A waste of helium and harmful to wild animals and the environment. I wish local media would stop covering these things.
Senate Bill 879 has been introduced in the PA Senate to ban balloon releases but has been stuck in a committee for about a year now. Contact your state representatives and let them know you support this Bill and to move it forward for passage!
A new data investigation argues that The New York Times sharply changed the way it covers transgenderpeople beginning in 2022, moving from rights-based framing toward more skeptical, conflict-driven coverage that elevated opponents of transgenderrights and gave less prominence to transgender people themselves.
The analysis, published Friday by civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo in The Dissident, reviewed 3,242 Times articles published between 2014 and early 2026. Caraballo also published an accompanying data site, where readers can review the findings and methodology.
“This isn’t about any individual story,” Caraballo, who said the project took her two months to complete, told The Advocate in an interview Monday. “This is about the whole corpus of how they’ve covered trans issues over time.”
The New York Times did not initially respond to The Advocate’s request for comment. After this story was published, the paper rejected the analysis and denied that its coverage is biased or anti-trans. In a statement to The Advocate, Danielle Rhoades Ha, the Times’ senior vice president of communications, said the paper’s role is “to report accurate, fact-based information on all aspects of a story to help the public understand vital issues better.”
Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, said she undertook the project because years of criticism from transgender writers, journalists, and advocacy groups had often been met by the Times with defenses of individual stories. The problem, she said, was not always factual error, but the cumulative effect of framing, story selection, and prominence.
“It is harder on the individual level because there isn’t anything usually factually wrong with their stories,” Caraballo said. “But part of the problem is the framing, what they choose to highlight, and how much priority they give certain stories.”