The New York Times is Failing its Readers
It has been coming for a while now. You could see it in their endless coverage of polls, which many of their reporters were unable to read correctly. (See here, and here.) Or its obsessive coverage of Pres. Joe Biden’s age. (See here.)
The New York Times, once a paragon of American journalism, the paper of record, has jumped the shark.
In a recent interview with Semafor, newly-minted Executive Editor Joe Kahn (who was promoted to the position in 2022), said this: “One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates and informing voters.”
Sounds reasonable enough, but The Times has not been doing this. Its excessive coverage of skewed polls and its incessant coverage of Joe Biden’s age is not “well-rounded coverage” by any stretch of the imagination. There hasn’t been nearly the same kind of coverage of Donald Trump.
And The Times’ fraught relationship with polling has not gone unnoticed.
In March, Salon noted, “The Times on Sunday [March 5], however, had this headline ready for your morning coffee: ‘Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to be Effective.’ It’s another grab from the New York Times/Siena College poll they published on Saturday that is so outrageously flawed, a cottage industry has sprung up to pick apart its methodology and point out its glaring contradictions and straight-up bias.”
Khan also said this to Semafor: “It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them?”
So, The New York Times, which along with Sienna College regularly conducts polls that the paper’s reporters have a hard time interpreting correctly, is now using polling to direct its coverage? That sure sounds like what Kahn is saying. And it surely is a recipe for disaster.
In 2022, Kahn told the Columbia Journalism Review, “I honestly think that if we become a partisan organization exclusively focused on threats to democracy, and we give up our coverage of the issues, the social, political, and cultural divides that are animating participation in politics in America, we will lose the battle to be independent.”
Apparently, Kahn does not think The New York Times can walk and chew gum at the same time. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t The Times cover “the issues” and also cover the existential threat to democracy?
The threats to democracy that he speaks about should be the number one topic of coverage in the paper. Not to the exclusion of all the other coverage, of course, but it should be the focus of the newspaper. It’s an issue that should be covered. It’s probably the most important issue that should be covered, despite what any of the polls say.
A newspaper’s job is to inform the reader. It’s to tell people what they need to know, not to reinforce what they think they know. Many readers may not care about the threat to democracy, but The Times sure as hell should. Particularly if it plans to remain independent if Trump gets elected. (Spoiler alert: it won’t).
But I guess when you grow up rich and privileged, it’s hard to worry about the stuff that surely will affect “the other people” but not affect you because you have money and status.
Joe Kahn is from a wealthy Boston family. His dad co-founded the Staples office supply chain and founded the Purity Supreme supermarket chain in New England. Kahn went to Harvard and wrote for the Harvard Crimson. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize at the Dallas Morning News in 1994.
So he knows how journalism works. That’s why it’s so puzzling that he thinks the most important story of our lifetime doesn’t deserve more and better coverage in his newspaper.
Maybe The New York Times should ditch the polling and find out what’s really happening on the ground. Before it’s too late.