Article snippet: The New York Times is fighting to maintain a middle course while being beset by criticism on all sides — and it has suffered some self-inflicted wounds in the process. The Times, the single most influential news outlet in the nation, has been accused of anti-Trump bias by the right and excessive deference toward the president by the left. It has come under fire for being too slow to defend itself from MORE’s “fake news” jabs — yet it’s also taken fire for being overly sensitive to the churn of criticism from Washington pundits and political Twitter. Some of the Times’s problems are an inevitable consequence of a hyperpartisan era and a historically polarizing president — as well as the upheaval of the digital age. “The great ocean liner of The New York Times is having an awful lot of difficulty steering itself through our current choppy waters,” said Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism and mass communications at New York University. “That is not atypical of an institution from one era trying to maintain its position into another.” Tobe Berkovitz, a Boston University professor who specializes in political communications, agreed, saying that “all media outlets are facing this problem of ‘How do we position ourselves in this increasingly partisan era where partisanship frequently determines who our subscribers are, who our readers are, who our viewers are?’” The Times itself is striving to take the long view. A spokeswoman for the paper pointed The Hill to... Link to the full article to read more