What A Concept!
NYT Editor Suggests Division of Labor Whereby Candidates Campaign and Voters Elect and Politicians Make Policy and Courts Adjudicate and Journalists Report
U.S. President Joe Biden is apparently not very happy with The New York Times, to the extent that he is refusing to do an exclusive interview with what many consider to be the U.S. “paper of record.” Eli Stokols points out in Politico that he could become the first not to do so since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Politico article also argues that this dynamic between Biden and NYT reaches back to the 2019 Democratic primaries (as well as treatment of his son in relationship to Ukraine).
The tension between the president and such a powerful newspaper is, in my view, good news, as it at least in part shows that there are some journalists are out there journalist-ing rather than just stumping for the Democrats. “No White House has ever been happy with our coverage,” The Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller is quoted as saying in the Politico piece, “And I don’t see why they should be. Our job is to hold power to account.” Amen and amen.
Meanwhile, a few of the folks I sometimes read on Substack have taken notice of a conversation between Ben Smith—himself a former writer for The New York Times—and two-year Executive Editor at The Times, Joe Kahn. The interview included a number of juicy tidbits, including:
There are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.
And:
I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of…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:
I’m open to graduates from whatever school who understand what they need to commit to being in an independent news environment. But I don’t think we can assume that they’ve been trained for that, if they’ve been trained for safe spaces. The newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.
I am also in a couple different text threads with friends and siblings in which we sometimes talk about these things, and one of the things I said recently about Trump was that after his not-so-subtle attempts at getting his Vice President to decertify the 2020 election he should never be president again, but that it should be either 1) election losses or 2) definitive outcomes in courtrooms where the man is allowed to speak up for himself and where his side gets to call witnesses that prevent him from becoming president again, rather than the endless Democrat attempts at getting the media and universities to do their bidding and/or using shady political strategies like trying to exclude him from state ballots (what a stunner that that got shot down by the Supreme Court). I think Kahn is basically correct, in other words, that it’s on the Democrats to beat the Republicans, and that they ought to do that by campaigning and debating and winning hearts and minds. And that if they cannot do that effectively enough, maybe the real problem is with them, and not with Trump. Why is it that this man is more appealing to these masses than our own do-gooding platform? That’s a question that all the attempted circumvention allows Democrats to endlessly avoid, and to their own detriment. They’re obsessed with their own self-declared righteousness, and it’s a blinder.
It would be tempting to do some comparing of this particular interview between Smith and Kahn to James Bennet’s essay in The Economist a few months back, about the events that led to his eventual firing from The New York Times. Many of the paper’s young reporters went after him in the wake of Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops” in the summer of 2020, which Cotton wrote in response to the flurry of protests across the country after George Floyd’s death. Or, if not Bennet, perhaps Uri Berliner’s more-recent piece, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust” (and for which he was subsequently suspended and then resigned). Or even of Bari Weiss’s work in general, with her publication, The Free Press, being the landing spot for Berliner’s unleashing.
There is a crucial difference between Kahn and the rest, though. Kahn is still at The New York Times. And he is throwing his weight around, not being shy about messaging what he thinks the role of serious media ought to be. The others have all taken their shots and gone on to start something new. In the interview with Smith, Kahn mentions both Bennet and Weiss by name, and he does so respectfully, which is to his credit. With Bennet, he basically says he understands why the man was hurt, why he sees things the way he does. But that there is a bigger picture that extends beyond one episode. He argues that the summer of 2020 was essentially a specific “moment” in history, that it won’t always be that way, and that while some problems in media were exposed during that time, that they can be corrected. He also admits to being a reader of Weiss’s The Free Press, even going as far as to say that they do some good work, but also that Weiss doesn’t really get The New York Times right. That she, he claims, has “a single note, and keeps playing it up over and over again.”
So can media be reformed toward a better version of itself or are we destined to just always be subverting it with Substacks and The Free Presses? I’m sure time will teach us some of that answer—with the 2024 presidential election right in the middle of it in the near future—but it is of little doubt that competition, multiple voices, “diversity” we might even call it, is a good thing in the sphere of media. In a world of infinite complexity, different values and conclusions are inevitable, and we ought to be better learners of history than we are in our many attempts to burn witches. We ought not, actually, to have a media class that is largely in lock-step with one of our main political parties; Kahn is certainly right about that much.