We know that if the FBI and/or the rest of the DoJ gets off its ass and starts a serious investigation into the theft of classified documents and the other myriad crimes of Trump and his minions, Baquet will do everything in his power to bury as much as he can as deep in the paper as possible. Fortunately for us, he is nearing mandatory retirement and will be out soon. But what I fear is that Sulzberger will find someone equally in thrall to the GOP, Wall Street and both-siderism that things will not improve. But, perhaps, maybe just maybe, this fiasco will be enough of an embarrassment if not to Baquet, then to Sulzberger, that they bring back the public editor, if for no other reason than to save them from themselves. Oh, and to paraphrase David Corn - today would be a good day to fire Maggie Haberman.
James Fallows has an article up at his Substack site which points out the problem isn’t just Bacquet; he lays out 5 ways the mainstream media does a less than satisfactory job in the way it frames the news.
“ Power that will not explain itself is a problem. It’s true of surgeons, and police officers. It’s true of the people who fly airplanes, and who lead troops. It’s true of the Supreme Court, and it’s true of classroom teachers. It’s true in all walks of life.
The media in general are too influential and indispensable to wave off criticism. The New York Times in specific is too influential and indispensable to have its leaders or representatives sound so haughty.
For 14 years, the Times had a partial answer to this problem, by creating the Public Editor position. (That move itself, in 2003, was itself part of the Times’s reckoning with a previous coverage failure.) Some of the public editors were very good; some were not. But simply by their presence they represented the expectation that the paper’s leaders should engage, respond to, and explain serious questions about its coverage and framing. (For instance, as a current question rather than a provocation: Why has the Times decided not to cover this Amnesty International report?) Rather than wave questions off or say they “could care less.” Having a public editor did not solve all problems, but it was a step.
It is a step the paper should take again, when Baquet’s successor is named some time this year. (The paper has a mandatory retirement age for its “masthead” leadership.) It could be framed as a way for the paper to deepen its connection and trust with its ever-growing global audience. And that framing would be true.”
How ironic that Baquet has no regrets about his paper's willful torpedoing of the Clinton campaign and helping to install the worst, most corrupt, most demonstrably evil president this excuse for a country has ever experienced. Like him. I have absolutely no regrets for having cancelled my subscription to the New York Times in perpetuity. I no longer trust the Times to be a forthright and fair purveyor of news in the national interest.
Now, I am going to say this because I truly believe it. Thanks to the paper's vendetta against Hillary Clinton it bears some responsibility, however remote, for a portion of the lives lost from having an incompetent, corrupt and evil monster occupying the White House during the initial phases of the pandemic. That's not even calculating the horrendous damage done to this country by four years of dystopia, and perhaps the dystopia to come from an energized, maniacal, fascist minority seizing power with Trump as its general. If an honest history of this period of U.S. history is ever written, perhaps in another nation still living under democracy at some future time, the "both-sides-do-it" horseshit spewed by many American MSM outlets, and their absolute lack of self awareness over the damage they are doing, will play a major role in a chronicle of this country's dysfunctional future.
When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy in 2015, he was 30 percentage points behind Clinton on the specific question of trustworthiness. After the media, who are supposed to tell the public what is going on in the world, spent a year and a half on the campaign, they were neck and neck on the question. Three weeks after the election, Donald Trump settled a fraud lawsuit for $25 million.
A $25 million settlement for fraud.
The job is to inform the public about what's happening. There is no more comprehensive evidence of failure than that.
I think a bigger ailment than Covid facing our country today is narcissism. Like Trump, Baquet is simply incapable of looking inward and admitting the mistakes he and his paper has made over the past several years. For all he cares, the country can fall apart as long as he doesn't get any of the blame. This is what happens when billion dollar industries are tasked with the public trust. Another example: watch the Netflix documentary about Boeing's 737Max disaster called "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing". Another example of a billion dollar industry more concerned about Wall Street than the public trust. That one caused several hundred people to die and what did the CEO of Boeing get? Ousted by the board of directors with a parachute of 62 million dollars. How fucked up is our country?
Ultimately, the NYT will face its day of reckoning and Baquet will be blamed for his double standard of journalism. As a result of absurd reporting stemming from the incompetence and arrogance of Baquet and his decisions, a right-wing biased media portrait of Clinton was reinforced on a daily basis by the NYT, leading to a current SCOTUS comprised of several justices who have made clear their desire to overturn our current libel laws. While Palin presented a pathetic case, there will be an opportunity to weaken the libel laws to the detriment of major media...and Baquet cannot escape his role as the architect of the inevitable collapse. As to Ukraine, the West has allowed Putin and his oligarchs to launder money, buy their real estate, attend their best schools, commit acts of genocide, repression, and annexation with little response. Now the literal world order is at stake and no country is willing to send troops to defend Ukraine, so warnings of an inevitable invasion is the last remaining tool. It's unfair to Ukrainian people to hear the ceaseless drumbeat of imminent war, but Western leaders are trying to communicate the stakes to their own people who will experience the repercussions of the coming war. Had the West acted years ago, we wouldn't be here, but the West is always in reactive mode.
But they didn't cover Clinton and Trump equally. Trump was under a serious investigation of which they were aware, but still published an article stating there was no connection between Trump and Russia.
Dean Baquet is truly one of the dumbest men in journalism.
Seriously, why is it so difficult for him & other members of the America's mainstream media establishment to admit they were wrong in how they covered Hillary Clinton in 2016 and they fucked up the United States even further by not holding the Covfefool's feet to the fire during the campaign, presidency & post-presidency?
Members of the American mainstream media establishment have seemingly developed an inflated sense of self-importance that what they're doing is a public good and shouldn't be subject to any form of criticism.
Some of them probably believe they're next Woodward & Bernstein looking for another story on the level of Watergate, but reading up on their relentless critical & often slanderous coverage of the Clintons in the Nineties, while downplaying major scandals like Iran-Contra in the Eighties makes me realize some of them inevitably ended up sinking to the level of working for the tabloids.
They've somehow forgotten what good journalism is supposed to be about informing the public by seeking & telling the truth even if it is uncomfortable that it would ruffle the feathers of the highest levels of the establishment.
One of my favorite things to read is the journals kept by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. I'm a history professor, and I love the idea of someone saying, "After my class, I had drinks with Betty Bacall and we discussed Vietnam. Then I had dinner with Bobby and some of his advisers. He may go for it." Or words to that effect.
Anyway, Schlesinger commented how amazing it was to him that working for The New York Times seemed to instill in its employees a belief that they and their newspaper were incapable of error. He was talking about Max Frankel taking umbrage when Schlesinger disagreed with an editorial in the late 1970s. In other words, Baquet is the latest in a long line.
But I do wish The New Yorker had asked if he kept the knife he put in Jill Abramson's back.
The prior publisher of theTimes, coincidentally or otherwise, tended to get along better with let’s say disappointing editors than the one more focused on doing good journalism. Abramson gets fired over being some degree of abrasive (actual reason’s pretty much unknown), Raines over the Blair affair — or, rather, that was a pretext because he was abrasive. Yet Bill Keller, with whom Sulzberger got along famously, suffered not at all for Iraq coverage prior to the “liberation” nor for, related, publishing anything Judy Miller wrote.
Baquet was his last hire. Baquet, whose CV is light on excellence in reporting and heavy on self-promotion and career advancement. Baquet, one of whose last acts before jumping to the Times was abandoning his LA Times newsroom as it faced draconian budget cuts.
I am willing to cop that being top editor at the Times is somewhat less editing and more being something of a publisher. So on that score, there was the pretty good accomplishment of subscriber growth. But funny; a chunk of that growth is from buying the Athletic and it’s subscribers. And less than 60% of Times subscribers are subscribing to the news but are food or games subscribers.
Given Baquet’s track record, what’s surprising about the New Yorker piece is the relatively little diplomacy on his part. But substantively, no real surprise at all.
BTW, a news flash to Baquet: given how the FBI works generally and more so the NYC bureau which was then still influenced byJames Kalstrom — a documented partisan piece of shit — it was irresponsible to take the Clinton investigation at anything like face value.
The NYT unrelenting But Her Emails coverage is the reason the FBI launched their investigation in the first place, and it was directly responsible for Hillary Clinton losing the presidency. I will never forgive the NYT for what they did to her, and their excuses are absolute horseshit. Thanks for calling them out on it, Eric.
I don't know much about Dean Baquet, and while I was reading this I wondered, why pile up on this guy when much of the media is equally guilty of having pushed the narrative about those damn emails, knowing damn well it was a garbage story and that they were helping to put Donald Trump in office.
We're seeing a news media that, unlike in the past, never apologizes. Before the emails, it was Benghazi, and before that, they crawled all over Hillary's legal career.
Have any of these hypocrites tried to get an interview with James Comey on this?
We know that if the FBI and/or the rest of the DoJ gets off its ass and starts a serious investigation into the theft of classified documents and the other myriad crimes of Trump and his minions, Baquet will do everything in his power to bury as much as he can as deep in the paper as possible. Fortunately for us, he is nearing mandatory retirement and will be out soon. But what I fear is that Sulzberger will find someone equally in thrall to the GOP, Wall Street and both-siderism that things will not improve. But, perhaps, maybe just maybe, this fiasco will be enough of an embarrassment if not to Baquet, then to Sulzberger, that they bring back the public editor, if for no other reason than to save them from themselves. Oh, and to paraphrase David Corn - today would be a good day to fire Maggie Haberman.
James Fallows has an article up at his Substack site which points out the problem isn’t just Bacquet; he lays out 5 ways the mainstream media does a less than satisfactory job in the way it frames the news.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/journalism-needs-to-engage-with-its?utm_source=url
He concludes with this:
“ Power that will not explain itself is a problem. It’s true of surgeons, and police officers. It’s true of the people who fly airplanes, and who lead troops. It’s true of the Supreme Court, and it’s true of classroom teachers. It’s true in all walks of life.
The media in general are too influential and indispensable to wave off criticism. The New York Times in specific is too influential and indispensable to have its leaders or representatives sound so haughty.
For 14 years, the Times had a partial answer to this problem, by creating the Public Editor position. (That move itself, in 2003, was itself part of the Times’s reckoning with a previous coverage failure.) Some of the public editors were very good; some were not. But simply by their presence they represented the expectation that the paper’s leaders should engage, respond to, and explain serious questions about its coverage and framing. (For instance, as a current question rather than a provocation: Why has the Times decided not to cover this Amnesty International report?) Rather than wave questions off or say they “could care less.” Having a public editor did not solve all problems, but it was a step.
It is a step the paper should take again, when Baquet’s successor is named some time this year. (The paper has a mandatory retirement age for its “masthead” leadership.) It could be framed as a way for the paper to deepen its connection and trust with its ever-growing global audience. And that framing would be true.”
The Times didn't need to buy Wordle to obtain s-u-c-k-s.
How ironic that Baquet has no regrets about his paper's willful torpedoing of the Clinton campaign and helping to install the worst, most corrupt, most demonstrably evil president this excuse for a country has ever experienced. Like him. I have absolutely no regrets for having cancelled my subscription to the New York Times in perpetuity. I no longer trust the Times to be a forthright and fair purveyor of news in the national interest.
Now, I am going to say this because I truly believe it. Thanks to the paper's vendetta against Hillary Clinton it bears some responsibility, however remote, for a portion of the lives lost from having an incompetent, corrupt and evil monster occupying the White House during the initial phases of the pandemic. That's not even calculating the horrendous damage done to this country by four years of dystopia, and perhaps the dystopia to come from an energized, maniacal, fascist minority seizing power with Trump as its general. If an honest history of this period of U.S. history is ever written, perhaps in another nation still living under democracy at some future time, the "both-sides-do-it" horseshit spewed by many American MSM outlets, and their absolute lack of self awareness over the damage they are doing, will play a major role in a chronicle of this country's dysfunctional future.
When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy in 2015, he was 30 percentage points behind Clinton on the specific question of trustworthiness. After the media, who are supposed to tell the public what is going on in the world, spent a year and a half on the campaign, they were neck and neck on the question. Three weeks after the election, Donald Trump settled a fraud lawsuit for $25 million.
A $25 million settlement for fraud.
The job is to inform the public about what's happening. There is no more comprehensive evidence of failure than that.
I think a bigger ailment than Covid facing our country today is narcissism. Like Trump, Baquet is simply incapable of looking inward and admitting the mistakes he and his paper has made over the past several years. For all he cares, the country can fall apart as long as he doesn't get any of the blame. This is what happens when billion dollar industries are tasked with the public trust. Another example: watch the Netflix documentary about Boeing's 737Max disaster called "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing". Another example of a billion dollar industry more concerned about Wall Street than the public trust. That one caused several hundred people to die and what did the CEO of Boeing get? Ousted by the board of directors with a parachute of 62 million dollars. How fucked up is our country?
Ultimately, the NYT will face its day of reckoning and Baquet will be blamed for his double standard of journalism. As a result of absurd reporting stemming from the incompetence and arrogance of Baquet and his decisions, a right-wing biased media portrait of Clinton was reinforced on a daily basis by the NYT, leading to a current SCOTUS comprised of several justices who have made clear their desire to overturn our current libel laws. While Palin presented a pathetic case, there will be an opportunity to weaken the libel laws to the detriment of major media...and Baquet cannot escape his role as the architect of the inevitable collapse. As to Ukraine, the West has allowed Putin and his oligarchs to launder money, buy their real estate, attend their best schools, commit acts of genocide, repression, and annexation with little response. Now the literal world order is at stake and no country is willing to send troops to defend Ukraine, so warnings of an inevitable invasion is the last remaining tool. It's unfair to Ukrainian people to hear the ceaseless drumbeat of imminent war, but Western leaders are trying to communicate the stakes to their own people who will experience the repercussions of the coming war. Had the West acted years ago, we wouldn't be here, but the West is always in reactive mode.
But they didn't cover Clinton and Trump equally. Trump was under a serious investigation of which they were aware, but still published an article stating there was no connection between Trump and Russia.
I see the new billboards for the Times with the slogan, “Independent journalism for an independent life”
The slogan should really be "Republican Propaganda making you serve your Corporate Masters"!
Dean Baquet is truly one of the dumbest men in journalism.
Seriously, why is it so difficult for him & other members of the America's mainstream media establishment to admit they were wrong in how they covered Hillary Clinton in 2016 and they fucked up the United States even further by not holding the Covfefool's feet to the fire during the campaign, presidency & post-presidency?
Members of the American mainstream media establishment have seemingly developed an inflated sense of self-importance that what they're doing is a public good and shouldn't be subject to any form of criticism.
Some of them probably believe they're next Woodward & Bernstein looking for another story on the level of Watergate, but reading up on their relentless critical & often slanderous coverage of the Clintons in the Nineties, while downplaying major scandals like Iran-Contra in the Eighties makes me realize some of them inevitably ended up sinking to the level of working for the tabloids.
They've somehow forgotten what good journalism is supposed to be about informing the public by seeking & telling the truth even if it is uncomfortable that it would ruffle the feathers of the highest levels of the establishment.
One of my favorite things to read is the journals kept by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. I'm a history professor, and I love the idea of someone saying, "After my class, I had drinks with Betty Bacall and we discussed Vietnam. Then I had dinner with Bobby and some of his advisers. He may go for it." Or words to that effect.
Anyway, Schlesinger commented how amazing it was to him that working for The New York Times seemed to instill in its employees a belief that they and their newspaper were incapable of error. He was talking about Max Frankel taking umbrage when Schlesinger disagreed with an editorial in the late 1970s. In other words, Baquet is the latest in a long line.
But I do wish The New Yorker had asked if he kept the knife he put in Jill Abramson's back.
The prior publisher of theTimes, coincidentally or otherwise, tended to get along better with let’s say disappointing editors than the one more focused on doing good journalism. Abramson gets fired over being some degree of abrasive (actual reason’s pretty much unknown), Raines over the Blair affair — or, rather, that was a pretext because he was abrasive. Yet Bill Keller, with whom Sulzberger got along famously, suffered not at all for Iraq coverage prior to the “liberation” nor for, related, publishing anything Judy Miller wrote.
Baquet was his last hire. Baquet, whose CV is light on excellence in reporting and heavy on self-promotion and career advancement. Baquet, one of whose last acts before jumping to the Times was abandoning his LA Times newsroom as it faced draconian budget cuts.
I am willing to cop that being top editor at the Times is somewhat less editing and more being something of a publisher. So on that score, there was the pretty good accomplishment of subscriber growth. But funny; a chunk of that growth is from buying the Athletic and it’s subscribers. And less than 60% of Times subscribers are subscribing to the news but are food or games subscribers.
Given Baquet’s track record, what’s surprising about the New Yorker piece is the relatively little diplomacy on his part. But substantively, no real surprise at all.
BTW, a news flash to Baquet: given how the FBI works generally and more so the NYC bureau which was then still influenced byJames Kalstrom — a documented partisan piece of shit — it was irresponsible to take the Clinton investigation at anything like face value.
The NYT unrelenting But Her Emails coverage is the reason the FBI launched their investigation in the first place, and it was directly responsible for Hillary Clinton losing the presidency. I will never forgive the NYT for what they did to her, and their excuses are absolute horseshit. Thanks for calling them out on it, Eric.
God knows, nobody else will.
I don't know much about Dean Baquet, and while I was reading this I wondered, why pile up on this guy when much of the media is equally guilty of having pushed the narrative about those damn emails, knowing damn well it was a garbage story and that they were helping to put Donald Trump in office.
We're seeing a news media that, unlike in the past, never apologizes. Before the emails, it was Benghazi, and before that, they crawled all over Hillary's legal career.
Have any of these hypocrites tried to get an interview with James Comey on this?
One could substitute the NYTimes for a condo association newsletter and be none the wiser for it. It is Next Door for Manhattan.
Just checking: is being a lying scumbag a required resume item for national news editors? Someone ask Baquat and get back to me.👀