Altercation: 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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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:

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