A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Has The New York Times Learned From Its Trump Era Disasters?

There is little sign the new executive editor Joseph Kahn is going to
reckon with what the Republican Party really is.

Dean Baquet's tenure as New York Times executive editor was a smashing
success in many respects. He came in after the brief and tumultuous
period led by Jill Abramson and not only steadied the metaphorical ship,
but also calmed the no less metaphorical waters. He appears to have been
well liked and respected among those who worked either directly with or
close to him. (He was always very decent in his dealings with me.) Just
as importantly, he significantly improved the Times' financial
outlook, and in the process not only the Sulzberger family's nerves
but also the state of its employees' 401(k)s. Had he not accomplished
this last task, he could not have undertaken the many journalistic
innovations that allow the Times to continue its dominant status as
almost certainly the world's most influential source of news.

During Baquet's tenure, the Times was able to overcome the economic
forces that are eating away at almost every other newspaper (and most
general magazines) in America due to its ability to exploit the unique
role it plays as the "paper of record" for the American elite. The
Wall Street Journal enjoys a similar status for business news, as do the
Financial Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, and Haaretz, for their respective audiences in other nations.
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times aspire to this status, but
their appeal, while national, and sometimes global, does not approach
that of the Times.

Each of these publications naturally faces a different set of
challenges, but a common one is the fact that a great national newspaper
is more than just a business. Newspapers are both watchdogs of the
powerful and curators of what John Dewey called democracy's "culture
of conversation." They make money, however, because they serve as must
reads for their respective global elites and therefore shape their
notions of what Walter Lippmann referred to as "the world outside"
versus "the pictures in our heads."
(Benedict
Anderson's landmark study of the intellectual origins of nationalism,
Imagined Communities
, examines
the implications of this phenomenon in fascinating detail.) They are
therefore able to charge advertisers accordingly. The New Yorker and The
Economist do much the same thing in the magazine world.

Blessed with the biggest market of all, the Times recently reached ten
million subscriptions

with the addition of The Athletic, which, along with the addictive
puzzle game Wordle, it recently purchased. The company now employs 5,000
people and enjoys an annual revenue of over $2 billion
.
But "most influential" even when combined with "most profitable"
does not always mean the best. To be clear, the Times genuinely is the
best of American journalism in many respects. Chief among these is its
commitment to expensive, time-consuming (and usually money-losing)
investigative journalism.

But I feel certain that when historians look back at the period during
which Baquet led the most influential news organization on Earth, his
failure to confront the Republican Party's attempt to abolish American
democracy and replace it with a homegrown form of fascism will be his
most significant legacy.

Baquet is an adherent of so-called "objective" journalism, which
holds that reporting must not have ideology or political bias. The
signal failure of this school of thought is its refusal to distinguish
between truth and lies-most often by dumbly covering "both sides"
of a dispute with no prejudice between what is true and what is false.
Joe McCarthy showed how to exploit this in the 1950s, and yet the Times
clung to its stale orthodoxy throughout the Trump years and up to the
present day. (I wrote about that here
.)

I could and did fill a significant portion of a book
, to say nothing of
countless columns and newsletters, with examples of the Times failing to
call out Republican lies and deliberate disinformation, as well as its
insistence on equating the tiniest of Democratic evasions and
dissimulations with purposeful (and often obvious) Republican
falsehoods. The most prominent example, of course, was the paper's
disgraceful coverage of the 2016 election. It paid more attention to
arcane questions of Hillary Clinton's email storage systems than
pretty much every other issue combined, while her opponent's far more
extensive record of scandal, sexual predation, racism, hucksterism, and
anti-democracy extremism went comparatively unnoticed. I wrote about it
early in the campaign at length in this article
.

Recall that when James Comey published his baldly unethical pre-election
letter to congressional leaders indicating that the FBI was reviewing
additional "emails that appear to be pertinent to the
investigation," Baquet decided to run three hyperventilating stories
above the fold on it, and two more the next day. This would turn out to
be a fantastic mistake in news judgment-the ultimate "much ado about
nothing" story-but undoubtedly played an extremely significant role
in Trump's victory.

When Trump won, Baquet drew exactly the wrong lesson. He announced that
the Times had blown it by not paying sufficient attention to Trump
voters, and so sent his reporters parachuting into Appalachia to produce
maudlin coverage of Trump supporters who still support Trump. He turned
over the most valuable real estate in journalism to lying, ignorant,
racist, and otherwise malevolent reactionaries, and was still doing it a
month before the 2020 election
!
Trump, naturally, weaponized Baquet's condescending outreach to
insist-falsely, per usual-that the Times had admitted lying about
him.

The Times did occasionally call Trump's lies "lies," but more
often than not, its news pages refused to take any position on truth
versus falsehood, treating the attempted destruction of our democracy as
a kind of theater. (I wrote about that here
.)
This was especially evident during Trump's first impeachment, but you
can find it almost everywhere in the Times political coverage.

Baquet was remarkably unreflective about these decisions in his exit
interview with The New Yorker
.
"I know this is going to get everybody riled up again, but I don't
have regrets about the Hillary Clinton e-mail stories. It was a running
news story. It was a serious F.B.I. investigation. The stories were
accurate," he said. He seems to believe that the Times is a kind of
journalistic island, answerable only to its traditions, rather than the
crucial role it plays in the maintenance of American democracy.

The Times' own coverage

of Baquet's retirement and Joseph Kahn's ascension to the top job
notes, "The Times is grappling with shifting views about the role of
independent journalism in a society divided by harsh debates over
political ideology and cultural identity. Mr. Kahn said securing the
public's trust 'in a time of polarization and partisanship' was
among his top priorities." Most of the coverage of the handoff has
indicated that there is likely to be no rethinking of Baquet's path in
this regard.

Those of us looking for even a hint of the willingness to take a more
aggressive tack toward the Republican assault on both truth and American
democracy may try to take heart in learning (from the Times itself
)
that in college, when Kahn was editor of The Crimson, "Harvard's
president, Derek Bok, got so fed up with Mr. Kahn's dogged reporting
that he barred university officials from speaking to The Crimson. Years
later, Mr. Kahn relished the memory, an early experience of
journalism's capturing the attention of the powerful. 'That felt
addictive,' he said."

At the Times, he made sure that the paper did not buckle to the
regime's threats, as for instance Bloomberg did (and the Times
reported on
).
And when China retaliated and blocked online access

to the Times, the paper never caved; a decade later, its sites remain
inaccessible there. As the Times notes, "Mr. Sulzberger said in an
interview that the episode was an illustration of Mr. Kahn's
'bedrock conviction and principle.'"

The paper's own profile quoted Kahn saying, "I would not have
thought that being a foreign correspondent in China would be good
preparation to be executive editor of The New York Times in 2022." In
fact, the contemporary Republican Party poses a far greater threat to
this country than anything anybody in China does. But holding one's
breath for The New York Times top brass to recognize this fact and take
the risks to its "brand" necessary to act accordingly would be a bad
bet indeed. "Bothsidesism" is its heroin, and the Times is an addict
that cannot even admit it has a problem. But as with addicts'
families-and as someone who has never lived a day in his life without
a Times subscription (if you include my parents')-I can say with
certainty that America's remaining democrats of all parties and no
parties will be the ones to suffer should the Times fail to shake its
habit.

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Odds and Ends

Repeat after Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow: "We will not let
hate win
."

Keith Danish of the New York Labor History Association wrote to inform
me that I was incorrect in my belief that Leon Trotsky lived on St.
Marks Place during his time in New York City in 1917. Actually, he lived
in the Bronx and worked on St. Marks Place in the offices of Novy Mir
with, as it happens, Nikolai Bukharin.

The wonderful actor Robert Morse has died. Here he is singing "I
Believe in You " from the
1967 film version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,
and here he is again, singing "The Best Things in Life Are Free
" during
his final appearance on Mad Men 47 years later.

Finally, just in time for Jazz Appreciation Month, devotees of classic
jazz can now enjoy highlights from the jazz archives of The Ed Sullivan
Show
.
Available performances so far include:
* Sarah Vaughan, "Poor Butterfly "

* Count Basie and His Orchestra, "How High the Moon
"

* Count Basie and His Orchestra, "Back to the Apple
"

* Peggy Lee and Steve Lawrence, "Manhattan
"

* Peggy Lee, "I Love Being Here With You/Yes Indeed
"

* Billy Eckstine, "If I Can Help Somebody
"

* Ella Fitzgerald, "Hotta Chocolatta/Oh, Lady Be Good
"

* Peggy Lee, "Fly Me to the Moon "

* Count Basie and His Orchestra, "One O'Clock Jump
"

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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