May 7, 2024
HEAD IN THE SAND
Top New York Times Editor
Offers Stunning Defense of Coverage of Trump
Why asking our media to get it right
on Trump’s threat to democracy is not remotely the same as being in the tank
for Biden
DAVID DEE
DELGADO/POOL/GETTY IMAGES
Former
President Donald Trump in New York City on May 7
Let’s
state this right at the outset: The New York Times has
produced a remarkable run of indispensable journalism about Donald Trump’s
authoritarian designs for a second term. The paper has exposed Trump’s schemes
to unleash the Justice Department on
political enemies, to gut the bureaucracy and stock it with
loyalists, to functionally wreck our
intelligence agencies by turning them into armies of back-alley political
warfare, to unleash a draconian and deeply
sadistic crackdown on immigrants, to hobble international institutions and
empower the world’s autocrats and dictators, and much more.
These
pieces are executed with great professionalism and revelatory power. Anyone who
finds the considerable amount of time it takes to consume this journalism will
come away deeply informed about—and profoundly rattled by—the specter of
authoritarian rule that haunts our country, should Trump win.
Can
all this be true even as it’s also true that the Times often
makes editorial decisions that risk obscuring all of this for ordinary readers?
Yes, both can be true. And it is mystifying that the executive editor of
the Times appears unwilling to take this notion seriously.
Joe
Kahn recently sat for an interview with Semafor’s Ben Smith about
criticism of the paper. Smith cited a (somewhat misrepresented)
claim from Democratic strategist Dan Pfeiffer that the Times doesn’t
see its job as “saving democracy,” and asked:
Why don’t you see your jobs as: “We’ve
got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?
The
problem here is obvious: This question reduces criticism of the Times to
a blanket demand for consciously hostile treatment of Trump—and consciously
favorable treatment of President Biden.
Unsurprisingly,
Kahn easily batted this away, because he correctly understood the question in
exactly those terms:
One of the absolute necessities of
democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete
for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew
your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very
good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing
voters.
Democracy,
said Kahn, requires the media to inform people about their electoral choices,
not to “prevent” people from voting for Trump or to become like “Xinhua News
Agency or Pravda”:
To say that the threats of democracy
are so great that the media is going to abandon its 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.… It is true
that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and
candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.
Kahn’s
answer is stunning in its simplistic rendering of the dilemma raised by Trump’s
hostility to democracy and its resolute lack of awareness of what many liberal
critics have actually argued about the Times, the media, and
the democracy question.
True,
some loud social media voices just want skewed coverage. But the more
sophisticated liberal critique, as I understand it, is something else entirely.
It’s that the unique danger Trump poses to democracy requires a serious
reevaluation of the conventions of political reporting at big news
organizations—the daily editorial choices that subtly shape how readers receive
information and ideas—and the ways they unmistakably obscure the true nature of
that threat.
In
Kahn’s formulation, the media is under no obligation to defend democracy
frontally and explicitly. Brian Beutler exposes the deep problems with this
notion, pointing out that democracy is foundational to a free press
and that journalists should actively inform voters that democracy itself is on
the ballot, because if they unwittingly choose to break it, that won’t be
easily undone.
I’d
like to try another approach. Kahn believes the press’s proper role in a
liberal democracy is to enlighten voting citizens on the true electoral choices
they face. He just thinks the Times is doing a fine job at it
already, and he reacts defensively to suggestions otherwise.
So
how might we get someone like Kahn to reconsider that proposition? One way
might be to ask whether the Times is truly meeting the
standard Kahn himself sets for it.
The
threshold question should be framed not in Smith’s terms but as follows: Does
Kahn believe that at the most basic level, the choice voters face in this
election is that Trump poses a fundamental threat to the system itself, and
Biden just does not?
My
suspicion is that many Times editors more or less accept
something like that formulation. Elite journalists who have been around D.C. a
long time, such as Susan Glasser, are getting more vocal
with such declarations. Kahn seems to recognize the broad outlines of this
possibility.
So
the next question becomes: Does the casual reader regularly come away from
most Times coverage grasping that core difference between
Trump and Biden, that one fundamentally threatens the system and the other
doesn’t?
Admittedly,
it’s not easy to definitively answer that. What we can do is isolate media
conventions and editorial choices that plainly do obscure that contrast, not
just at the Times but everywhere in the media, and ask for
hard thinking about them. Here’s a partial rundown:
The
two-different-realities fallacy. A recent Times news
piece reported that both Democratic and GOP voters perceive the
other side as an existential threat, concluding that “just what is threatening
democracy depends on who you talk to.”
The
piece largely treated GOP voters’ concerns about threats to democracy that are
unfounded (phantom voter fraud) as equivalent to Democratic anger over
Trump’s insurrection and election-denying Republicans who are helping him get
away with it. The overall effect was a who’s-to-say-who’s-right shrug.
This
is emphatically not a demand for ignoring Trump voters’
concerns. Cover them, of course, but if journalists know those concerns to be
largely baseless and know Democratic concerns are mostly grounded in things
that happened—as in this case—the question is: Will the casual reader also come
away grasping this? The two-different-realities device, which is ubiquitous,
structurally works against that goal.
The
systemic-threat problem. A lot of
media coverage obscures the purely systemic threat Trump poses. To take just
one example, Trump is trying to delay his trials so he can cancel ongoing
prosecutions of himself if he wins. Times pieces sometimes describe this
fact in oddly neutral tones, without asking whether it poses a unique threat to
the system’s validity by attempting to place Trump above the law entirely.
The
casual reader could easily infer that Trump’s gambit is tantamount to just
another conventional legal strategy, and not see anything amiss with it.
The Times could include more quotes explaining how abnormal
this is, isolate Trump’s real aim in headlines far more often, and do more
stand-alone pieces explaining why this would dramatically undermine the rule of
law itself.
The
proportionality pitfall. When
critics argued that coverage of Biden’s age, as referenced in special counsel
Robert Hur’s report, was over the top, Times publisher A.G.
Sulzberger dismissed this as a
demand that the media engage in “downplaying” the age issue to help Biden, in
refrains similar to Kahn’s. This is absurdly evasive. The question is not
whether Biden’s age should be covered—of course it should—but whether attention
to it is disproportional. And it plainly is disproportional, all across the media.
But
here’s the thing: Even if Sulzberger and Kahn disagree with me on that, it’s
time for figures like them to stop employing rhetorical dodges that reductively
treat such criticism as nothing more than special pleading. Surely there
is some point at which they’d concede coverage crosses into
disproportionality. The dispute is over where that line lies. Editors make
decisions about how much importance to ascribe to things all the time. These
are editorial choices. Defend them frontally, and own them.
It’s
no accident that many in the profession have never seriously accepted that “But
Her Emails” coverage was over the top, which it plainly was,
given what we know now. This
reflects a broader evasion about the proportionality issue. Enough games around
this. Volume and placement matter.
The
fodder-for-attacks news hook. The
Hur report unleashed a deluge of media analysis pieces declaring
that it would provide Trump and Republicans fodder to attack Biden, and looked
at whether that will be effective. There is obviously a place for probing the
efficacy of political strategies. But this easily veers into overkill.
The
danger is that one side’s use of something to wage an attack—the seizing on it
as “fodder”—itself becomes the hook for covering those attacks and the broader
issue around them, often in the form of stand-alone pieces about the attacks
themselves. If the attacks carry more weight in determining the scope of
coverage than editors’ judgment of the genuine newsworthiness of the underlying
fact itself—like what Hur said about Biden’s age—that seems self-evidently
problematic.
This
and the proportionality pitfall raise a broader point: News organizations like
the Times have great power to send a message that people
should be generally alarmed by something, simply by covering it relentlessly.
Do casual readers come away thinking that Biden’s age is as alarming a problem
as Trump’s authoritarian intentions are? I don’t know the precise answer to
that question. But would Kahn really deny that it’s a reasonable one for
journalists to ask themselves?
The
euphemism temptation. There are too many of these to
count: The description of
right-wing propagandists and ratfuckers as “provocateurs”; the claim that “Congress”
did something, when the culprit is Republicans; the echoing of GOP “election
integrity” talking points in headlines, and so forth.
One
cannot answer these objections by citing the great coverage mentioned above
that does detail Trump’s authoritarian designs. That’s because the crucial
point here is that other day-to-day editorial choices work at
cross-purposes against that revelatory work.
It
cannot be right that raising these concerns is tantamount to demanding
“propaganda” for one side, as Kahn puts it. Rather, they are demands that
coverage reflect what reporters and editors know to be true, and reflect the
importance that they themselves ascribe to it, something they already do about
all kinds of matters. If Kahn means what he says about the media’s proper role
in informing citizens, reevaluating these conventions regularly would be more
faithful—not less—to his own declared mission.
It’s
hard to know how to improve on these problems. But the truth is, none of us has
the answer to them. At bottom, the dilemma is this: When one of the candidates
is running on an express vow to wreck the political and legal systems
themselves, do typical conventions of political reporting—ones geared around
presenting both sides as equivalently conventional political actors fighting on
an even civic playing field—really get the job done in communicating what that
means?
Would
Kahn really assert that the Times—or anyone else—has that all
figured out? Would he really declare that they’ve got that problem aced?
Greg
Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic.
