People walk by The New York Times building in Manhattan, New York City.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

New York:

The New York Times editorial board on Monday endorsed Kamala Harris, calling the Democrat “the only patriotic choice for president” in the race against Republican Donald Trump.

But the paper did not even mention the vice president’s name until the fourth paragraph of its written endorsement — instead focusing attention on Trump’s unworthiness for the presidency, calling him morally and temperamentally “unfit.”

“This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.”

It’s an “anyone but Trump” approach that The New Yorker took one day prior, with editors at the magazine saying the Republican represents the “ongoing assault on the stability, the nerves, and the nature of the United States.”

In its lengthy endorsement, the Times acknowledged Harris “may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken.”

“Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s,” the paper said. “Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative.”

The Times editorial board has not thrown its weight behind a Republican for president since 1956 when it backed Dwight Eisenhower.

But the paper emphasized that this election is “about something more foundational” than “competing politics and principles” in a two-party system.

“Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy,” the paper wrote.

The Times said voters are right to ask more from Harris when it comes to policy specifics: “Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error… under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory.”

“That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record.”

Meanwhile, it called the Republican Party “little more than an instrument” of Trump’s “quest to regain power” and claimed a second Trump term “would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.”

“Kamala Harris is the only choice,” the editorial board said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

America’s most influential newspaper, The New York Times, called in an editorial Friday for President Joe Biden to step aside and allow another Democrat to challenge Donald Trump for the White House in November.

Describing Biden as “the shadow of a great public servant,” the newspaper’s editorial board — which is separate from its newsroom — said Thursday’s debate between the president and Trump proved the 81-year-old “failed his own test.”

His determination to run again is a “reckless gamble,” it said, adding: “the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss parts of the New York Times copyright lawsuit against it, arguing that the newspaper “hacked” its chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems to generate misleading evidence for the case.

OpenAI said in a filing in Manhattan federal court on Monday that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through “deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”

“The allegations in the Times’s complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards,” OpenAI said. “The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products.”

Representatives for the New York Times and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.

The Times sued OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft in December, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots to provide information to users.

The Times is among several copyright owners that have sued tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work in AI training, including groups of authors, visual artists and music publishers.

Tech companies have said that their AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material and that the lawsuits threaten the growth of the potential multitrillion-dollar industry.

The complaint accused OpenAI and Microsoft of trying to “free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism” and create a substitute for the newspaper. It cited several instances in which OpenAI and Microsoft chatbots gave users near-verbatim excerpts of its articles when prompted.

OpenAI said in its filing that it took the Times “tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results.”

“In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will,” OpenAI said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)