What Is Going On at the Gray Lady?
The New York Times tries to find its equilibrium.
Last month Politico’s Eli Stokols wrote a long, fascinating story about the petty feud between the New York Times and the White House. That is not me misinterpreting the story — it’s literally the title of the piece. Stokols detailed the grievances that each side feels towards the other:
According to interviews with two dozen people on both sides who were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject, the relationship between the Democratic president and the country’s newspaper of record — for years the epitome of a liberal press in the eyes of conservatives — remains remarkably tense, beset by misunderstandings, grudges and a general lack of trust. Complaints that were long kept private are even spilling into public view, with campaign aides in Wilmington going further than their colleagues in the White House and routinely blasting the paper’s coverage in emails, posts on social media and memos.
Although the president’s communications teams bristle at coverage from dozens of outlets, the frustration, and obsession, with the Times is unique, reflecting the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience — and a deep desire for its affirmation of their work. On the other side, the newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright.
The president’s press flacks might bemoan what they see as the entitlement of Times staffers, but they themselves put the newspaper on the highest of pedestals given its history, stature and unparalleled reach. And yet, they see the Times falling short in a make-or-break moment for American democracy, stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of impartial neutrality, often blurring the asymmetries between former President Donald Trump and Biden when it comes to their perceived flaws and vastly different commitments to democratic principles.
Reading through the whole story, my takeaway about this hot media mess was that everyone had way too high an opinion of themselves. I am pretty damn concerned about Trump’s naked desire for an authoritarian presidency, but I also think it’s delusional for Biden staffers to expect the Times to focus exclusively on Trump’s threat to democracy.
For one thing the Times’ Washington staff makes a valid point when they told Stokols that, “writing about Trump with the stronger language Biden aides seem to want would likely do more to affect the newspaper’s brand, and the public’s trust in it, than Trump’s.”
For another thing, Biden’s reluctance to speak with national print and broadcast media cannot be dismissed so casually by his staff. According to one recent count, Biden has given barely more than a third as many interviews in his first term as Trump did during his first term. If the point of Biden’s presidency is to return American politics back to pre-Trump norms, the current White House is failing badly in this area.
That said, the Times also seemed weirdly obsessed with ensuring a sit-down interview. As Stokols writes:
In Sulzberger’s view, according to two people familiar with his private comments on the subject, only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency. Beyond that, he has voiced concerns that Biden doing so few expansive interviews with experienced reporters could set a dangerous precedent for future administrations, according to a third person familiar with the publisher’s thinking. Sulzberger himself was part of a group from the Times that sat down with Trump, who gave the paper several interviews despite his rantings about its coverage. If Trump could do it, Sulzberger believes, so can Biden.
“All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,” one Times journalist said. “It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.”
Things got even weirder when, in response to the Politico story, the Times fired a fusillade of responses. On social media, myriad Times reporters pushed back on the notion that Sulzberger was behind the stories about Biden’s age. The NYT also issued a press release saying, among other things, that, “For anyone who understands the role of the free press in a democracy, it should be troubling that President Biden has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.” That made it pretty clear Stokols was right about where the Times was coming from on this.
To be clear, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World agrees that Biden should be doing far more interviews. But if the Times is going to be issuing statements like this about Biden, there is some justification for his staff to complain that they seem less interested in the threat that Trump poses as well.
Things got even weirder over the weekend, however, when Semafor’s Ben Smith interviewed Joseph Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen zeroed in one particular segment of the Smith interview:
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?
Lots of folks have harped on the logic pretzel contained in Kahn’s answer. If the New York Times feels like it should be following public opinion on these topics rather than leading it, is it appropriate for Smith to assert at the outset that, “the Times sets the tone for American journalism, and Kahn sets the tone for the Times. So it’s worth listening closely to his view on this topic”? All newspapers need to write on issues that are top of mind for the public — but if the Times views itself as the epicenter of American journalism, isn’t it the case that what they write also prime Americans about what issues should be at the front of the queue?
Kahn is not completely wrong. Immigration is a leading issue for voters.1 The economy is always important. And it is far from clear whether more sympathetic New York Times reporting on other issues would move the needle for Biden.2
Still, democracy is one of those “necessary conditions” for a free press, so it is worth asking just how much the Times is focusing on what Trump would do if elected president again. Kahn acknowledges in the interview that, “there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that [Trump] will win that election in a popular vote.” A similar calculation based on the polling caused the Times to disproportionately focus on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 general election campaign.
If Trump is leading now, shouldn’t the Gray Lady be taking a harder look at Trump’s proposed policies and personnel choices? If the Times really wants to talk about inflation, shouldn’t its business and political reporters provide more in-depth reporting about how Trump’s proposed policies — tax cuts, protectionist barriers, forced expulsion of migrants, eroding the independence of the Fed — would cause a massive spike in inflation?3
The rest of the interview, however, is far more revealing about where Joe Kahn thinks the Times should be positioned in the current political landscape. Here are some excerpts:
Joe: Don’t you feel like there was a generation of students who came out of school saying you should only work at places that align completely with your values?
Ben: Don’t you think we all sort of said that to them?
Joe: I don’t think we said it explicitly. I think there was a period [where] we implied it. And I think that the early days of Trump in particular, were, “join us for the mission.”
Ben: Was it a mistake to say that — even to think it?
Joe: I think it went too far. It was overly simplistic. And I think the big push that you’re seeing us make and reestablish our norms and emphasize independent journalism and build a more resilient culture comes out of some of the excesses of that period….
I do think that there was a period of peak cultural angst at this organization, with the combination of the intensity of the Trump era, COVID, and then George Floyd. The summer of 2020 was a crazy period where the world felt threatened, people’s individual safety was threatened, we had a murder of an innocent Black man by police suffocation. And we have the tail end of the most divisive presidency that anyone alive today has experienced. And those things just frayed nerves everywhere.
Ben: Do you think you made mistakes, or just that it was very hard to navigate that moment?
Joe: I think it was very hard to navigate that moment. Everybody’s remote. We’re dealing with this political upheaval. We still did good journalism through that moment. But I think we’ve looked back at that and learned. Unlike James Bennet, who sees that as emblematic of what the Times and maybe the news media in general has become, I think it was a particular moment. I think it was an extreme moment. I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that.
Let’s stipulate that the pandemic caused a lot of folks to lose their bearings for a longer spell than anyone would care to admit. What is striking about that section is Kahn’s conviction that the Times’ problem was a partisan lean in its reporting that required a course correction.
Kahn’s interview suggests a lack of self-confidence the Times’ leadership possesses about where it stands in the media firmament.4 The Gray Lady either acts entitled or desperate to locate the median voter and anchor its reporting at that spot. What it lacks is something that Politico’s Jack Shafer wrote about recently: swagger.
The psychological approach journalists bring to their jobs has shifted. At one time, big city newspaper editors typified by the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee strode their properties like colossuses, barking orders and winning deference from all corners. Today’s newspaper editor comes clothed in the drab and accommodating aura of a bureaucrat, often indistinguishable from the publishers for whom they work. These top editors, who once ruled their staffs with tyrannical confidence, now flinch and cringe at the prospect of newsroom uprisings like the ones we’ve seen at NBC News, the New York Times, CNN and elsewhere. You could call these uprisings markers of swagger, but you’d be wrong. True swagger is found in works of journalism, not protests over hirings or the publication of a controversial piece.
Treading softly so as not to rile anybody, these editors impose that style on their journalists, many of whom do their work in a defensive crouch instead of the traditional offensive stance. Often throttled by their top editors, today’s journalists also find themselves fighting a second front against politicians who now direct their campaigns at reporters as much as they do their opponents….
“It’s harder to be confident, and exude that confidence in newsrooms — given the state of our industry. But leaders should find their inner swagger,” [Kevin] Merida says. “I don’t like to generalize, as every newsroom is different. But cautiousness, lack of ambition, being too quick to abandon experiments or being afraid to try them, all are signifiers. To quote the immortal, A Tribe Called Quest: ‘Scared money don’t make none.’”
If there is any newspaper that should not be scared about money, it’s the New York Times. And yet, based on their recent behavior, they do seem to be following rather than leading the pack in their political coverage. That’s a shame for them — and for the country.
Though I really wish Kahn would look just a little more closely at the polling on this.
Indeed, on foreign policy Kahn acknowledges, “I believe even an alien would see Biden as much more hands-on in [foreign policy]. You may not like the results. I think the general public actually believes that he’s responsible for these wars, which is ridiculous, based on the facts that we’ve reported.” In other words, Kahn thinks the foreign policy coverage of Biden has been favorable, and yet allows that this favorability is not reflected in public opinion polling.
To be fair, Paul Krugman has written about this, but he’s not on the news side of the Times.
Hopefully, Kahn follows through on this observation: “The amount of time and energy that we put on the nuances of the story, the nut graf, compared to the amount that spent at the end of that process on the headline is still probably disproportionate. Some huge number of people only interact with the headline.” He’s right!! The Times could avoid a lot of grief by devoting more time and care in crafting its headlines and social media.
Some good thoughts, most of which I applaud. I do disagree with this part, though:
>>> For one thing, as Stokols writes, the Times’ Washington staff makes a valid point when they argue that, “writing about Trump with the stronger language Biden aides seem to want would likely do more to affect the newspaper’s brand, and the public’s trust in it, than Trump’s.”
I believe that many of us who are upset at the WaPo (and NYT) are not looking for "stronger language," necessarily. Or at least that's not our primary concern. What we want is some kind of balance; e.g., NOT two weeks of wall-to-wall coverage over Robert Hur's hatchet job; NOT making every tiny Biden stutter front page news, while relegating coverage of Trump's obviously fascist speeches to page A16. Also, more coverage of Trump's increasing mental decline. Also, more prominent coverage of Biden Administration accomplishments, while resisting the never-ending temptation to write yet another one of those "here's why the good news is actually bad news for Biden." And so on.
Finally, it is seriously hard to imagine how making coverage of Trump more prominent and in-depth is going to hurt the WaPo. The people who don't trust the WaPo have long since made up their minds about that. Maybe there are a few low-info/swing voters who'd be put off, but I have to think that for every one of those, there's going to be another who says, "Wow. I didn't realize things were this bad with Trump. Good thing the WaPo reported it."
I think this is completely consistent with the NYT's ethos over decades, maybe all the way back to the mid-1970s. More than anything else, the NYT publishers and editors want to be close to power. They want to be trusted by the political elite and to provide advice to the wealthy (about investments, about where to live, about the high culture worth consuming). This produces shifts that aren't quite about following partisan ideological lines but are about trying to demonstrate that they can be trusted to provide sage advice to the people in charge. Not quite "on the team"--that's too much like propaganda--but sort of the "we can be a useful advisor to the king, whomever the king might be".
So Keller shifted over hard to supporting the Iraq War, for example, and more or less told his staff that they wouldn't be reporting anything hostile to the war (until later, when it became a more fashionable position among the political class). A.M. Rosenthal was determined to show the Reagan Administration that the NYT were reliable anti-Communists and shut down Ray Bonner's reporting from El Salvador to demonstrate that point.
They tried really hard to show Trump that they could be trusted in the same way--that they'd criticize him, sure, but if he gave them access, they'd stay inside the same space of respectful-courtier. He mostly refused except for talking to Maggie Haberman, because he can't resist personal coverage, no matter how it makes him look. You can feel how painful the top editors and publisher found their exclusion from power, and I think that's why they're hassling Biden--they assumed he'd let them back in and he mostly hasn't. But they're also trying to show distance from Biden as a way of accommodating Trump and Trumpism in case it wins out in November--they're once again offering to be courtiers, to be "inside the room".
The NYT has no especially principled interest in democracy as such, and has never been particularly friendly to the ideal of a wide-open democratic public sphere--it cultivates a view of itself as the pinnacle of American journalism, as an elite without peers, as the "paper of record", which is part of why NYT reporters are often such assholes on social media whenever they're criticized--they really think of themselves as above it all, and most criticism as a version of tugging on Superman's cape. The affirmation of their top-dog status is that the people in power can't do without them, and they work very hard to try and make sure that's so. If they're spurned, they do their best to mete out punishment for it.