Fury at NY Times for ‘sneering attack’ on British monarchy
The New York Times faced yet another wave of backlash over its coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, with readers now threatening to end their $17-a-month subscriptions.
In its latest story on Wednesday, the Times reported that the British taxpayers would front the bill of the funeral costs, which will reportedly cost more than $6 million.
The story labeled it a ‘hefty price tag’ amid rampant inflation in Britain, but readers were unamused by the article as they slammed the tone of the reporting regarding the late monarch of 70 years.
‘Your newspaper has been unfailingly full of snark, on a story that doesn’t belong to you. Disappointing,’ wrote Twitter user Dorren Wilson.
‘I subscribed for five years, but you’ve confirmed the wisdom of letting it go.’
The New York Times received more backlash over its reporting of the Queen’s funeral as it noted that it would be paid for by British taxpayers
Readers took to social media to condemn the tone of the reporting just days after Queen Elizabeth’s death, marking an end to her 70 year reign
Wilson was not alone in her criticism of the Times, fellow Twitter user Robert Corbishley said the cost to taxpayers would still be less than the $7 paper.
‘Less per person than the price of one copy of your “newspaper,”’ he wrote.
Tom Harwood, another Twitter user, noted that the British government was already committing billions of pounds to tackle inflation.
‘The Queen’s funeral [cost will] be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that,’ Harwood wrote. ‘You absolute ghouls.’
Another Twitter user with the handle Siamese5 wrote also condemned the Times, writing: ‘Show some respect to the Woman who gave her Life to Service.’
Dave Birty, another Twitter user, sarcastically applauded the Times for its reporting, tweeting: ‘Wow, incredible news, I imagined the Queen’s funeral was going to be paid for by American taxpayers.’
Twitter user Steve Chadwick echoed many online that said they were glad to help pay for the Queen’s funeral.
‘It’s been 70 years since the last one – I think we’ve got this,’ he wrote.
The backlash came a week after the paper garnered criticism over an article by Maya Jasanoff, a history professor at Harvard University, where she focuses on the history of Britain and the British Empire and said it was wrong to ‘romanticize’ the crown.
‘The queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged,’ she wrote as other reporters around the nation joined suit to criticize the late Queen’s reign.
Many called The Times disrespectful and said British taxpayers were more than happy to help pay for the Queen’s funeral costs
The Times’ story was the latest in a slew of American articles about the Queen’s death and funeral that been criticized for its tone of coverage
Maya Jasanoff, a Harvard professor specializing in the history of the British Empire, wrote for the Times last week that it was wrong to ‘romanticize’ the Queen’s rule
New York Magazine’s The Cut has been seen as the biggest offender over its coverage of the Queen’s death and the British Royal Family.
The liberal magazine that published an in-depth interview with the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, in August, has recently targeted King Charles in a new piece that was published online on Wednesday.
The latest story is titled: ‘King Charles’s Reign of Fussiness Has Begun,’ which comes days before the Queen‘s funeral, which is scheduled for Monday.
The article points to reports that Charles went through two ‘tantrums’ in the days after his mother’s death. One was the report that he stormed out of a signing ceremony in Northern Ireland when a pen leaked on him, another was when he ‘trussed up in tails and hissing at palace aides who failed to move a pen tray off his table with due haste.’
The king apparently gestured to aides to help him to make some room on a cluttered desk.
The Cut goes on to mention a report from the Guardian in which it was alleged that Charles chose to tell close to 100 employees that he was letting them go as he prepares to move into Buckingham Palace during a memorial service for his mother.
A source told the newspaper: ‘Everybody is absolutely livid, including private secretaries and the senior team.’
New York Magazine’s The Cut, which published an in-depth interview with Meghan Merkle, has been seen as the biggest offender over its coverage of the Queen’s death
The article concludes by one of Meghan Markle’s many unproven allegations against Charles, that he was racist about her son, Archie, and accuses him of ‘mundane cruelty’ to his wife, Princess Diana.
Infamously, shortly after the Queen’s death, The Cut published an article titled: ‘I Won’t Cry Over the Death of a Violent Oppressor.’
The piece was an interview Carnegie Mellon linguistics professor Uju Anya who tweeted on Thursday: ‘I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.’
Anya told the Cut that the Queen was a ‘representative of the cult of white womanhood.’
Uju Anya, a black applied-linguistics professor at the Pittsburgh university, said on Friday: ‘Queen Elizabeth was representative of the cult of white womanhood’
Shortly before the Queen’s passing was announced on Thursday, Anya tweeted that she hoped her death would be ‘excruciating’
Anya, an applied-linguistics professor at the Pittsburgh university, is the daughter of a mother from Trinidad and a father from Nigeria.
She told NBC News that she is ‘a child of colonization,’ and that her perspective was shaped by Britain’s role in the Nigerian Civil War.
‘My earliest memories were from living in a war-torn area, and rebuilding still hasn’t finished even today,’ she said.
She defended her remarks opposing the monarchy and added that the Queen was not exempt from the decisions made by the British government ‘she supervised.’
‘Queen Elizabeth was representative of the cult of white womanhood,’ Anya said.
‘There’s this notion that she was this little-old-lady grandma type with her little hats and her purses and little dogs and everything, as if she inhabited this place or this space in the imaginary, this public image, as someone who didn’t have a hand in the bloodshed of her Crown.’