices that are nearly double its price" [should be just "as" good, but apparently the $100 million from Google isn't enough to pay for quality copyediting at the Times] and "Google continues to build on the latest craze in tech with an array of products using artificial intelligence."
There are other outlets and reporters—for example Jacob Siegel in Tablet—casting a critical and skeptical eye at the way Google is collaborating with governments to fight "disinformation" in a way that helps the ruling elites exert control but undercuts freedom and democracy.
Anyway, $100 million is a lot of money to a company like the Times, whose print subscribers plummeted to 700,000 in the first quarter of 2023 from 770,000 in the first quarter of 2022, whose digital average [monthly] revenue per user sank to $9.04 in the first quarter of 2023 from $9.13 in the first quarter of 2022, and whose stock price has sagged to about $36 yesterday from $54 in October of 2021, even as the Ochs-Sulzberger family members who manage the place have collected millions of dollars in compensation.
Maybe Google would be getting lavishly positive coverage from the Times even without paying the $100 million. But should Times readers have to rely on the Wall Street Journal, a competing paper, to understand the financial relationship between the Times and the Big Tech companies that the Times is supposed to be providing editorially independent coverage of? This is the same paper that thinks it's an outrageous conflict of interest for Justice Thomas to socialize with Harlan Crow. If it were any institution other than the Times taking $100 million from a business it is supposed to be independently covering, the Times would be breathlessly telling readers how rotten the whole thing is. As it is, the combination of the financial deal and the Times headline "Deft Moves Help Google Make Gains" serve to undermine reader trust in the Times. It's the sort of thing you might call the public editor about, if the Times hadn't eliminated the position.