(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.
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.