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This doesn't exist. During the height of the Daily Show's popularity, Fox News' news programming was purportedly actually quite good. And that counted for absolutely nothing with the wider media environment because Glenn Beck had an opinion show, and thus FAUX NEWS.
There is no degree of impartiality that will cause a zealous, mind-killed left-partisan to not write a neutral media source off as "blatant right wing propaganda", because calling everything to the right of AOC "blatant right wing propaganda" is an important tool for maintaining the power of their blatant left wing propaganda.
It doesn't need to be impartial enough to win over deranged leftists, just enough of the center that people like myself or Scott or Bryan Caplan or Richard Hanania or Nate Silver could look at it and see a relatively competitive alternative. The easiest niche would be on identity topics since the MSM is quite bad on those, but right-leaning news is also terrible so we're in a "pick your poison" environment on that issue. On most other topics the NYT is good enough that it can generally be trusted within terms of bounded distrust that reading it will be a lot better than the average right wing news source, which at this point isn't so much Fox News as it is Tucker, Candace, and Rogan.
The entire point of my post was that we literally had exactly that and it was meme'd into a mass perception as "blatant right-wing propaganda". It's honestly still not that bad, compared to, say ABC News. I see articles on their website that seem low-key hostile to Trump and relatively few that look like water carrying.
Silver does seem to have positive things to say about Fox, but then he asks LLMs to rate them by consensus and gets VERY CONSERVATIVE, compared to ABC as "somewhat liberal". As someone who uses those two for "hard" news sources, I think that's exactly reversed. But then, I actually consume their content. Silver is trusting a self-serving "consensus".
We never had this. The conservative ecosystem has never had something that was as consistently high-quality and as consistently central to the conversation (even only among conservatives) as the NYT.
Your point of comparison is literally the biggest name in news in America, which never actually deserved it (Walter Duranty, etc).
Your argument here is essentially "You don't deserve to be taken seriously because you're not at the cool kids table, and you're not at the cool kids table because you don't deserve to be taken seriously. The rest of us do deserve to be here because we just don't admit our biases, lies, and open support for genocidal tyrants."
As I said, it's not about total popularity. Popularity within the movement is sufficient. If the NYT was ignored by every centrist but still did the same quality of work and was widely read by leftists, that would qualify since it would be generally truth-seeking news with enough pull to be a major part of the conversation. You could sort of see the outlines of this with stuff like the National Review back in the 90s and 2000s, but it was ostracized by conservatives themselves. Now, nothing even remotely looks close in the age of MAGA.
Not sure what this is in reference to.
Walter Duranty, mostly.
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The correct comparison to the NYT would not be Fox news, though- Fox is in a different medium, just to start with. The WSJ isn't terribly pro-Trump, but it's still an overall right leaning paper, and the National Review is somewhat more pro-Trump and also a high quality source. Fox is the equivalent of, like CNN.
I'd agree National Review is fairly decent. The problem is its place in the Republican ecosystem. The fact its been willing to criticize Trump has made it a persona non grata to a lot of the MAGA-dominated modern Right. By contrast the NYT remains firmly centered in the left-leaning info sphere.
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