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When the New York Times lost its way: America’s media should do more to equip readers to think for themselves

www.economist.com

When the New York Times lost its way

This was a really interesting read about the growing polarisation in media and the US.

Like me, Baquet seemed taken aback by the criticism that Times readers shouldn’t hear what Cotton had to say. Cotton had a lot of influence with the White House, Baquet noted, and he could well be making his argument directly to the president, Donald Trump. Readers should know about it. Cotton was also a possible future contender for the White House himself, Baquet added. And, besides, Cotton was far from alone: lots of Americans agreed with him—most of them, according to some polls. “Are we truly so precious?” Baquet asked again, with a note of wonder and frustration.

The answer, it turned out, was yes. Less than three days later, on Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation. I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.

Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

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When the New York Times lost its way
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When the New York Times lost its way
19 comments

  • How could you walk up SO close to the point and then manage to get 1,000% backwards

    There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

    Dude print it on a fuckin flyer that gets stapled to the shirt of every NYT reporter and editor so they can always pick it up and read again and it’s never out of sight. Have someone stop them when they walk in the building, and then read it to them like a Miranda warning, and ask for a verbal yes or no whether they have understood, before anything can continue. Fuckin do it every day. I cannot stress enough how well this gets to the heart of the point of what is wrong with US journalism and the Times in particular.

    And then:

    The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.

    Where was this careful avoidance of favoring one side or another as to Biden’s age and its importance in the campaign

    Or in whether Israel is justified in the war

    Or whether criticism of them is anti Semitic

    The exact problem with the Times is that they are favoring one side of the national debate, and specifically somehow unerringly the wrong side. I actually agree that they should either avoid taking sides, or, even better, favour the side that is backed up by objective reality. But neither of those is what they are doing.

    As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change.

    What old standards are those, AG

    I remember the paper favouring killing Palestinians for as long as I remember. I remember it telling my parents what a good idea the Iraq War was and them believing it. I don’t remember it ever having it lost its way into some postmodernist fog where it was careful to say that maybe Palestine has a point

    SO WHAT OLD STANDARDS ARE YOU MEANING

    WHAT YEAR DO YOU MEAN, AND WHAT STORIES

    Because I kind of have a feeling I know exactly, precisely, what version of truth AG is talking about how very important it is for the paper to enforce, and publish exclusively, not committing the disservice that it would be for them to waver from that version of the truth.

    Let me say it again:

    There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

    • But... you keep quoting AG and the NYT as examples of why the article is wrong, AG is clearly one of those at fault in the article and the entire article is making the same points as you are? They're not praising the NYT.

      • AG is clearly one of those at fault in the article, but I’m not convinced that that is the voice the author is coming at it from.

        It’s so long that I’m not going to read it all in depth. Maybe that means I am going to miss something but I just now made a pretty lengthy concerted effort to skim and try to see if your reading makes sense, and I’m still having trouble. So like, check this out:

        The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise. It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work. After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.

        Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be. The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority.

        The whole framing of the article is that the “untruth” AG needs to be setting straight is overly sensitive political correctness from progressives, and analyzing everything he’s doing through that lens. Whether we have to be neutral and present progressives and “conservatives” on the same footing, or whether we should take a side and say the progressives are wrong. Right? Have I read that part right in your opinion?

        I think once you’ve framed AG’s dilemma in those terms, you already fucked up. That is not AG’s dilemma. His dilemma is that part of the US political spectrum is explicitly fascist now, and his decision as far as I can tell is that we need to go further than the Times’s editorial voice being on the side of the neoliberals as it always was, and now needs to be the fascists or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, whether or not that’s the reality.

        Here’s an extremely instructive example:

        Cotton had tweeted that Trump should call out troops to stop the “anarchy, rioting and looting” if “local law enforcement is overwhelmed”, and Twitter had threatened to censor his account. Jim Dao, the op-ed editor, was more interested in the substance of the tweet and, via Rubenstein, asked Cotton to write an op-ed about that.

        That was the right thing to do. Trump was starting to call for the use of troops, and on May 31st the mayor of Washington, DC, had requested that the National Guard be deployed in her city. After police gassed protesters before Trump posed for a photo in Lafayette Square on June 1st, the editorial board, which I led, weighed in against that use of force and Trump’s “incendiary behaviour”, and the op-ed team had pieces planned for June 3rd arguing he did not have a sound basis to call out federal forces and would be wrong to do so. In keeping with the basic practice of the op-ed page, which was created to present points of view at odds with Times editorials, Dao owed readers the counter-argument. They also needed to know someone so influential with the president was making this argument, and how he was making it.

        The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.

        This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s. Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”. That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest.

        Right? I still won’t say I’m 100% sure on 100% of the thesis of the article, but is that not Bennet arguing that AG needs to enforce better the pro-fascist standard of truth?

  • I very strongly disagree with almost every word in this article. The work of journalism is to hold power to account, not to publish the dangerous ideas of the already-powerful. Any so-called journalist who thinks that is their job ought to be fired. The NYT didn't lose its way when it hesitated to publish a call to crush BLM protestors with the army, but when it decided to be the mouthpiece of the American elite, as it has been for most of its history. Remember when it collaborated with the Bush administration to invade Iraq? Manufacturing Consent came out even before that, and it documented decades of NYT editorializing in favor of specific American interests.

    Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered.

    Give me a break. The very people who did the Iraq WMD coverage are still famous and respected journalists, for crying out loud. Some of them are still at the fucking Times.

    I agree with the author that the failure of journalism is a major cause of Trump, but in the exact opposite sense: It's not that the NYT is no longer trying to be objective, but that its veneer of objectivity has become transparently bullshit. The only thing that has changed is that traditional media outlets no longer have a monopoly on what information Americans get. The many other sources that have risen to challenge them are extremely problematic, to say the least, but traditional media outlets created that opening themselves. Like so much MAGA bullshit, the attacks on the media as elite and biased and out of touch land because they are in fact grounded in some truth, though the "solutions" are always a nightmare.

    • I very strongly disagree with almost every word in this article.

      That's funny, because I feel like the article generally shares the same opinions as you do. Many of the points you make were made in the article as well. Keep in mind this article is not a defense of the NYT, but a condemnation, the same as what you are doing.

      • No, we only agree that the NYT sucks, but disagree on basically everything else. We are coming from exact opposite directions. Yes, we both are attacking the NYT, but, like I already explained, the article attacks them for the opposite reason. For example:

        Until that miserable Saturday morning I thought I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in a struggle to revive them. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

        That is absurd bullshit. Like I said, the NYT's principles and history are that of collaborating with American elite interests since its founding.

        The article talks about "objectivity" over and over, and how the NYT used to strive for it, but that's simply not true. The author's concept of objectivity is what Gramsci calls cultural hegemony, in which the worldview of the ruling class becomes accepted as consensus reality. Like I said, the NYT and its ilk once had cultural hegemony, but it's now been pierced. Another example:

        There have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions. The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

        Fuck that noise. This author is praising them for being "brave" on questioning trans people, but many activists groups have documented what this actually is: The NYT has an anti-trans editorial stance.

        Again, like I said in my first comment, the author doesn't understand the role of power in journalism: He thinks that the job of the journalist is to present all sides objectively, without any understanding that some people are in power and others are oppressed. Like the famous saying goes, the job of the journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. The NYT's entire history, with some very notable exceptions, I grant you, is the opposite of that. Its apparent fall from grace now isn't because it has lots it objectivity, but its hegemony over American information.

  • Corporate media should be teaching critical thinking though? I think I'd rather they just keep trying to kill my soul, and fund schools to teach critical thinking more rigorously.

19 comments