The issue with the WSJ is the editorial board and the obvious mutual contempt between them and the news side. It’s not uncommon for the editorial board to run whackadoodle stuff that ends up being ripped to pieces by the news staff.
NYT in my eyes appears to be of quite low quality, but I don’t have enough history with them to figure out if this is a new trend or not.
Alas, no. I typically cross compare against multiple publications, along with the knowledge of what the short-comings and biases of each source might be.
It really degraded that much. It's always been of the left, but used to be fairly even handed and not as openly ideological.
I know what happened - if you've followed what's happening in our universities the past decade, that mostly explains it (see cases like Weinstein at Evergreen, and Christakis at Yale).
Those students have graduated and are influencing the newsroom at NYT and elsewhere.