They have a very long track record of pretending to be independent but actually toeing the government's line at key pivotal moments in history when an independent newspaper is needed the most. Everybody here knows how they helped start the second Iraq war I hope, but that wasn't a one-off fluke. Go back through the major wars in American history and you can find the New York Times championing the cause of war before each of these. World Was 2, they uncritically accepted Walter Durranty letting Stalin ghostwrite for him, specifically w.r.t. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, because America was allied with Stalin. WWI, frequent editorializing of Germans being wild Asiatic savages while the Anglos were good and noble people that Americans owed something to for some reason nobody could explain. Vietnam, they uncritically accepted government reports on the second Gulf of Tonkin incident which never happened and broadly accepted the governments own reports about how the war was going, at least in the early years when it still might have been possible to avoid further engagement. Korean war, they supported the government narrative of communist containment. First Iraq War, they uncritically reported very dubious atrocity propaganda, like the fraudulent "Nayirah testimony" given by the teenage daughter of a diplomat pretending to be a politically uninvolved hospital worker.

The pattern here is deference to official narratives at precisely the times when criticism is needed the most.