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? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?
– Joe Kahn, NY Times Executive Editor, Semafor interview.
Oh boy. Where to begin?
In this Semafor interview with Ben Smith, the former Times media editor, the New York Times executive editor explains how they have to cover immigration because it’s polling at the top of issues.
And what I find fascinating is there’s nary a thought for how that issue got there, the accuracy of that perception, and the part they played. Nothing to do with the slow death of local journalism, the relentless barrage of Republican TV ads, or the constant hammering of an immigration “crisis” on Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN. Why is it that people who live in Minnesota, for example, are so worried about the border?
Not to mention that the Times coverage simply follows (their own inaccurate) polls, not news worthiness. So we have a continuing feedback loop. “We cover the border because people care about the border. People care about the border because we cover it in a vaccum, and not the political manipulation that keeps it in the public eye.”
Create the narrative, then cover the narrative. Because polling.
As a former journalist, I know that I couldn’t cover the border without “the Republican party refused to vote for the comprehensive border bill because it would give Biden a political win” placed prominently in every story. But I’m stubborn that way. Because readers care even more about political hypocrisy, and it doesn’t show up in polls. It’s just a given.
But according to Joe Kahn, the Times is the Mary Poppins of news organizations, Practically Perfect In Every Way. He refuses to see that readers aren’t asking him to serve as the house organ for the Democratic party — we’re only asking that they take their thumb off the scale!
Every day is a tabula rasa at the Times. No context, no self examination. No institutional history.
