this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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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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[–] 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.