(Reposted from Salon.com.)
If Donald Trump wins the Nov. 5 election, the New York Times will be partly responsible.
As the dominant voice in American journalism, the Times could have fundamentally changed the way Trump has been covered not just by its own journalists but by the political media as a whole. It could have stopped using soft, empty language and false equivalence, and made it crystal clear to the public that if elected Trump would turn America into a racist, authoritarian regime where facts don’t matter.
But rather than call out the dangerous lunacy in plain view, the Times has chosen to engage in tortured euphemisms, passive construction, and poor news judgment.
Here are a few examples of the troubling coverage — or lack thereof:
- When Trump seized up at a rally this week and bizarrely swayed to music for 39 excruciating minutes, the Times called it an “improvisational departure.”
- Trump’s racist threats to deport millions of undocumented people are actually just full of “hyperbolic rhetoric” and “fury.”
- When it was reported that Trump’s top general, Mark Milley, called him “fascist to the core” the Times buried what should have been front-page news deep in an article about something else entirely.
- Times journalists refuse to call Trump’s “false claims” what they are: malicious lies.
- Hurling racist invective at a vulnerable community to fire up a hateful and bigoted base is just “rabble rousing” to the Times. It’s “combative conservatism.”
- And even in an otherwise admirable article on Trump’s cognitive decline, the Times couldn’t bring itself to use the term “cognitive decline.”
Meanwhile, the day-to-day coverage treats Trump like a normal candidate, rather than as the wildly dangerous and unhinged felon that he is. Day in and day out, the Times “sanewashes” his dark and unintelligible ramblings. Day in and day out, it treats the divisions about basic facts and democratic rule as just so much partisan squabbling.
Day in and day out, Times reporters use the passive voice to muddle responsibility for heinous acts committed by Republicans, find fault with “both sides,” and create false equivalencies between two parties, only one of which respects facts and the rule of law.
This weakness — this failure to rise to the occasion – is not a coincidence nor an accident. It is also not, despite the insistence of some on social media, because the institution is somehow rooting for Trump.
The fault lies with the Times’ selfish, smug, and self-destructive leadership. To be specific: New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editor Joe Kahn have made it abundantly clear time and again that they prize their so-called “journalistic independence” over any obligation to sound the alarm that electing Trump would be a disaster for the country.
And by “journalistic independence” they don’t mean the freedom to speak truth to power. They mean the freedom to triangulate between the two parties to occupy some sort of mythical middle, which they consider morally superior to “taking sides” in any kind of political battle – even one as unbalanced as this one.
Kahn gave away the game in a recent interview with NPR. “In people’s minds, there’s very little neutral middle ground,” he said. “In our mind, it is the ground that we are determined to occupy.”
But the “people” are right about this one. There is no middle ground between the two parties these days. And there’s certainly no middle ground between truth and lies.
Kahn’s resistance to sounding the alarm is shared by none other than his boss, the Times’ publisher. Sulzberger has said quite definitively that he doesn’t think that’s something the Times should be doing. “I see no lack of passionate, morally confident actors sounding the alarm,” Sulzberger said in a speech this past spring. “Indeed, the alarm seems so loud and so constant that much of the public has by now put in earplugs.”
He described independent reporting as “the kind that doesn’t fully align with any one perspective.” It requires being “willing to take a simple, easy, or comfortable story and complicate it with truths that people don’t want to hear.”
I think the message that sends to the newsroom is: If partisans are happy with your work, you’re doing something wrong, so make sure they never are – even if the facts support their view.
It’s easy to blame the reporters whose bylines appear on Times news articles for their pusillanimity. And I often do. But the fault actually lies further up the food chain, with their editors and their editors’ bosses.
The way the Times covers Trump comes directly from the top – as did the disastrous decision in 2016 to devote so much front-page real estate to Hillary Clinton’s emails instead of to the danger represented by Trump.
What we’re left with is this conclusion: If Trump wins in part because the public was insufficiently alarmed by the press coverage of the 2024 election, the people who run the Times will have the extremely dubious distinction of having gotten Trump elected twice.
Exactly right. And yet it’s worse: about 2016, NYT leadership says ‘oh, we didn’t think he could win’ as a justification for slanting the playing field. That excuse, just like the endless speculation on when exactly he was going to pivot, is simply unavailable this time around.
To paraphrase that other guy: If they get Trump elected again, they’ll be destroyed and they’ll deserve it.
You are exactly correct!
The fact that the Times’ leadership think it’s an honorable position to take the middle ground between fact and fiction, between truth and lies, says it all. They don’t think they have an obligation to report the truth. Like the old story of “reporting” that one side says it’s sunny, and the other side says it’s raining, and failing to take a look out the window to see what’s actually true.
I agree wholeheartedly. I’ve cancelled my NY Times subscription, as well as the one for the Washington Post. I’ve had it with both of these organizations. They’ve failed America when it needed them most. They’ve done absolutely nothing but white-wash the danger that this man is to the country.
If they won’t stand up to him, why would any other news organization do the same? Leaders in the industry? If so, they’re going the wrong direction. My money won’t furl their sails.
I’ve cancelled both as well. I agree with y’all completely and I’ve been an avid news consumer for decades. MAGA is effectively killing the fourth estate- WHEN WE NEED IT THE MOST.
Missing from this: last week it took NYT 2 and a half days to cover Trump threat on Sunday morning Oct. 13 to use military on “enemies within” US citizens including US Rep. Adam Schiff. After most media outlets covered test Sunday or Monday, NYT finally covered as “news analysis” last Tuesday night. It was the top rated article on Wednesday for NYT, so it wasn’t that story lacked news value, but it was clearly suppressed by editors until they were forced to publish something.
False Equivalency is NOT journalism.
There is so much of it in in ALL of the National distribution newspapers, NONE of them qualify as Journalism.
I do believe that the Times strives to be in the middle of the political spectrum. The problem is that in practice it is aiming for the middle of the Overton Window, which has moved sharply to the right over the last 25 years. Consequently, the Times has moved to the right as well. A position in the middle of the objective political spectrum would be well to the left of where the Times is today.
I also wish that the Times and other newspapers had at least published verbatim transcripts of his speeches, rallies, etc. That alone might have at least moved the needle somewhat, and would certainly not compromise their reporting the facts. I wrote this email to Michael Gold about publishing verbatim transcripts, or at least significant passages and not just contextualized phrases. He, of course, did not reply but here is what I sent:
I have looked at a lot of your stories and have found little, if any, verbatim wording from Trump’s speeches. He has recently said some things, such as the shark/battery rant, that have little bearing with reality, much less with a political campaign. He has said a few things that are incoherent and border on the irrational. I can find plenty of coverage of his exact words on Twitter, but the MSM shies away from his actual words. Instead, you supply context and interpretation, which is certainly part of your job, but essentially gives the appearance that what he says is more coherent than what is actually verbalized.
I fully realize that much of what he says is riffing on his themes, red meat for his devoted followers. But there are many people out there who are not his slavish followers and who are not Twitter users, who would be well served to see the actual words he says, in the exact phrases and syntax he uses, and not the cosmetically adjusted paraphrasing that your paper and other MSM outlets use.
In my opinion this is a disservice to the voting public. The true believers and those unalterably opposed to Trump don’t really need to see what he says verbatim, but many independent and undecided voters do. They don’t realize, in my opinion, just how unhinged much of what he says truly is–how devoid of policy positions or programs proposed. It is invective against his enemies, real or imagined, and disjointed non sequiturs and falsehoods. Take a look at Daniel Dale taking apart his recent Detroit speech, or his recent debate, for example.
I implore you to at least to occasionally include verbatim excerpts from his speeches. This is not a partisan issue… The entire voting public, not just the polarized sides, needs to see exactly what he is saying. It is vital to this election that we all see and hear Trump without media’s mediation–the unvarnished words. Otherwise you are not truly informing the public and, if not deceiving it, at lest abetting the deception.
Yes….
It is so very nice to catch up with you, Dan, again after too many years. I started following when you were at the WP, and often commented, and distributed links of your work. I am also an avid listener to Keith Olbermann’s podcast “Countdown.” He too has been a severe critic of NYT and its flawed attempt to conquer the supposed “middle ground.” Unfortunately for the majority of main stream press, that increasingly shrinking slice of space called the “middle ground” totally disappeared the day Don the Con(vict) came down the escalator and opened his mouth. It has taken so long for so many to recognize this. Thank you so much for your sharp critique of a missing element from journalism that should take lessons from the historic muckrakers of the past. Both sideism gets you nowhere. Also my thanks to David Cay Johnston for dropping your name in a podcast during a riff on the pitiful state of the mainstream press and Trump’s patently obvious failings.
It is even deeper. The Times and WaPo are still asking for Harris’ policies — why don’t they listen to her and to Walz — there are plenty of policies — and Trump has NO policies except hate, revenge, retribution, exclusion, and other strategies to rid our country of his “enemies within” and his “vermin.” The decline of journalistic responsibility in this country is shameful. I was educated as a journalist, and we were taught to be unbiased in our reporting. To be truly unbiased, these newspapers should be reporting Trump’s speeches word for word along with his threats, behavior and cognitive decline. More importantly, they should be reporting what Kamala actually says — rather than commenting that those in attendance left feeling like “they still didn’t know her.” What does that mean? The demise of civics education in our country combined with the shift in the veracity of media coverage, as led to an electorate that blames the President for things that are local, that believes Trump’s lying about tariffs, that discusses the “economy” and “inflation” even when globally we have made the most amazing recovery in history, far outperforming the other global leaders. Trump said in 2015 that he “loves the undereducated.” Of course he does, because they believe his lies, misinformation and anything he tells them because they do not want to do the work that it takes to keep a democracy strong: they want someone they think is strong to do it for them. He is not strong, he is weak. And J.D. Vance and Elon Musk will run America (into the ground) if Trump is elected.
My husband refuses to cancel our subscription to NYT saying there’s no other media source with the vast amount of information it offers. We don’t get the Post.
Any suggestions on alternatives to the NYT?
The Times is irreplaceable. That’s what makes all this so tragic.
Try the Philadelphia Inquirer
I think most of us recall the NYT cheerleading right up to the moment of the Iraq invasion! I have never paid for a this paper since. Money over substance. The good old American way!