The thing is, the NYT still has enough normative cultural power, even as it has fallen from newspaper-of-record, that it takes a particular sort of heretical self-confidence to sort of ignore whatever they happen to be wrong about on any given week, whether or not it concerns you
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A subtle shift has occurred in the workings of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It used to be an individual private amnesia re: media ("I'll believe myself when I am certain they got it wrong because I'm an expert, but still believe them when I am not"). Now it's a collective effect
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A sort of common-knowledge threshold has been crossed lately. "Everybody knows that everybody knows the NYT is wrong on X across largish subcultures." It's no longer mutual beliefs being validated occasionally 1:1.
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SV isn't the first to achieve this sort of collective bozobitting of the NYT... I think econtwitter got there first. Krugman is ok for the school of thought he represents, but "the economy according to the NYT" bears little resemblance to "the economy according to economists"
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It's very patchy though. The internal culture war they have going on between the old guard and the entryist upstarts who've made inroads has left some coverage areas/beats untouched, torched other areas entirely, and left other areas in some sort of partisan-controlled state
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It would be interesting to see a map of say several dozen major areas/beats, with a map of current control state.
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A couple of years ago, a journalist (with a different bias) got in touch with me in pursuit of this kind of feature for another major newspaper. I gave him a couple of hours time and also directed him to a representative sampling of friends across the map. That piece got axed.
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He was a sincere, thoughtful guy, and though I didn't quite like the tack he was planning to take, I thought he approached the matter with enough good faith to help out. What I did't anticipate was how hard it would be to simply convey the rawest of basics.
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Ie, dramatis personae, major events and schisms, my own take on people/threads (being careful to separate information from opinion). But despite my effort, when he tried to recap for me to confirm he'd understood, I realized he hadn't. A lot of subtle distortions had crept it.
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This ssc kinda piece is like anthropology, and expecting someone to drop in from outside and understand what's going on is unrealistic for everyone.
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Can be done though, if they cared enough. But this topic is too close to their own strong priors and institutionally baked-in hostilities. Thet have the competence and talent to do it right. They merely lack the desire.

