The New York Times is no longer the paper of recordEditor Dean Baquet admits his newspaper has become a political organ
Americans have always loved to hate the New York Times, but the rancor always came tinged with admiration.
A timeless piece of reactionary Americana, the paper’s stubborn resistance to change, stodginess, and our-farts-don’t-smell superiority were somehow always elements of its charm. The “Gray Lady” is where history’s worst mass-murderer would forever remain “Mr. Hitler,” where the robber-baron look is always welcome back in style (“The monocle returns as fashion accessory” is a Times classic), and the porn film Deep Throat could become a pop culture sensation in part because Times critic Vincent Canby panned it (''The film,” seethed Canby, “has less to do with the manifold pleasures of sex than with physical engineering”).
The paper’s style and grammar Nazis were monuments to Freud’s anal stage of development. They stayed frozen there for 150 years. Its upper-class airs have never not been funny, e.g.:
The paper’s worship of honorifics and leaden third-person prose came packaged in an ethical code that, love it or hate it, was a beacon for reporters. The Times was the white line in the middle of the road, an industry measuring stick.
When the Times pushed odious politics, it at least made a pretense to neutrality. Its reportorial style was timid to the point of morbidity. Writers were afraid to offer the smallest opinions. If a Times reporter wanted a point of view in a byline story, it had to be told through an “expert” or an “analyst.”
Nonetheless, there was a standard. Former Deputy Editor Phillip Corbett in the early 2000s said objectivity was “not only a worthy goal, but probably our most important one: the goal that underpins most of our other ideals, like fairness and accuracy.”
The Times braintrust refused across decades to budge an inch off its hoary stance. Editors were like druids guarding a thousand-year religion.
Not only was the Times the biggest paper in America, with the awesome mandate to document the news of the whole world, but every line on every page fit into a ponderously self-referential system of ethical standards. When there were breakdowns, as in the case of cocaine-snarfing fabulist Jayson Blair, it shook the whole business. (The characteristically understated Timesadmission in that case was that the “accident” of Blair opened “credibility cracks” for journalism).
After decades of intransigence, the paper in the Bush years began to change. In 2004 Public Editor Daniel Okrent took on the issue of being too deferential to both sides of political issues in a piece called “It’s Good to Be Objective. It’s Better to Be Right.” Okrent’s humorous example of over-balance was an obituary of Ronald Reagan that via a “balancing” quote by pious Republican Gary Bauer pointed out that AIDS research had gone up in his presidency. It had to. AIDS didn’t exist before Reagan.
Even the Times began to see the absurdity in this. The relentless emphasis on “X says a, but Y says b” as rule began to slacken.
The Times put ads on the front page in 2009. It abandoned euphemistic language describing the War of Terror in 2014. In 2016, it recognized the existence of the word “fuck.” Some of these changes may have been inspired by a loss of authority: in the digital age, the hard-fought distribution advantage of our biggest city’s biggest daily paper evaporated, and the “paper of record” suddenly had to compete with hundreds, if not thousands of other news organizations around the world for online eyeballs.
Between 2006 and the mid-2010s, New York Times overall revenue numbers saw sharp declines. It was forced to reduce the size of its news hole by about 5%, slash jobs, and close a printing operation in 2008, beginning a long slog back to commercial viability that would be based on digital readership. There would be no more telling readers to suck it up if they didn’t like the Timesianattitude. Like the rest of us mortals, the Times had to beg for clicks.
In 2016, when Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, the paper made a dramatic change in approach. The new concept was elucidated in an August 7, 2016 story by Jim Rutenberg, “Trump is testing the norms of objectivity.”
The column redefined objectivity as meaning not just true, but true to “history’s judgment.” Rutenberg added:
The column was difficult to not understand it as a corporate mission statement, especially when editor Dean Baquet told NPR that Rutenberg “nailed it.” When the paper dismissed public editor Liz Spayd, who’d acidly warned abandoning objectivity norms could mean turning the Times into “The New Republic gone daily,” the transformation to an “oppositional” Times was official.
How would the Times, which once treasured objectivity as its “most important” value, alter its approach? What would such changes look like?
We’re finding out.
In recent weeks, the Times and Baquet have given a public burial to the paper’s objectivity standard. In keeping with the paper’s tradition of slapstick self-importance, the announcement was accidental and pretentious, coming via a leaked transcript of a would-be private employee meeting. Still, it was revelatory, or would have been, in any other era. In the age of Trump, reporters barely noticed.
They should have.
Baquet, who seems to be a vacillating, nervous sort of personality, called for an urgent staff town hall meeting on Monday, August 11. From reports, it had the flavor of an ace pitcher leading a players-only confab after his team loses ten in a row.
The Times had had a tough week. In a small unforced error of the sort that passes for a towering intellectual controversy in journalism, editors used a page 1 headline, TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM, that readers and pundits alike said was too Trump-credulous. The paper was accused of giving our race-baiting tweeter-in-chief undeserved political points.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the “cowardice” of Times “aided” white supremacy. Cory Booker said lives “literally” depended on the Times working harder to unfuck its headlines. An online movement to cancel Timessubscriptions rushed over Twitter.
When the paper changed the online version of the header to something more anodyne (“ASSAILING HATE BUT NOT GUNS”), Pro-Trumpers seethed. The Times, they said, had removed a factually accurate headline just to assuage pro-Democratic audiences. Kellyanne Conway barked the Times was apologizing for being “insufficiently rabid.” Trump campaign manager Matt Wolking said “Democrats prefer their false narrative over reality.”
Both criticisms were right. No matter what your feelings about Trump, a page 1 head after a racially-motivated mass shooting is probably not the place to imply on any level that Captain “Go Back” is a racial healer. It made the paper look like it was doing White House P.R.
On the other hand, removing a factually accurate headline in response to Twitter complaints told every conservative or independent reader the Timeswill swiftly red-pencil itself in response to a hashtag (#CancelNYT). This was not an option that had even been open to editors in the old days (you can’t have paper kids snatch back print headlines) even if they had been so inclined.
In the wake of the headline scandal, plus another in which Washington editor Jonathan Weisman made an ass of himself with a series of racially-insensitive tweets, Baquet felt a need to calm the troops.
This probably wasn’t a terrible idea, but a naughty person recorded the “town hall,” which featured 75 minutes of Times staffers puking on each other in what they thought was an atmosphere of confidence (how a group of journalists expects any meeting of this size to remain quiet is also odd, but whatever). The transcript of the grim therapy session was leaked it to Slate,fueling more embarrassing headlines.
Baquet in the meeting spent most of his time talking about a headline controversy, and when and how much to use the word “racist” (a sequel to the controversy of 2016-2017 over the paper’s use of the word “lie”). He also made a series of stunning admissions. In a non-Trump era, these other comments would be fodder for a Judith Miller-sized journalistic scandal – a real one, not an overblown chin-scratching exercise like the headline flap.
Baquet described how the paper became laser-focused on Trump’s history of racial rhetoric:
Baquet placing the mission of a daily newspaper in terms of just one or two stories seemed odd. Still, only Baquet and a few other humans know what it’s like to captain a journalistic supertanker like the Times. Maybe that’s how it’s done? He went on:
By now, we know something is off. Even if you wanted to marshal your editorial resources to attack one subject – I could see it for something like an election, a world war, 9/11 – investing in this way in Russiagate represented an extraordinary up-front judgment about that story’s importance. He continued:
In the middle of telling staff the Times kicked ass on the Russia story, Baquet shifted to say:
WTF!!!!
In classic Timesian manner, speaking in pretzel-sentences and referring to one’s own first-person mistakes as a distant second or third person concern that just sort of happened, Baquet said the paper was staggered by the realization that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was not going to “do it,” i.e. remove Trump from office. The paper, he said, was caught “a tiny bit flat-footed” by the disappointing ending.
“A tiny bit flat-footed” is a Times euphemism on par with calling waterboarding “harsh questioning.” The only way a newspaper can get caught “flat-footed” by factual developments is if it’s been playing an expectations game with coverage, which should never happen, if you’re practicing safe sex and not overselling information.
Baquet admitted the Times did just that, crafting coverage to fit hopes of readers who “want Trump to go away.” Moreover the paper “built” its newsroom around “one story.” This enormous emphasis had the effect of further suckering readers into believing a) the story was massive in scope and importance, and that b) significant fallout had to be coming.
When “the story changed,” the paper was forced to shift gears and throw its weight into a new story. Here is where Baquet’s comments got really bizarre:
Baquet is explicitly saying the Times moved to cover race “in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time,” because the paper needed to “shift resources onto a different story.” The paper is now planning on focusing on race “for the next two years,” obviously meaning to the end of Trump’s first term (is the assumption that this all-consuming attention to racial issues will only be necessary until then?).
The Times could have elected to dig into race more at any time in its history and it would have been appropriate. In areas like criminal justice, housing, education, income disparity, political representation, and racial violence, there is more than enough territory for good reporters (of which there are many at the Times) to cover. They could even have started doing this in conjunction with an examination of Trump’s racial attitudes at the beginning of Trump’s term, or before his election, and it would have made sense.
But in this particular context, with the bizarre reference to a plan for focusing in this direction for the next “two years,” the editor of America’s paper of record is saying he’s building his newsroom around race because the paper’s first-choice topic, Russiagate, failed to “do it,” i.e. end Trump’s presidency. “Russiagate ran out of gas, so we’ll focus on race,” seems somehow to be the message. This is Jim Rutenberg’s “oppositional” approach reimagined to scale.
The Times was once squeamish about the appearance of political bias to the point where reporter Jodi Wilgoren, years ago, became the locus of controversy for saying John Kerry was a “social loner” without quoting a source. Now the paper is openly building coverage for readers who “want Trump to go away.”
Forget for a moment the question of whether this is good or bad and just focus on what this means: it’s a radical change for a once-rigid American institution, stomping on an objectivity standard the paper spent 150-plus pretentious years building.
On one level, “objectivity” has always been an absurdity. Ex-public editor Okrent was right in 2004 when he wrote that bias and opinion are baked in to editorial decisions at every level, from the wording of headlines to where to place photos and how much space to give one topic over another. Bias in journalism can’t be escaped. I don’t know a reporter who really believes in it.
But there is such a thing as striving for objectivity, as a goal. This was a quality control method for newspapers as much as anything else. When the Times foundered on a WMD or Jayson Blair fiasco in the in the past, readers forgave, because the mistakes at least happened in the context of trying to hit true factual north. But what’s left when you stop bothering with objectivity and you get things wrong? That’s where you’re at when you’ve poured two years of resources into a story that “changed” and left you “a tiny bit flat-footed.”
There are other approaches to reporting beyond the old Timesian objectivity standard. It would be perfectly legitimate, for instance, for the Times to re-brand itself as a firebrand blue-state political organ whose purpose is campaigning against Donald Trump.
But the new, post-Trump Times is not selling itself as a political rally-sheet like Iskra or an opinion bugle like The New Republic. It continues to be written in the style of the old, stodgy, pole-up-its rear Times, whose main selling point was exactly its careful measuring of import and its phobic avoidance of visible slant.
The new Times, in other words, markets itself in the style of objectivity, while delivering a product that contentwise runs in the exact other direction. It’s selling authority and subjectivity at the same time.
This formula could work, in the hands of people with the self-awareness and intellectual audacity to make it work, but that’s not this New York Times. The inevitable consequence of this group of people trying to retain a reputation for stuffy editorial rectitude while seeking a bold lead role in the campaign to break the Trumpian wheel is that the paper will fail at both.
It is headed for a reputation for being politicized and unreliable while simultaneously somehow still being an absurdly windy, pompous, self-important drag editorially. This food is terrible – and such large portions, too!
It’s hard to overstate what the trajectory of the Times means for American journalism. When the paper’s revenues began declining in the mid-2000s, it was symbolic of the irreversible overall decline of print news.
However the Times, like cable news channels and some other large commercial news outlets, has begun a rebound in the last few years, with ascending revenues and a rapidly-expanding digital subscriber base. This rise, too, is symbolic of dramatic trends. It’s not an accident that this is coinciding with the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene.
News companies that have to compete with millions of tweeters and thousands of bloggers have figured out the formula is playing aggressively to a demographic half rather than trying to hold the entire fractured audience. Fox was the first big corporation to run in that direction. In the Trump era, even the Times has surrendered the hill, meaning the last connection to the objectivity era is gone.
Image by Joi Ito |
Saturday, August 24, 2019
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