In 2016, British voters voted to leave the European Union. The result was divisive but, in the end, a majority supported leaving.
While Britain's departure from the EU is still being worked out, companies are asking granular questions about how they will keep their operations running under new rules. Then there is the more complicated issue of what sort of relationship Britain wants to have with the EU in the future.
Why is the New York Times so against Britain?
The New York Times - which claims to be the most important newspaper in the world, and sells more subscriptions outside the US than any other - has an intensely anti-Britain slant. It isn't just the Brexit vote that is driving it.
As it turns out, the NYT's slant towards Britain has been going on for a while now, and it has been getting more and more extreme.
It's a twisted culture war vendetta that the NYT has launched against Britain.
Over the years it has been employing writers with a specific hatred for Britain to write articles that will put out a whole range of vile rumours about the UK.
They will do anything to get a story out there, even if it means they'll misrepresent the facts and distort the truth. It's an incredibly destructive way to run a paper, and it is proving to be a problem for its readers too.
This particular slant on Britain has been getting worse and worse in recent months, with the NYT regularly publishing articles that suggest that Britain is melting, sinking into the sea, or a place where no one knows what to do anymore.
In the run up to the referendum on June 23rd it was particularly vicious in its coverage, with pieces such as "Britain is on the Brink", and "Britain's Covid Response Offers a Warning". It also published a piece in which it claimed that people who were against Brexit could not be trusted because they had a “racist heart”.
The paper has been recruiting a series of obscure figures from the hard-Left to write these pieces, many of whom are never heard of by the public at large. It isn't just a case of using obscure names to make slanderous, factually incorrect allegations against Britain, but it also means that they aren't respected or viewed as being worthy of a space in the newspaper.
Another example of this was a piece that claimed that British people were still subsisting on boiled mutton and oatmeal. This was a ludicrous claim, and would be laughable if it wasn't such an insulting thing to say about the nation.
There are dozens of similar pieces in the past year. They all attack Britain in various ways, and they are all based on the same nonsense.
It seems that the NYT thinks it has a lot of power and can get away with saying whatever it likes about the country. It has a huge target audience in the UK, so it should try to be at least moderately respectful.
In this respect it is a little similar to the BBC, which has an equally large UK audience, and which is also paying for its coverage through taxpayers' money. But the difference is that the BBC speaks for Britain, while the NYT is a national newspaper speaking for a city in the United States.
This has all led to a lot of outrage among British commentators, who see the New York Times' anti-Britain stance as particularly unfair. Andrew Neil, for instance, wrote in the Daily Mail last week that "the NYT has assembled an impressive array of Britain-haters to spread their bile" over the years. He added that the paper "regularly depicts Britain as a plague-ridden, poverty-stricken hellhole in terminal decline" and that it has become a "spreading platform for an impressive array of obnoxious hatemongers".
Why is the New York Times so against us?
The New York Times is one of the world's largest and most prestigious newspapers. Founded in 1851, it has won 112 Pulitzer Prizes and remains one of the most popular daily newspapers in the United States. Its website is one of the most visited sites in the world.
The NYT's coverage of American politics and policy has changed dramatically in recent years. It has not endorsed a Republican candidate for President since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and largely supports progressive causes like racial justice, environmental policy, and immigration policy. It is a leader in the "Fight for $15" campaign, which calls for a federal minimum wage increase. Its editorial board also criticized President Trump's "War on Worker Rights" in 2018.
For decades, the NYT has been a leading opponent of any attempt to decriminalize marijuana or legalize pot for recreational use. It has argued that a marijuana legalization would destroy the country's economy, kill jobs, and cause widespread social disruption. It has argued that marijuana should only be legal for medicinal purposes and that the government should ban it from all places except medical facilities.
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon was so upset by the NYT's publication of classified documents from a secret history of the Vietnam War that he publicly urged Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to have the newspaper stopped publishing. The president was convinced that the newspaper had compromised the security of national defense and was threatening the public's trust in the U.S.
Nonetheless, the paper's editors were unwilling to stop publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers. They began to publish the documents, which were illegally leaked by government officials, as early as 1971. The government obtained a court injunction against the newspaper, which was based on a claim that publishing the material endangered national security.
The New York Times's publication of the Pentagon Papers caused a massive debate about the First Amendment and free speech, and resulted in the Supreme Court ruling that the newspaper had a constitutional right to publish the material. In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that the government's prior restraint was unconstitutional and dissolved the injunction.
That case is still a watershed in American journalism. It helped establish the legal precedent that a prior restraint can never be justified under the First Amendment. In fact, it was the first case in which a newspaper won a First Amendment victory against the government.
There are many other cases in which the New York Times has fought back against government censorship, such as a lawsuit over the release of classified information during the Vietnam War. But the most famous of these was the 1971 case New York Times Co v. Washington, which has become known as the "Pentagon Papers" case.
This case was the beginning of a decades-long battle over the right to publish confidential and classified government information. It is often cited as the most important case in the history of the United States Constitution.
The Supreme Court upheld the free speech rights of the Times and the Washington Post when they published excerpts from a classified study about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1971. The case paved the way for future freedom-of-the-press victories, including the landmark decision in 1992 that the Pentagon Papers were protected by the First Amendment. In the years since, the NYT has pushed for many causes favored by the left, such as a federal minimum wage increase and a legalization of marijuana. It has also been an outspoken supporter of the far-left Intercept, which has leaked emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign to far-left journalists.