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.
So this is the first sentence of that interview:
And this is the entire question he was asked:
And here’s his entire answer:
I don’t know if that’s just an unusual interpretation or if you’re being disingenuous but I see the question and his answer as exactly as described. The question was: Why isn’t your job stopping an authoritarian, and he says, essentially, “because we don’t tell people how to vote”. Which is bullshit in 100 different ways. It doesn’t answer the question, it makes the exact leap he’s accused of in the OP, and he takes the opportunity to shit on Biden with a left-handed compliment and blowing more smoke up everyone’s ass.
“He says” is not the same as “he says, essentially”.
One is directly reflects what he said, the other injects your interpretation of what he said. It requires the leap of believing that defending democracy is best done by stopping Trump, even if it means abandoning journalistic ethics. He claims that defending democracy requires an impartial media.
To say that he doesn’t want to defend democracy is entirely bullshit. It’s not what he says or implies. He just disagrees with you on how best to do so.
True, that’s why I put both the full quote and, later, the “essentially” to show that was a reading of it. Yes.
No “leap” is required. Trump has already staged a coup. Trump has already said he will pursue a program of retribution. Trump’s idiot followers in red states have already passed unconstitutional laws to prevent the voters’ candidates from winning if they so decide. NO LEAP. IS REQUIRED.
This is a platitude one learns in journalism 101 and at the place and time he sits, right now, it is means nothing. Let’s skip the definitions of what ‘an impartial media’ might mean and examples for and against.
The purpose of the free press is to allow any subject to be told. There are MANY subjects the NYT hasn’t touched about either candidate. But as regards trump, the subjects-less-traveled are almost all criminal, corrupt, and deeply idiotic. Is it “impartial” to deliberately ignore them? No.
Furthermore, the NYT appears to be “defending democracy” by chasing polling results and securing more cycles of a given feedback loop. That is also not impartial, nor is it defending democracy.
No, what he says and what he implies is, in fact, bullshit.
I have no doubt he believes he has a role in “defending democracy”. His actions on how to do that are simply wrong, and his words justifying his critical inaction give away that he simply can’t bear to write a story that might not give both sides equal weight. Do we need to argue ‘both sides’? I would expect not.
He says they have a responsibility to publish “hard-hitting” stories. Well, where are they? “trump said some stupid shit at a rally again”? “Joe looked tired and was hoarse”(on repeat for the month)?
Bullshit.