OT, but someone this morning requested Beutler’s piece. Below:
The rift between Democrats and mainstream media institutions might have been unavoidable, but it didn’t inevitably have to force mainstream news leaders into a defensive crouch or to take leave of their reasoning skills.
And yet…
In an interview with New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, Semafor founder Ben Smith reduces the most essential and bracing criticism of mainstream news into the following straw man: “Why doesn’t the executive editor [of the New York Times ] see it as his job to help Joe Biden win?”
Smith’s decision to frame the conversation this way is telling. Here’s a bull session of fairly vigorous agreement between two mainstream news sentinels, staged for public consumption, and they chose to engage in a kind of sophistry that wouldn’t withstand the editing process at Times opinion. Why is that?
I suspect it’s because, despite the years they’ve had to prepare, they have no good response to the fair-minded version of the critique. They are at the same time determined not to relent to their liberal critics. And that leaves them no choice but to caricature the critique and then tear down the caricature.
Nevertheless, the interview is instructive. Its purpose, presumably, was to reassure consumers that mainstream news outlets like the Times use well-calibrated methods to insulate themselves from grubby partisanship. Liberal critics—the scapegoats who supposedly want the New York Times to be a Democratic Party mouthpiece—were mere collateral damage. But the methods Kahn described are anything but satisfying. If anything they suggest that some of the Times’ s critics’ worst fears are well placed.
SOFT CORPS
The whole imbroglio stems from recent reporting on Biden world’s deep distrust of the Times ’s political desk. And if Smith and Kahn wanted to engage the dispute at the heart of the rancor, they could have gone directly to the source. Just 10 days ago, Biden addressed the entire White House Press Corps with this plea: “ I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horse-race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake.”
Emphasis added.
By making this caveat explicit—don’t take sides in the election, but treat the threat to democracy as worthy of your sustained attention—Biden made himself an inconvenient foil. Instead of addressing his critique head on, Smith used Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter as a prompt, because Dan described the dilemma in more partisan terms. Journalists, Pfeiffer wrote, “do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power,” and liberal voters should stop expecting them to.
I would quibble with this formulation. Many mainstream journalists do see themselves as valid advocates for democracy, because only a rule-of-law system can sustain press freedom. But nearly all of them are highly (and reasonably) attuned to the distinction between advocating for an idea—antidemocratic backsliding is bad—and advocating for a candidate—people should vote for Joe Biden because antidemocratic backsliding is bad.
The line dividing these two forms of advocacy is not always bright, but it’s focused enough for outlets like the Times to walk with professional integrity. And yet this precisely the challenge to the mainstream journalism status quo that leaders want to sidestep. Eliding this important distinction made it easy for Smith to collapse it altogether: “Why don’t you see your job as: ‘We’ve got to stop Trump?’” Smith asked Kahn. “What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?”
“Why are our critics so unreasonable?” they ask in the sincere spirit of mutual comprehension, “and when did they stop beating their wives?”
GAFFE OF KAHN
When Biden says, “I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment,” I think he means something like this: If you, the press corps, were to cover Trump’s authoritarian vision for his second term with the kind of exuberance and insatiability that marked your coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails or my age, the country would be better off. We’d see less survey data suggesting the public is woefully unaware of Trump’s most antidemocratic campaign promises. Yes, that kind of drumbeat coverage might help my campaign, but that’s no reason not to provide it. As the foundation of all legitimate policy making, democracy is the most important issue at stake in the election. It’s not even really an issue in the commonly understood sense, it stands alone. More than anything else, voters must be informed of the implications before choosing to potentially break their democracy, because that decision can’t be easily reversed. And, of course, Trump is always free to respond to public censure by embracing democracy and neutralizing the political liability.
It’s difficult to infer what Kahn would have said if confronted with an entreaty like that. But we have some clues. Against Smith’s fallacious backdrop where pro-democracy bias is equivalent to pro-Biden propaganda, Kahn essentially took the view that democracy thrives in darkness. That it’s worthy of no more attention than any other substantive issue, and maybe less, because overemphasizing it would be tantamount to pro-Biden advocacy.
“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have,” he responded. “At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them?”
The straw man blots out the sun again. But distilling the debate down in this way—rigging the argument to favor the status quo—doesn’t actually leave Kahn in a sure-footed position to defend non-partisan journalism. Intentionally or not, he’s disclaimed the idea of applying professional expertise—news judgment—to the subjective question of issue importance. He must therefore grasp for some other, ostensibly neutral basis for assigning and framing stories and divvying up the Times ’s precious real estate. Editorial decisions can’t reflect what journalists have come to believe based on their immersion in the field. They must come from some place devoid of ideology and critical thinking.
Kahn thus lands on the idea that good journalists should outsource news judgment to issue polls. This is not a defensible ethic for many reasons, one of which is that journalism is a key input driving issue-poll findings.
Treating issue polling as an assignment editor also offers loud, partisan minorities immense influence over the mainstream discourse and wastes the collective wisdom of the newsroom. It tells journalists, who in theory should understand issues and election stakes better than most voters, that they should never act on their hard-earned knowledge. If issue polls suggest voters are misinformed, it’s not the journalist’s job to write stories that might bring public awareness into better alignment with empirical reality. If polls say democracy is a third-tier issue for voters, it’s not the journalist’s job to increase its salience, even if all reporting suggests that the national consequences of abandoning democracy would be first-tier.
Who becomes a journalist to let public confusion fester? Or, worse, pander to it? I don’t think many people do. I also don’t think this describes the Times ’s actual professional creed, either in the abstract or in practice.
If Trump blacklisted the Times from his campaign, the Times would raise a huge fuss about it, even as it would surely rank near the bottom of voter concerns. If Trump were running neck-and-neck with Biden on a promise to nuke Manhattan, with Times HQ as ground zero, the Times would surely sound the alarm—even if it meant pulling resources off the immigration beat for a while.
And in the real world, the Times simply isn’t letting public opinion be its guide. As of this writing, its most recently published political stories include as many pieces about immigration as about Kristi Noem’s anti-dog agenda. There is no writeup of the RNC lawsuit that seeks to prohibit vote counting after Election Day, even if it means junking millions of opposition ballots. There is a short, credulous squib about the RNC pushing out its chief election lawyer, Charlie Spies, which downplays reporting (via CNN) that “Trump originally approved of the hiring [but] was angered after his allies pointed to clips of Spies criticizing the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.”
It wouldn’t be hard for outlets like the Times to communicate the significance of the RNC booting its election counsel for abjuring the Big Lie, while simultaneously seeking to mass-purge millions of valid Democratic votes. There are ways to suggest that’s at least as important as the discovery of duplicate emails on Huma Abedin’s laptop. This is not one of those ways.
The Times is, of course, free to elevate and overproduce stories on any topic, for any reason, including web traffic. If it bleeds, it leads, even if “it” is a puppy. But Kahn clearly understands that editorial judgment should be, or should at least seem, more high-minded than click chasing. The problem is there’s no high-minded way to ration a newsroom’s resources and shape its coverage that doesn’t at some level require the application of subjective judgment. The executive editor of the Times really should have a view on whether democracy is preferable to autocracy, truth preferable to lies, and where those values fit in the hierarchy of political commitments. And he should feel free to share that view with the public. Even if voters tell pollsters they have other concerns. Even if fervent coverage of the threat to democracy happens to help the only candidate in the race committed to its survival. Even if it means acknowledging your critics have a point.