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.
I used to think that, too, that it is a mere "bias". Then my reasoning became more powerful than my skepticism, and I realized it is not bias, it is conscious intent. To have a "bias" against liberals, Democrats, or the Clintons, at this point, is to be malevolent and stupid simultaneously. I know we shouldn't blame these folks for sincerely feeling that the fascist thuggery from the right wing doesn't represent as much of an existential threat to America as the excesses of the reactionary radical leftists; there really are sound reasons for taking that stance. But clinging to it at this point, when it is Joe Biden against Donny Treason and Cancun Cruz against AOC, isn't even cynicism, let alone skepticism, it is just plain paranoia of a particularly delusional sort.
The National archives referred this matter to DOJ to investigate a couple of weeks ago. The media has not made much of that story like they did with “buttery mails” stories.
I found one NYT story when I googled. Overall, this bombshell of a story inexplicably fizzled out. There was media coverage, the NYT's most recent story is dated October 2021. Nobody buried it, it just seems to be an unsolvable mystery.
It’s true that no one ever found out for sure what happened but a lot of media coverage that I have seen pretends those communications never happened, not that they just haven’t been explained.
From what I have seen they have decided those communications didn’t happen. The truth is that there are several explanations for those “pings” but none has been proven. This article from a few months ago is a good summary of the story.
Agreed. The DOJ is selling us and our democracy down the river over an obsession with "process" and "precedent." We have eight months left and the sense of urgency is non-existent.
"Sulzberger will find someone equally in thrall to the GOP..."
You're right. That deplorable demographic is the most susceptible to the click bait infotainment that is the bread and butter of today's news organizations like Baquet's NYT. The opportunity cost of NOT catering to their naivete and ignorance is too high.
Baquet is doing what he's paid to do and Maggie will never be fired. I wonder if any "reporter" has asked Baquet about why they were hell bent on acquiring Clinton Cash and if they vetted the material in the book since it was a right wing hit piece.
The NYT fancies itself as the guardian of the conventional wisdom and the arbiter of all political and social discourse. Always has, always will. And the greatest profit comes from the Republicans and the dark money billionaires that love them. You are correct, Baquet is exactly what the Sulzberger family wants in charge, and legacy hire Maggie will never be fired, at least as long as they feel the need for a pipeline to Trump. That doesn't change the fact that today would be a good day to fire Maggie Haberman.
It won't matter because nobody will want to prosecute Trump. I think the Justice Dept is more inclined to walk away from something so divisive in an election year (not that there isn't always an excuse not to mess with a former president).
I've been alive long enough to understand that nothing ever changes. This too. If they wait long enough, the public will simply forget about it.
I think Garland is afraid that Fox and the Republicans will call anything he does to prosecute Trump or his Congressional enablers revenge for the McConnell freeze out. He needs to grow a thicker skin and a spine and ignore it, do what's right for the country and the rule of law. At the same time, Tish James is showing that she has zero f'ks to give for Trump's bullshit. She is going to burn the Trump Organization to the ground, and turn everything she has over to the Manhattan DA for criminal prosecution. He may not go after the Orange Menace, but I'd bet he sends DJTJr, Ivanka, Eric and Weiselberg up the river. The Georgia DA may have zero f'ks left as well, and she may decide to prosecute her open and shut case against Trump as well.
Especially with the NY prosecutions, remember, they got John Gotti, and he like Trump, strutted around the city for years thinking that he was immune.
You have more faith than I do. He is a coward and a do-nothing. Maybe they will give him a custodian job at the Ministry of Justice when the Fourth Reich is installed. The rest of us will be fighting an insurgency to take back whatever hope is left for a democracy from the MAGA-Schutzstaffel.
I think Garland just doesn't have it in him to act against a former president. He's very much like Bob Mueller in that regard. I don't think he's at all concerned about what Fox News or the GOP think of him. Letitia James is the opposite - she even withdrew from the gubernatorial race because she wants to see the Trump case through to its conclusion.
Biden chose Garland because they're of the same mindset, which is that of old school politicians who think all problems should be solved at the ballot box.
Then we are done. We have eight months left before the actual "steal" takes place. These are not normal, genteel, gentlemanly times. We are in a streetfight about to see democracy gutted by brownshirts. If he is not up to the job, I have no other suggestions for democracy fans other than to get ready for what's coming and decide how we are going to respond to living in a Handmaid's Tale dystopia. Hyperbole? Not on your life...
Perhaps, but it is just as plausible that Biden chose Garland to give him a consolation prize for McConnell's foul actions. Biden may have even been hoping that Garland might be looking for a bit of revenge. That said, I think Garland is cowed by the potential for bad PR, after all, he was a judge for a long time and they want to toil in the background. Same problem with Mueller. It's good that Tish James is not infected with typical Democratic spinelessness.
Revenge? Because we should play dirty just like the Republicans? I don't think Biden is that petty. In fact, he was all about conciliation, "reaching across the aisle." Biden actually knew Garland long before Obama wanted to nominate him to the SC.
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.”
Fallows is right that understanding how information is framed is critical for raising awareness of implicit biases. As I am sure you know Frank Luntz is a master of framing. He conducted many focus groups to come up with just the right terms to frame Republican’s policy positions.
For example to come up with better messaging about turning Social Security and Medicare over to for profit companies Luntz found that using the term “privatization” caused people to activate frames about personal empowerment and distrust of government rather than frames about not trusting Wall Street. “Death taxes” is another example of a term Luntz came up with to negatively frame the estate tax.
Dan Froomkin also has a great article up which I discussed in my comment above. Froomkin points out that Baquet’s snotty dismissal of Twitter criticism directly contradicts Sulzberger’s assertion that social media and reader criticism would replace the public editor’s role.
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.
Everything you just said. While they went hard on Hillary Clinton, the NYT’s coverage of Trump was a joke, and they left informing the public a long time ago.
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.
I seriously doubt the Times will ever face a day of reckoning, at least not in my lifetime. It never did after years of flogging dishonest Clinton scandal stories then trashing Al Gore. It paid almost no price for helping the Bush administration lie us into an unnecessary war and despite helping to elect Trump the Times is still considered the gold standard of journalism.
It's not that public opinion will turn against the NYT; my point is that there are 3 SCOTUS justices eager to limit the current libel law precedent. While it won't happen via the Palin suit, it appears that thanks, in no small part, to indefensible bias of the NYT, yet another cornerstone of democracy will be damaged, and in turn, the NYT.
Given that the attacks are coming from the right I’m afraid it will make the media even more willing to pander to that side. Also making libel lawsuits easier to win it may result in the media doing less investigative reporting. From what I have read the tobacco lawsuit against CBS and the Food Lion lawsuit against ABC resulted in them being less aggressive in their coverage of powerful corporations.
Yes, that is my point. Looser libel laws will curtail the media's willingness to do much of the oversight that's supposed to be their mandate, thus weakening the NYT. With curtailed coverage comes a reduced need for journalists. It's a predictable downward spiral, forged by mediocrity in leadership and greed in ownership. It's been clear for the past 6 years that Beltway journalists were the architects of their own demise. Meanwhile the Texas GOP is looking at banning contraceptive rights...
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 remember when Trump pardoned all his crooked friends and thinking, most of them were involved in crimes that centered around Trump. What amazed me and still does is that nobody batted an eye, even when he pardoned Bannon for embezzling over $1 million from the privately raised "fund" to build the border wall. You'd think those "investors" would have thrown a fit, but no.
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.
Baquet disagrees with your assessment of him. In that New Yorker interview he said:
“I don’t want to call myself a great journalist, other people will have to decide what kind of journalist I am but I think to run the New York Times you have to be a great, thoughtful journalist. That comes first. That’s before everything else.”
In other words “I don’t want to call myself a great journalists, but I have to.”
I wonder does Baquat know people think his paper has gone to hell in a hand basket. Well mr. Great and Thoughtful, way to kill what was a once great newspaper.
I'm not sure he's dumb. Irresponsible, derelict in his duties as a steward of the fourth estate, perhaps.. But not dumb.
Baquet is doing what most news outlets are doing: Infotainment... Lot's more money in that than in responsibly reporting facts and holding politicians accountable.
The reason it is so difficult for the NYTimes (and others) to admit that they got it wrong is that pundits one job is to be right (they are being paid for their expert opinion, after all), and if they are wrong, who will ever trust them again?
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.
Schlesinger’s remark about the arrogance of people at the Times should be better known. I would like to know the truth about why Jill Abramson was fired. Understandably she has been unwilling to talk about it. She couldn’t have been worse than Baquet.
There's also a reference in The Brethren, Bob Woodward's and Scott Armstrong's book inside the Supreme Court (and there are debatable things in it, of course), to James Reston being told that Justice John Marshall Harlan II refused to vote so as to avoid any questions of bias. Reston supposedly said, "We all vote at The Times," and they said Harlan found it amusing that a journalist would be so pompous about his newspaper, while Reston said he had no recollection of the conversation. Well, who knows? Reston, Russell Baker, Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, and Harrison Salisbury didn't suffer from the idea that if The Times said it, it had to be true, but, boy, did Frankel and Abe Rosenthal!
As for her firing, I suspect Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., didn't get along with her as he hoped, but I have no doubt that Baquet was in there telling him all the nonexistent problems she was causing. The sexism in that place is so obvious.
Arrogance pretty much sums it up. The people at the NYT are so enamored with their own superiority, they are not capable of self-reflection or correction.
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?
I think the reason people have reacted so strongly is that the Times is considered the gold standard and is the most influential newspaper especially on people in positions of power. Other media outlets often follows its lead. That is why Steve Bannon turned first to the Times to get his Clinton Foundation propaganda into the mainstream media. Bannon knows that if the Times report something the rest will follow its lead.
And he knew Axis Maggie would obediently print it. Axis, who says NYT never uses the word "lie", accused Clinton staffers of lying about the Clinton Foundation in a tweet.
This is true. Every presidential candidate begs for the Times' endorsement. That endorsement is literally gold when it comes to both follow-up endorsements by other papers, and campaign contributions. And they "frame" major stories, such as when they led the charge in calling Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan "disastrous."
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.
sadly, whoever follows Baquet will likely continue to make same mistakes
They're not "mistakes". They're deliberately misinforming people for the Republican Party.
We college educated “libs” call it propaganda.
I thinks its more like a deeply ingrained bias. This article by long time media observer James Fallows is a good summary of how that works.
I used to think that, too, that it is a mere "bias". Then my reasoning became more powerful than my skepticism, and I realized it is not bias, it is conscious intent. To have a "bias" against liberals, Democrats, or the Clintons, at this point, is to be malevolent and stupid simultaneously. I know we shouldn't blame these folks for sincerely feeling that the fascist thuggery from the right wing doesn't represent as much of an existential threat to America as the excesses of the reactionary radical leftists; there really are sound reasons for taking that stance. But clinging to it at this point, when it is Joe Biden against Donny Treason and Cancun Cruz against AOC, isn't even cynicism, let alone skepticism, it is just plain paranoia of a particularly delusional sort.
The National archives referred this matter to DOJ to investigate a couple of weeks ago. The media has not made much of that story like they did with “buttery mails” stories.
exactly! “Criminality” was the media’s calling card for Clinton emails
Hmmmm I wonder why the Times buried the story about the Russian server in Trump Tower?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html
I found one NYT story when I googled. Overall, this bombshell of a story inexplicably fizzled out. There was media coverage, the NYT's most recent story is dated October 2021. Nobody buried it, it just seems to be an unsolvable mystery.
It’s true that no one ever found out for sure what happened but a lot of media coverage that I have seen pretends those communications never happened, not that they just haven’t been explained.
"But her emails!"
From what I have seen they have decided those communications didn’t happen. The truth is that there are several explanations for those “pings” but none has been proven. This article from a few months ago is a good summary of the story.
https://www.businessinsider.com/alfa-bank-trump-organization-link-remains-mystery-after-durham-indictment-2021-10
The individual currently occupying space in the AG's office won't make much of it either.
When all the biopics about this come out years/decades from now Garland will be the obstructionist like George Wallace in Selma.
Agreed. The DOJ is selling us and our democracy down the river over an obsession with "process" and "precedent." We have eight months left and the sense of urgency is non-existent.
"Sulzberger will find someone equally in thrall to the GOP..."
You're right. That deplorable demographic is the most susceptible to the click bait infotainment that is the bread and butter of today's news organizations like Baquet's NYT. The opportunity cost of NOT catering to their naivete and ignorance is too high.
Baquet is doing what he's paid to do and Maggie will never be fired. I wonder if any "reporter" has asked Baquet about why they were hell bent on acquiring Clinton Cash and if they vetted the material in the book since it was a right wing hit piece.
The NYT fancies itself as the guardian of the conventional wisdom and the arbiter of all political and social discourse. Always has, always will. And the greatest profit comes from the Republicans and the dark money billionaires that love them. You are correct, Baquet is exactly what the Sulzberger family wants in charge, and legacy hire Maggie will never be fired, at least as long as they feel the need for a pipeline to Trump. That doesn't change the fact that today would be a good day to fire Maggie Haberman.
Amen to that!!!
It won't matter because nobody will want to prosecute Trump. I think the Justice Dept is more inclined to walk away from something so divisive in an election year (not that there isn't always an excuse not to mess with a former president).
I've been alive long enough to understand that nothing ever changes. This too. If they wait long enough, the public will simply forget about it.
I think Garland is afraid that Fox and the Republicans will call anything he does to prosecute Trump or his Congressional enablers revenge for the McConnell freeze out. He needs to grow a thicker skin and a spine and ignore it, do what's right for the country and the rule of law. At the same time, Tish James is showing that she has zero f'ks to give for Trump's bullshit. She is going to burn the Trump Organization to the ground, and turn everything she has over to the Manhattan DA for criminal prosecution. He may not go after the Orange Menace, but I'd bet he sends DJTJr, Ivanka, Eric and Weiselberg up the river. The Georgia DA may have zero f'ks left as well, and she may decide to prosecute her open and shut case against Trump as well.
Especially with the NY prosecutions, remember, they got John Gotti, and he like Trump, strutted around the city for years thinking that he was immune.
You have more faith than I do. He is a coward and a do-nothing. Maybe they will give him a custodian job at the Ministry of Justice when the Fourth Reich is installed. The rest of us will be fighting an insurgency to take back whatever hope is left for a democracy from the MAGA-Schutzstaffel.
I think Garland just doesn't have it in him to act against a former president. He's very much like Bob Mueller in that regard. I don't think he's at all concerned about what Fox News or the GOP think of him. Letitia James is the opposite - she even withdrew from the gubernatorial race because she wants to see the Trump case through to its conclusion.
Biden chose Garland because they're of the same mindset, which is that of old school politicians who think all problems should be solved at the ballot box.
Then we are done. We have eight months left before the actual "steal" takes place. These are not normal, genteel, gentlemanly times. We are in a streetfight about to see democracy gutted by brownshirts. If he is not up to the job, I have no other suggestions for democracy fans other than to get ready for what's coming and decide how we are going to respond to living in a Handmaid's Tale dystopia. Hyperbole? Not on your life...
Perhaps, but it is just as plausible that Biden chose Garland to give him a consolation prize for McConnell's foul actions. Biden may have even been hoping that Garland might be looking for a bit of revenge. That said, I think Garland is cowed by the potential for bad PR, after all, he was a judge for a long time and they want to toil in the background. Same problem with Mueller. It's good that Tish James is not infected with typical Democratic spinelessness.
Revenge? Because we should play dirty just like the Republicans? I don't think Biden is that petty. In fact, he was all about conciliation, "reaching across the aisle." Biden actually knew Garland long before Obama wanted to nominate him to the SC.
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.”
Oh good piece! thanks for posting link
Fallows is right that understanding how information is framed is critical for raising awareness of implicit biases. As I am sure you know Frank Luntz is a master of framing. He conducted many focus groups to come up with just the right terms to frame Republican’s policy positions.
For example to come up with better messaging about turning Social Security and Medicare over to for profit companies Luntz found that using the term “privatization” caused people to activate frames about personal empowerment and distrust of government rather than frames about not trusting Wall Street. “Death taxes” is another example of a term Luntz came up with to negatively frame the estate tax.
https://coolcommunicator.com/estate-tax-death-tax-change-public-opinion-overnight-video/
Dan Froomkin also has a great article up which I discussed in my comment above. Froomkin points out that Baquet’s snotty dismissal of Twitter criticism directly contradicts Sulzberger’s assertion that social media and reader criticism would replace the public editor’s role.
Yes, it’s excellent
+ *Smug*
Great piece!
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.
The Times was also one of the media outlets that trashed Gore mercilessly which really strengthened Bush’s candidacy.
👆Wow.
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.
Everything you just said. While they went hard on Hillary Clinton, the NYT’s coverage of Trump was a joke, and they left informing the public a long time ago.
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.
yes, there’s a direct connection between NYT treatment of Clinton and current right-wing smear re: Clinton “spying”
I seriously doubt the Times will ever face a day of reckoning, at least not in my lifetime. It never did after years of flogging dishonest Clinton scandal stories then trashing Al Gore. It paid almost no price for helping the Bush administration lie us into an unnecessary war and despite helping to elect Trump the Times is still considered the gold standard of journalism.
It's not that public opinion will turn against the NYT; my point is that there are 3 SCOTUS justices eager to limit the current libel law precedent. While it won't happen via the Palin suit, it appears that thanks, in no small part, to indefensible bias of the NYT, yet another cornerstone of democracy will be damaged, and in turn, the NYT.
Given that the attacks are coming from the right I’m afraid it will make the media even more willing to pander to that side. Also making libel lawsuits easier to win it may result in the media doing less investigative reporting. From what I have read the tobacco lawsuit against CBS and the Food Lion lawsuit against ABC resulted in them being less aggressive in their coverage of powerful corporations.
Yes, that is my point. Looser libel laws will curtail the media's willingness to do much of the oversight that's supposed to be their mandate, thus weakening the NYT. With curtailed coverage comes a reduced need for journalists. It's a predictable downward spiral, forged by mediocrity in leadership and greed in ownership. It's been clear for the past 6 years that Beltway journalists were the architects of their own demise. Meanwhile the Texas GOP is looking at banning contraceptive rights...
Well, the "gold standard" of journalism has slowly become the "gold toilet at Trump Tower" standard of journalism.
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 remember when Trump pardoned all his crooked friends and thinking, most of them were involved in crimes that centered around Trump. What amazed me and still does is that nobody batted an eye, even when he pardoned Bannon for embezzling over $1 million from the privately raised "fund" to build the border wall. You'd think those "investors" would have thrown a fit, but no.
This is what I was thinking.
Thx for bringing up this minor detail… :/
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"!
Sounds like ‘pick and choose what you like!’…?
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.
his interviews are uniformity unimpressive
He's just another example of the Peter Principle! The more incompetent you are the higher you rise in the organization.
That concept was first described in the late sixties. It still holds today but almost no one refers to it anymore.
Baquet disagrees with your assessment of him. In that New Yorker interview he said:
“I don’t want to call myself a great journalist, other people will have to decide what kind of journalist I am but I think to run the New York Times you have to be a great, thoughtful journalist. That comes first. That’s before everything else.”
In other words “I don’t want to call myself a great journalists, but I have to.”
I wonder does Baquat know people think his paper has gone to hell in a hand basket. Well mr. Great and Thoughtful, way to kill what was a once great newspaper.
I'm not sure he's dumb. Irresponsible, derelict in his duties as a steward of the fourth estate, perhaps.. But not dumb.
Baquet is doing what most news outlets are doing: Infotainment... Lot's more money in that than in responsibly reporting facts and holding politicians accountable.
The reason it is so difficult for the NYTimes (and others) to admit that they got it wrong is that pundits one job is to be right (they are being paid for their expert opinion, after all), and if they are wrong, who will ever trust them again?
I trust media which openly admits mistakes far more than I trust ones that don’t.
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.
Schlesinger’s remark about the arrogance of people at the Times should be better known. I would like to know the truth about why Jill Abramson was fired. Understandably she has been unwilling to talk about it. She couldn’t have been worse than Baquet.
There's also a reference in The Brethren, Bob Woodward's and Scott Armstrong's book inside the Supreme Court (and there are debatable things in it, of course), to James Reston being told that Justice John Marshall Harlan II refused to vote so as to avoid any questions of bias. Reston supposedly said, "We all vote at The Times," and they said Harlan found it amusing that a journalist would be so pompous about his newspaper, while Reston said he had no recollection of the conversation. Well, who knows? Reston, Russell Baker, Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, and Harrison Salisbury didn't suffer from the idea that if The Times said it, it had to be true, but, boy, did Frankel and Abe Rosenthal!
As for her firing, I suspect Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., didn't get along with her as he hoped, but I have no doubt that Baquet was in there telling him all the nonexistent problems she was causing. The sexism in that place is so obvious.
Arrogance pretty much sums it up. The people at the NYT are so enamored with their own superiority, they are not capable of self-reflection or correction.
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?
Also, the Clinton Foundation v. The Trump Organization, covering it as if they were equal. And you’re right, they never apologize or correct.
I think the reason people have reacted so strongly is that the Times is considered the gold standard and is the most influential newspaper especially on people in positions of power. Other media outlets often follows its lead. That is why Steve Bannon turned first to the Times to get his Clinton Foundation propaganda into the mainstream media. Bannon knows that if the Times report something the rest will follow its lead.
And he knew Axis Maggie would obediently print it. Axis, who says NYT never uses the word "lie", accused Clinton staffers of lying about the Clinton Foundation in a tweet.
This is true. Every presidential candidate begs for the Times' endorsement. That endorsement is literally gold when it comes to both follow-up endorsements by other papers, and campaign contributions. And they "frame" major stories, such as when they led the charge in calling Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan "disastrous."
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.👀
He won't answer but I will!
The answer is...Yes, provided you will publish every lie the Republicans provide after they've tested it with Frank Luntz's focus groups!
And Steve Bannon and Roger Stone have signed off on it.