Has AG Sulzberger turned it into the Orange Lady?
“WTF Is Happening To The NY Times?” Digby wrote just days ago. A chorus of critics believe the Gray Lady has lost its way, and they’ve brought receipts. The Times giving space this week to National Review‘s editor Rich Lowry, for example, to suggest that on character Donald Trump has a better case to make for his election led one FKA Twitter user to suggest, “The Onion writers are now running the @nytimes.” The New York Time Pitchbot account added, “I think we may be nearing the end of civilization.”
Dan Froomkin caustically distilled a March speech publisher A.G. Sulzberger gave at Oxford University explaining Sulzberger’s editorial stance thusly:
One: You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist.
And two: You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.
The Times headline writers have been an issue for years, as journalist Jennifer Schulze again noted on Tuesday:
In a follow-up comment, Schulze adds, “It’s actually a very interesting piece about the state of the race -especially the remarkable campaign Harris has run. But the times has to do do it’s ‘yes, but’ headlines when it’s about a Democrat. Good grief.”
But it’s not just the headlines at issue. It’s the paper’s decisions about what constitutes a newsworthy story and what does not. James Fallows illustrated Wednesday with two Times front pages eight years apart. The Times that ran “but her emails” stories about Hillary Clinton for months in 2016 placed news of Trump’s superseding indictment by a fifth grand jury on Tuesday not just below the fold, but on Page A11.
“And, if you were wondering,” Fallows continued, “the inside-page article about Trump’s visit to Arlington Cemetery is framed as a “dueling attacks” story and does not mention the photo-op controversy.”
If trolling liberal readers is the way to Sulzberger’s heart, Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy is bucking for Employee of the Month with pieces noted by both NYU’s Ruth Ben Ghiat and Fallows.
Bruce Bartlett posted a thread to FKA Twitter on Wednesday on how the Times’ choice of what constitutes news is its own kind of bias, shown, as Fallows observed, in its coverage of Hillary Clinton in 2016:
The real power of the Times on other media is establishing priorities–what is news and what isn’t. The Times clearly has the power to make nothingburgers, such as Hillary’s emails, into those that all media must cover. It can also bury stories, as it has often done for Trump.
Its comprehensiveness is its defense. If one asks why a certain story wasn’t covered, it can always find an article or op-ed where is was covered–once and only once, and henceforth buried. Implicitly, the Times acts as if every article it’s ever published was read by everyone.
The Times’ constant repetition of certain stories or lack of such coverage on others constitutes bias. But it’s hard to find bias in any individual story. It’s the sheer repetition of stories that should have been dropped that constitutes the bias.
There is a certain Times’ methodology that also constitutes de facto bias. That is the widely criticized policy of implying that both sides are equally guilty of some action or intellectual wrongdoing.
Quite often, one side’s minor misdemeanor is equated with the other side’s first-degree murder, as if all lawbreaking is equally wrong. The law itself doesn’t say so and the Times shouldn’t either. Unfortunately, the bothsidesism disease has spread throughout the media.
Finally, read John Harwood’s assessment on how the media is failing to meet the moment and a candidate like Trump with an agenda like Project 2025. The Times’ fetish for prioritizing neutrality over preservation of the culture that sustains it makes preferencing balance a suicide pact:
Experts warn his brazen dishonesty exceeds that of any of his predecessors. And the threat he and his allies pose to the norms, freedoms, and institutions of the world’s most powerful nation lends extraordinary gravity to the collective decisions of the news business.
Is the paramount responsibility of U.S. journalists to help protect their country’s 2½-century-old democratic experiment, which not coincidentally also protects the existence of their craft? That requires braving the ire and denunciations of Republicans long conditioned to scream bias.
The Times is not up to it. Harwood cites political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein who believe “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”
The nation’s leading newspaper rejected the democracy-above-all-else approach out of hand. In an interview with the digital outlet Semafor, New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn suggested that such a framework would compromise the very norms its advocates aim to preserve.
“To say that the threats [to] democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda,” Kahn said.
“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have,” he added. “At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [in opinion polls], and the economy and inflation is the second.”
Kahn later clarified his comments, promising more coverage of issues around democracy and the expected thrust of a new Trump presidency. But the controversy generated by his remarks laid bare the dilemma American news executives face.
But Kahn’s response simply raises more questions. Harwood asks why news executives should “organize their coverage based on opinion surveys.” Another question “is whether some of their coverage has misshapen public opinion itself,” reinforcing Bartlett’s point above. The snake eats its own tail.
Jay Rosen suggested months ago that the news’ framing should emphasize “not the odds, but the stakes” of the 2024 election. The Times has yet to take up his challenge and revels in criticism that it hasn’t.
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