BIAS ALERT: NYT accused by its public editor of bias in Trump, Clinton coverage

AP (Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton)

The public editor for The New York Times said Sunday that the number of complaints the newspaper received over its coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign spiked to five times its normal level.

Complaints to the paper included claims that its coverage was biased against Trump during the general election as well as accusations from readers that it favored candidate Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries.

“My colleague Thomas Feyer, who oversees the letters to the editor, says the influx from readers is one of the largest since Sept. 11,” public editor Liz Spayd wrote.

Spayd says others are calling into customer care at multiple times the usual rate and had “a variety of concerns, including the election coverage.”

Last week, President-elect Trump tweeted the Times had lost thousands of subscribers since the election – a fact strongly refuted by the paper which reports having the largest one-week subscription increase since the first week it rolled out its digital pay model in 2011.

“I hope any chest thumping about the impressive subscriber bump won’t obscure a hard-eyed look at coverage,” Spayd wrote. “Because from my conversations with readers, and from the emails that have come into my office, I can tell you there is a searing level of dissatisfaction out there with many aspects of the coverage.”

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