This is from May 7th, but I hadn’t seen it.
Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.
He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.
But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party
. . . And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.
Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.
No one ever thought we’d have to legislate telling the goddamned truth.
The fuck we didn’t, that’s why perjury is a thing.
It’s just not illegal to lie to people
Er, well, in court is a whole other thing from in the press. But - point taken. There’s at least precedent if you’ll pardon the expression.
It used to be illegal in the press too, IIRC ReagN abolished it.
?? Not sure which you mean
I’m thinking of the fairness doctrine
I don’t think the fairness doctrine legislated “truth” as such, though torpedoing it did usher in media conglomeration, talk radio fascism and a host of related bullshit. If it did, though that’d be interesting.