Pedro Pardo/Pool via AP
China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng, right, speaks during a meeting with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, July 8, 2023.
Sometimes the news and “interpretative” coverage of the supposedly liberal New York Times is astonishingly shabby and friendly to the corporate view. Recent exhibits A, B, and C are the Times treatment of the fraught question of U.S. limits on sensitive exports to China; the right-wing assault on the heroic Lina Khan; and the issue of how to think about the national debt. On China, the Times ran an explainer piece largely taking the corporate view, with a few brief quotes from China hawks for the sake of credibility. The July 13 piece, by Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson, was headlined “Looming U.S. Investment Restrictions on China Threaten Diplomatic Outreach.” The subhead helpfully explains: “Any such restrictions are expected to anger Beijing and will be the first test of the new channels of communication that the world’s two largest economies are trying to restore.”
In fact, strategic export controls have been Biden policy since last October. As the details are finalized, there is a great deal of infighting as corporate players and their allies in government work to make them as weak as possible. The Times piece first quotes the concerns of someone named Mark Sobel, described as “a former longtime Treasury Department official who is now the U.S. chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum.” It doesn’t mention that the private organization, despite the official-sounding title, is almost entirely corporate.
The piece goes on to quote one critic after another about the risks of the controls, without saying much about the Chinese practices that make the controls necessary. Just to gild the lily, the forthcoming Times Sunday magazine features a piece by Alex Palmer with the title “‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China: The Biden administration thinks it can preserve America’s technological primacy by cutting China off from advanced computer chips. Could the plan backfire?”
Here’s an even worse one. FTC Chair Lina Khan has been under repeated assault by corporations and their Republican allies for the sin of resurrecting long-dormant antitrust enforcement, and with great energy and creativity. On the eve of a hearing called by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan to flay Khan, the Times ran a “news” piece by Cecilia Kang largely siding with Khan’s critics.
Kang began by citing two recent court decisions blocking FTC efforts, and went on:
The defeats raise questions about Ms. Khan’s ability to carry out her ambitious goal of reversing decades of weak antitrust enforcement, as political pressure mounts and patience wanes for the 34-year-old academic, who has ruffled the feathers of corporate America. Ms. Khan’s critics are more emboldened and are speaking out more loudly to poke holes in her take-it-to-the-courts strategy, saying the losses are not even partial wins—they’re just losses.
“I completely disagree with this approach,” Anthony Sabino, a professor of business and law at St. John’s University, said of Ms. Khan’s methods. “She’s trying to change a century’s worth of antitrust law overnight, and that’s not necessarily wise.”
The piece neglected to mention the right-wing politicization of the courts or Khan’s many successes. As our colleague David Dayen writes, the hearing backfired on Jordan and was a triumph for Khan, who had the support of many committee Republicans concerned about the impact of extreme corporate concentration on independent businesses and consumers.
Here’s one more from the supposedly liberal Times editorial page. The editorial, titled “America Is Living on Borrowed Money,” concludes, with splendid evenhandedness:
Both parties will have to compromise: Republicans must accept the necessity of collecting what the government is owed and of imposing taxes on the wealthy. Democrats must recognize that changes to Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of expected federal spending growth, should be on the table. Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable.
This of course falls into the trap of bothsidesism. Today’s Republicans are a lunatic-fringe party. The Democrats are a normal, moderately center-left party. Should they just split the difference?
Medicare’s shortfall is the result of deep structural flaws in the larger health system. If wages, the basis for the payroll tax shortfall, had kept up with productivity growth, there would be a much more manageable Social Security deficit that could be plugged by taxes on the rich. Instead of looking at these deeper factors, the Times’ fiscally conservative homily on debt sounds like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The New York Times has been exemplary in its coverage of race. But as Hillary Clinton learned in 2016, going left on identity and right on political economy is not a great recipe. Same for our paper of record.
