Are there any newspapers left in New York?
Are there any newspapers left in New York?

Normally, you would never see a headline read like this in the New York Post—“Another Palestinian teenager shot dead by Israeli soldiers.” So contrary and lopsided.

But apparently these are not normal times.

Everyone chooses a side and the Post, which for years we’ve trusted as the most reliable source of information, has chosen the Hamas terrorists as its darlings. This development is something new. Something happened. Over the past few months, to the surprise of we the readers, generally conservative, the paper has been trending anti-Israel and anti-Trump.

On WABC’s Bernie and Sid in the Morning program, one of them asked if the Post had been sold. No, it just seems that way.

The same paper still features Michael Goodwin, one of the finest columnists all around, and a guy always on our side, and the same goes for its editorials.

You know you are reading the New York Post and not The New York Times…where there is nothing to read unless you like dirty laundry and propaganda.

So what’s going on?

About that headline, first, most of the copy appears to come off the wires, from the AP, which is never a friend.

Second, the copy itself is not quite so slanted, though it could have mentioned the terror Israel faces from Hamas week after week, giving the Israelis no choice but to respond.    

Hamas instigates any and all such fatalities precisely to win the headline wars – which it wins universally from the leftist press. It’s automatic.

Never so at the Post, until now, so a word about how headlines are done. They are done not by the reporter, but by the headline desk. This is a unique skill. These editors know how to wrap things up so that in a few words you know the whole story, and for this observer, the story about the Post is that its headline writers are at odds, in revolt, against the rest of the staff.

They’ve gone into business for themselves, or so it seems, and the business is to slant the news their way, anti-Israel, anti-Trump, regardless of the text.

Otherwise, it means that the Post is entirely changing sides, top to bottom, from us to them, which I find impossible to believe.

They must know what happened to their rival the New York Daily News, which calls Trump a clown, and which is pretty near belly-up after its staff was slashed in half as of a few days ago. From what was once the most widely-read paper in town, it’s curtains. Scores have been sent onto the streets.

Among them a copy-desk friend who was let go and laments – “It’s the death of journalism.”

Maybe so. But try this -- it’s the death of journals that keep getting it wrong, which the Daily News keeps doing, and is now paying the price of lost readership and insolvency.

Leftist journalism, as we now see, does not sell. Even in New York? Yes, even in New York, blue city, blue state, but perhaps not so blue after all when it comes to Trump and the Jews. New Yorkers (aside fanatical knee-jerk Liberals) generally side with Israel, and as for Trump, we may be watching something remarkable, a message from readers on how they’ll be voting.

Give them Trump Derangement Syndrome, as per the Daily News. They prefer Trump. From that pattern, that’s how they’ll vote, and it is surely how they’re buying their newspapers.

The New York Post needs to take the hint.

The paper needs to take heed before jumping off a cliff and into the arms of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Daily News ought to be a lesson even for the Murdochs, who run the Post (plus Fox News and other such enterprises) and always ran it true to the flag…well-written, concise, patriotic, and favorable towards Israel, the only major newspaper anywhere reliably so.

Until, perhaps, the sons took over the business, gradually tilting it Liberal.

Then this, as we found it and wrote it, page 112, in the most authoritative book on journalism, the newsroom thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” as follows –

“After all, Murdoch had already sold a piece of Fox News to an Arab sheik and this Arab sheik already had some say about what went out over the airwaves. A banner that spoke of ‘Muslim Riots in France’ was hastily changed to ‘Civic Disorders in France’ after a phone call from the sheik.”

Still a fan of the New York Post and Fox News – but makes you wonder.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and most recently the two inside journalism thrillers “The Bathsheba Deadline” and “News Anchor Sweetheart, Hollywood Edition.” Engelhard is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com