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When the New York Times lost its way: America’s media should do more to equip readers to think for themselves (www.economist.com)
submitted 4 months ago by awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/longreads@sh.itjust.works
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This was a really interesting read about the growing polarisation in media and the US.

Like me, Baquet seemed taken aback by the criticism that Times readers shouldn’t hear what Cotton had to say. Cotton had a lot of influence with the White House, Baquet noted, and he could well be making his argument directly to the president, Donald Trump. Readers should know about it. Cotton was also a possible future contender for the White House himself, Baquet added. And, besides, Cotton was far from alone: lots of Americans agreed with him—most of them, according to some polls. “Are we truly so precious?” Baquet asked again, with a note of wonder and frustration.

The answer, it turned out, was yes. Less than three days later, on Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation. I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.

Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/JxGro

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[–] awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But... you keep quoting AG and the NYT as examples of why the article is wrong, AG is clearly one of those at fault in the article and the entire article is making the same points as you are? They're not praising the NYT.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

AG is clearly one of those at fault in the article, but I’m not convinced that that is the voice the author is coming at it from.

It’s so long that I’m not going to read it all in depth. Maybe that means I am going to miss something but I just now made a pretty lengthy concerted effort to skim and try to see if your reading makes sense, and I’m still having trouble. So like, check this out:

The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise. It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work. After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.

Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be. The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority.

The whole framing of the article is that the “untruth” AG needs to be setting straight is overly sensitive political correctness from progressives, and analyzing everything he’s doing through that lens. Whether we have to be neutral and present progressives and “conservatives” on the same footing, or whether we should take a side and say the progressives are wrong. Right? Have I read that part right in your opinion?

I think once you’ve framed AG’s dilemma in those terms, you already fucked up. That is not AG’s dilemma. His dilemma is that part of the US political spectrum is explicitly fascist now, and his decision as far as I can tell is that we need to go further than the Times’s editorial voice being on the side of the neoliberals as it always was, and now needs to be the fascists or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, whether or not that’s the reality.

Here’s an extremely instructive example:

Cotton had tweeted that Trump should call out troops to stop the “anarchy, rioting and looting” if “local law enforcement is overwhelmed”, and Twitter had threatened to censor his account. Jim Dao, the op-ed editor, was more interested in the substance of the tweet and, via Rubenstein, asked Cotton to write an op-ed about that.

That was the right thing to do. Trump was starting to call for the use of troops, and on May 31st the mayor of Washington, DC, had requested that the National Guard be deployed in her city. After police gassed protesters before Trump posed for a photo in Lafayette Square on June 1st, the editorial board, which I led, weighed in against that use of force and Trump’s “incendiary behaviour”, and the op-ed team had pieces planned for June 3rd arguing he did not have a sound basis to call out federal forces and would be wrong to do so. In keeping with the basic practice of the op-ed page, which was created to present points of view at odds with Times editorials, Dao owed readers the counter-argument. They also needed to know someone so influential with the president was making this argument, and how he was making it.

The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.

This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s. Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”. That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest.

Right? I still won’t say I’m 100% sure on 100% of the thesis of the article, but is that not Bennet arguing that AG needs to enforce better the pro-fascist standard of truth?

[–] awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

The whole framing of the article is that the “untruth” AG needs to be setting straight is overly sensitive political correctness from progressives, and analyzing everything he’s doing through that lens. Whether we have to be neutral and present progressives and “conservatives” on the same footing, or whether we should take a side and say the progressives are wrong.

I kinda read it differently. I'm not saying you're wrong, since this is of course all pretty subjective. But at least the way I read it, Bennet is saying that the NYT has a duty to help both sides understand each other, and the way to do that would be by giving a voice to the right and centrists without necessarily endorsing any faction. I agree with it to some extent - as both sides have polarised and pulled away from each other, it's gotten hard to be a neutral viewpoint in any number of topics without being roundly condemned by both sides.

is that not Bennet arguing that AG needs to enforce better the pro-fascist standard of truth?

That's a tough one. Dogwhistles, weasel words, doublespeak are all things to watch out for. He's condemning the NYT for changing the language Cotton used, but I'm not familiar enough with US politics to have an opinion if they changed the meaning or just polished the turd.

Regardless, I appreciate the different viewpoint you presented. As usual, there's no black and white in these scenarios.

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But at least the way I read it, Bennet is saying that the NYT has a duty to help both sides understand each other, and the way to do that would be by giving a voice to the right and centrists without necessarily endorsing any faction

I think that this is a superficially pleasing argument but actually quite dangerous. It ignores that the NYT is itself quite powerful. Anything printed in the NYT is instantly given credibility, so it's actually impossible for them to stay objective and not take sides. Taking an army out to quash protestors gets normalized when it appears in the NYT, which is a point for that side of the argument, but the NYT can't publish every side of every issue. There's not enough space on the whole internet for that. This is why we have that saying that I mentioned in the other comment, that journalists should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, or that journalists ought to speak truth to power. Since it's simply impractical to be truly neural, in the sense of publishing every side of every issue, a responsible journalist considers the power dynamics to decide which sides need airing.

The author of the OP argues that, because Cotton is already a very influential person, he ought to be published in the NYT, but I think that the exact opposite is true. Because Cotton is already an influential person, he has plenty of places that he can speak, and when the NYT platforms his view that powerful people like him should oppress those beneath them, they do a disservice to their society by implicitly endorsing that as something more worthy of publishing than the infinite other things that they could publish. For literally all of history, it's been easy to hear the opinions of those who wield violence to suppress dissent. Journalism is special only when it goes against power.

[–] awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 months ago

I get what you're saying. The flip side, is that at the other extreme you get echo chambers, which is arguably where we've landed today in a lot of media. It's a pretty tough question, and I don't claim to have the answer, but I think it's a good thing to be having this discussion instead of sweeping it under the rug.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I kinda read it differently. I'm not saying you're wrong, since this is of course all pretty subjective. But at least the way I read it, Bennet is saying that the NYT has a duty to help both sides understand each other, and the way to do that would be by giving a voice to the right and centrists without necessarily endorsing any faction. I agree with it to some extent - as both sides have polarised and pulled away from each other, it's gotten hard to be a neutral viewpoint in any number of topics without being roundly condemned by both sides.

Yeah, I agree with all of this -- both that it is what Bennet is saying, and that it's true and important.

I just don't think it applies to the Times's or AG's behavior, in the real world, although Bennet is saying that it does. We need quadrants, I think:

  1. We could refuse to weigh in on questions of truth, and instead just present "both sides"
  2. We could present journalistic truth, what is objectively true, as best it can be detected by our professionals which sometimes looks "partisan" and upsets you if your side is not aligned with the truth
  3. We could let the coverage be dominated by a bunch of oversensitive progressive whiners in the newsroom and on Twitter
  4. We could let the coverage be dominated by a neoliberal hegemony which is pretty hostile to working people in the US and any brown people anywhere in the world
  5. We could let a deeply deluded publisher dictate the coverage according to his own power-mad dicates, for which even #4 doesn't go far enough, and so align ourselves with the growing fascist movement in the country (in the absolutely stupid belief, apparently, that it won't then turn on us violently the instant it seizes power)

Yes I am editorializing a little bit. It's okay, I'm not a journalist. Also, it's still a quadrant; #5 just exists way, way off the bottom right-hand side of the square.

I think Bennet is saying that the Times was doing too much of #3 and is now getting back to its roots of #1, or should be. What I think is happening is that the times was doing #4 and is now starting to do #5, with a little disingenuous sprinkling of #1 to disguise the taste.

You'll notice that they don't feel any kind of need to present "both sides" of people's feelings on Biden's debate performance, or the war in Gaza (although I think the sheer humanitarian atrocity is so massive by now that they've been forced into admitting on some level that yes, a whole bunch of Palestinians many of them families and innocent children do seem to be starving and getting buried under rubble and maybe it's not an ideal outcome, although, of course, there's a lot of blame to go around on many different sides for why that is happening.)

That's a tough one. Dogwhistles, weasel words, doublespeak are all things to watch out for. He's condemning the NYT for changing the language Cotton used, but I'm not familiar enough with US politics to have an opinion if they changed the meaning or just polished the turd.

Personally, I wish the NYT would do stuff like this within the context of an interview. If you know someone is redefining words with new sinister meaning to try to justify their killing, I think you should call them out on it. Don't just let them pretend on the editorial page that they mean killing looters, certainly. But also, don't change their words and just kind of sneakily not address it (which I suspect is the result of splitting the difference between the reporter's desire to report the truth and AG's desire for the reporter to report the fascist newspeak version of it).

In a perfect world, I think you could do an interview where you say, I want to ask about about this "looters." You're clearly talking about shooting protestors, and pretending you are talking about shooting looters. What's up with that? And then in that context you give them a chance to speak and say their side. And if you're wrong, fair play, but in this case I think it is absurd to pretend that Trump and Cotton were telling the truth when they were talking about shooting looters and getting upset when people pointed out that they mean they want to shoot protestors.

[–] awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Think you've put it pretty well there! I do think Bennet wants #2 though. He draws a clear line between op-eds and factual news, and was pretty clear that the latter should be evidence-based.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yeah, agreed. I oversimplified a little, in that in the supposed ideal, you have a news section which is "objective" and an editorial section which is "both sides" and they work in very different ways, and to me that's a pretty good system when it's working well. I think AG is distorting both sides of it to serve his agenda, in somewhat different ways of course.

[–] Maeve@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The fairness doctrine? Eta: I'm aware it was for broadcast, but it used to be fairly standard, anyway, in print.