Just when it looks like its all doom and gloom, a ray of sunshine breaks through.  The following news article might be coming from a British newspaper but it is reporting on the American press and word spreads in these circles especially when the Brits school a major US newspaper.  I will quote large sections of the article’s beginning to give you a flavor of the article.  Janice Turner, an prominent opinion writer for the prestigious British newspaper The Times (of London) just posted:

“Trans U-turn is belated victory for free speech After years of all but ignoring an epidemic of gender dysphoria, The New York Times [NYT] will allow journalists to report it… this week Joe Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times, upheld the right of journalists to do journalism…A large brick in the once unbreachable wall of “no debate” has crumbled.”

“For years the NYT had all but ignored an important story, the colossal rise in children, mainly girls, diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Our own recently shuttered Tavistock Gids clinic [the UK’s only dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people] was at least subject to [National Health Service] oversight. But US private medicine has enjoyed an unregulated gold rush. Over 100 child gender clinics have sprung up in 15 years; their “affirmation only” model prescribes hormones to children immediately without question; drug companies have acquired many thousands of lucrative, lifelong patients; surgeons happy to remove the breasts of girls as young as 14 pimp their services on TikTok.

“Ker-ching! Surely any journalist, especially an NYT liberal, would suspect capitalism had devised a new way to exploit the vulnerable… Yet slowly, five years after this newspaper [The Times of London], the NYT acknowledged a middle ground: liberal readers began asking why whole friendship groups of girls were now trans boys; young women openly regretted hastily approved mastectomies; lesbians who had been tomboys and gay men who were “effeminate” boys worried that they had rushed off to clinics. Finally, the paper set its best investigative reporters on to this potential medical scandal to produce long, deep, effortfully balanced reports. Reader comments brimmed with relief that the NYT was finally doing its job.”

This is the first time I’ve heard of a major policy change in a prominent liberal/woke newspaper and the editor survived the cancel culture push back.  Moreover, when the news media’s union tried to push back at management  “the mass of NYT reporters told their own union to get stuffed. Journalists for journalism had won” during a Zoom call with 150 reporters.

By the way, Turner really tweaked the NYT’s nose by her remarks about an ignored story.  The NYT’s motto is “All the News Fit to Print.” Key European countries have had a multi-year long debate on this transgender issue and the absence of “settled science.”  (for example, please see The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray)  As Turner mentioned the UK has changed its policy, and she could have also mentioned that the Swedes were also changing. 

This isn’t the NYT’s only recent embarrassing about face for wokeness.  They just let Bret Stephens report: 

• ‘The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?  The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.
  “There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”’
  
  Bret then got brutally truthful including a call for the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to resign. 
• Earlier, they let him attack another liberal newspaper, the Washington Post, with “How to Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility.”

The NYT is re-balancing a bit for three reasons:  the readership and its own journalists are complaining about constraints on honest journalism, other prestigious organizations are attacking it, and as Stephen’s “How to Destroy” article suggests, they might be losing paying readers.  After all, the news media is a business.  The complaints about bias by its own reporters date back several years.  Take for example the resignation letter by one of their talented editors, Bari Weiss.  She along with other disgruntled truth-tellers founded their own “newspapers” initially on subtack.com.  Then in January, Colombia Journalism Review, the voice of America’s premier journalism school, published a scathing article on the NYT’s biased coverage of Donald Trump and Russia-gate. 

For conservatives, it means some of the best reporting to push back on trans gender issues might now be on the pages of a liberal newspaper.