I was late to the party, but it turns out that the NYT has always been an agent of manufacturing consent for the US govt dating back at least as far as the vietnam war but almost assuredly since the beginning of the Cold War.

The overton window is constructed by our media and it was built in such a way that anyone to the left of the democrats was definitionally too radical while anyone to the right of the GOP was just misunderstood and needed to be accommodated.