As a daily reader of The New York Times, I’ve often been baffled by its negative coverage of Biden, coupled with its kid-glove treatment of Trump. For example, the Times constantly harps on Biden’s age, highlighting every verbal gaffe. When the Hur Report was released, containing gratuitous remarks about Biden’s mental acuity, the Times featured it in multiple stories but paid no attention to critiques by retired federal prosecutors about Hur’s highly partisan background. And after the debate between Biden and Trump, the Times editorial board was quick to call on Biden to step down, but not the convicted felon Trump, who lied nonstop throughout the debate. Since the debate, readers of The Times have seen a steady flow of articles urging Biden to step down. Just last night, I counted six concurrent articles about Biden’s infirmity and why he should leave the race.

There’s no question that Biden has slowed down, and his gait is not as vigorous as it was in the past. As everyone agreed, including Biden, his debate performance was awful. Nonetheless, he’s only three years older than Trump, and he has a wealth of experience and knowledge, as well as a well-qualified staff. Why does the Times echo the Republicans’ main talking points?

Contrast their coverage of Trump. Every time he holds a rally, he attacks the integrity of American institutions and hurls personal insults at his opponents. He curses and carries on like a bully. He lies about the 2020 election and leads his followers to believe that elections are routinely “rigged,” unless he wins. He ridicules the judiciary, the civil service, and describes the economy as failing. He says that America is a failing country. No person or institution is spared his insults unless they are on his team. And they don’t have a place on his team unless they agree that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden is an illegitimate president. The Times pays little attention to the anti-democratic, authoritarian tone of his speeches and seldom mentions his unhinged rants, where he goes off topic and speaks nonsense.

I think I found the explanation. It’s contained in this post by media watcher Daniel Froomkin. The editor-in-chief of the Times has made clear that the paper will not take sides. It will not be partisan. Therefore it must treat Trump as a normal candidate—not a wannabe fascist with dangerous plans—and must bend over backwards to criticize Biden.

Froomkin writes:

Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.

He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.

But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.

Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party:

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.

But critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.

Kahn’s position is, not coincidentally, identical to that of his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who I recently wrote about in my post, “Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.”

And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.

Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.

“I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that,” he said.

I translate that to mean that the old guard has reasserted total control over the rabble.

But how, exactly, the Times lost its footing, he doesn’t explain. I’d love to see him point to a few articles that he considers went too far. Best I can tell, his real complaint is that the Times under Baquet hired too many young and diverse people who — in his view — don’t understand the rules.

“I think there’s a larger number of people who we might at some point have hired, but we’ve asked the kind of questions or looked at the sort of work that they do, and wondered whether they’d be a good fit for us,” Kahn said, making it clear he won’t make that mistake again.

His example was hyperbolic and not even vaguely credible:

We’re looking more closely and asking more questions and doing more interviews. … We’ve actually asked people, “What happens if you got an assignment to go and report on some people that have said some nasty things and that you don’t like, what would you do?” And some people say, “I’d reject the assignment.” Okay, well, then you should work somewhere else.

I’d be willing to bet a large sum that no job candidate at the Times has ever said any such thing.

On Democracy

In one small paragraph, Kahn outdid himself. He:

  • Dismissed the importance of democracy as a political issue.
  • Disclosed that the Times coverage is poll driven.
  • Asserted that coverage of the economy and immigration is favorable to Trump.
  • Whined that more coverage of democracy was tantamount to becoming a partisan publication.

Here’s what he said:

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?

(Smith had asked Kahn to respond to Pfeiffer, a former Obama official, who recently complained that the editors at the Times  “do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.”)

That one paragraph, posted on social media by NYU professor Jay Rosen, elicited a storm of critiques.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling was among those upset by Kahn’s dismissal of democracy as a key issue.

Hate to Godwin’s Law this, but what if the Berlin Bugle in 1931 said, Hitler may be a threat to democracy, but polls show that most Germans are most concerned about Communism and the Jewish problem. A journalist’s job is not to reflect the polls, but to cover the objectively important stories.

University College London professor Brian Klaas wrote:

It is insane to me that someone in this role doesn’t understand that democracy is the superstructure for literally everything else. Democracy isn’t an issue that matters because of public opinion. It’s *the* issue that makes free public opinion possible.

Veteran political observer Norm Ornstein wrote:

This is both cringeworthy and frightening. I can’t say it is sleepwalking to dictatorship. He is not sleeping. It is marching in that direction.

Entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash concluded:

Just so you know, NYT fully believes they have no obligation to stop the fascist attack on America. They’ve finally said so explicitly. Act accordingly.

Many objected to Kahn’s argument that democracy is a partisan issue. Extremism researcher Mark Pitcavage wrote:

This quote strongly suggests the exec editor of the NYT can’t even think of democracy as an issue other than as a Biden campaign strategy.

OG blogger Heather “Digby” Parton wrote:

This is so, so tiresome. Nobody says it’s his job to “help” Joe Biden. It would be nice if they could find it in their hearts not to sabotage him though.

Others were horrified that Kahn breezily suggested that the economy and immigration were favorable stories for Trump. Journalist and author James Surowiecki wrote:

If the NYT covers it accurately, the economy is not an issue that is “favorable to Trump.”

A Twitter user named Hank Hoffman wrote:

The Exec. Editor of @nytimes believes immigration, the economy, & inflation are issues “favorable to Trump.”

Just to take immigration, why would a plan for militarized mass deportations & concentration camps be “favorable to Trump?” How’s a STRONG economy “favorable to Trump?

[Please open the link to finish this excellent post.]

The above post was written in May.

More recently, the Times demonstrated Froomkin’s point about its habit of normalizing Trump.

Froomkin retweeted the following example:

@scaredlawyerguy: If Biden so much as flubs a word in a speech, there’s a week of “he’s lost it, too old, step down” argle bargle in the media but Trump? He can rant incoherently for an hour and the media is just like “the hold this guy has on his supporters, it’s INCREDIBLE”

Meisels’s:

Here is a short summary of Donald Trump’s June 9 speech in Las Vegas:

  1. Tells crowd “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote. I don’t care.”
  2. Tells contractors who set up mic and teleprompter they did a “shitty job” and he “won’t pay them.”
  3. Tells audience to choose “suicide over Biden.”
  4. Complains about teleprompter again.
  5. Asks “Do I get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark?”
  6. Claims he “aced” a dementia test twice: “Not easy to ace!”
  7. Says “There has never been people treated more horrifically than J6 hostages.”
  8. Calls prosecutor a “dumb son of a bitch.”
  9. Complains media is too focused on health of crowd in heat when they should “care about Trump.”
  10. Glitches multiple times.
  11. Speech ends. Trump whisked away on private jet paid for by donors.

We have all the receipts here

youtu.be/A27GiTMmXjE?si…