Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.

A.G. Sulzberger's two rules: Don't be alarmist and don't make the partisans happy

It’s an increasingly common critique of the New York Times: The largest, most influential news organization in the nation is not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy — while at the same time bashing President Joe Biden at every opportunity.

And it’s been a bit of a mystery. Why would a newsroom full of talented and mostly liberal reporters be engaging in such damaging behavior?

Well, mystery solved.

It’s because that’s what the publisher wants.

Publisher A.G. Sulzberger — perhaps unintentionally — showed his hand in a speech on Monday at Oxford University on “Journalistic Independence in a Time of Division.” His ostensible goal was to defend the Times against its critics. But the two biggest takeaways, in my view, were as follows:

One: Sounding the alarm, it turns out, is anathema to Sulzberger’s notion of independent journalism. Independent journalism should instead “empower our fellow citizens with the information they need to make decisions for themselves.” There are plenty of other people sounding the alarm, he insisted. “Indeed, the alarm seems so loud and so constant that much of the public has by now put in earplugs.” Furthermore, he said, “journalists don’t serve the public by trying to predict history’s judgments, or to steer society to them.”

And two: According to Sulzberger, independent journalism requires being “willing to take a simple, easy, or comfortable story and complicate it with truths that people don’t want to hear.” He described it as a badge of honor that “independent reporting — the kind that doesn’t fully align with any one perspective — will never win over the partisans.” He expressed contempt for “echo chambers” that “celebrate work that conforms to their narratives and protest anything that challenges them.”

What does that mean — practically speaking — to the editors and reporters who work for him? In my view, the message is clear:

One: You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist.

And two: You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.

That explains a lot of the Times’s aberrant behavior, doesn’t it?

A Response to Critics?

The speech — the annual Reuters Memorial Lecture – was framed as a response to critics but never honestly engaged with their most serious and urgent concerns. Instead, Sulzberger built straw men and blew them down, from start to finish.

He started, in fact, by describing his speech as a response to what he called the “growing resistance to independent journalism.”

But the growing resistance to the Times is not to its independence! The problem is not the Times’s august standards, it’s that the Times isn’t living up to them. It’s not measuring up to the moment.

Here’s how Sulzberger defined independent journalism. I think it’s a wonderful definition!

You can think of it as a first-order commitment to open-mindedness. Journalistic independence demands a willingness to follow the facts, even when they lead you away from what you assumed would be true. A willingness to engage at once empathetically and skeptically with a wide variety of people and perspectives. An insistence on reflecting the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. A posture of curiosity rather than conviction, of humility rather than righteousness.

Does any of that describe the New York Times you’re familiar with? Especially the work coming out of its Washington and Jerusalem bureaus?

Just for starters:

• Times political articles are much more likely to reflect conventional wisdom than defy it.

• Times reporters barely ever talk to Biden supporters – certainly not Black ones.

• The D.C. bureau believes fervently that there is still a moderate, rational core to the Republican Party.

• And do you find the Times humble? I didn’t think so.

Now here’s how Sulzberger summed up what he called the attacks on the Times’s “journalistic independence”:

It’s long been contested by those on the right who see it as masking a pervasive liberal bias in newsrooms. It’s long been contested by those on the left who argue that independence privileges a straight, white, male worldview that props up existing power structures. And it’s increasingly contested by some journalists, who argue that a society grappling with existential challenges cannot afford an impartial press focused more on sharing information than crusading for change. Independence, in this view, is a peacetime luxury.

Let’s unpack that.

He’s correct about the critique from the right, although these days it seems quaint.

He’s sorta correct about the critique from the left, although that critique is technically not of “independence” but of “objectivity” as defined by Times leadership.

But he intentionally misconstrues the critique from “some journalists” – by which he presumably means people like me.

We aren’t asking the Times’s news side to “crusade for change.” We’re not asking it to abandon independence as a “peacetime luxury.” 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.

Reporting that Trump is a racist fanatic who would turn a democratic government into his personal fiefdom is not crusading, it’s journalism.

Reporting (endlessly) that Biden is old without noting that Trump is deranged is not “independent” journalism, it’s just bad journalism.

Sulzberger also defended the Times’s unremittingly hostile coverage of gender-affirming care for young people by saying critics don’t want the topic covered at all, which is not remotely true. They want it covered fairly, in a way that respects trans existence.

And he defended the Times’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by saying it’s impossible to please everybody. “There’s no story that is more fiercely contested, more mired in competing zero-sum narratives,” he said. But he didn’t address one common concern, which is that Times coverage is generally more respectful of Jewish lives than it is of Palestinians’.

The Threat to Democracy

The closest Sulzberger came to addressing concerns about the Times’s campaign coverage was responding generally to critics who he said “insist our coverage will end up on the wrong side of history.”

Earlier in the speech he had ruefully acknowledged two epic, historic failures of Times coverage – the Iraq war and the AIDS crisis– both of which put the Times very much on the wrong side of history, and both of which could have been avoided if the Times had been less credulous and less bigoted, respectively.

Nevertheless, Sulzberger said, worrying about future judgements is warping to independent journalism.

Why? How? He insisted that “the instinct to write for the future judgement of history rather than the public we serve today can lead even the most well intentioned journalist astray in three ways.”

I don’t see the conflict, myself. But let’s go through his explanation point by point:

First, everyone wants to make the right decisions, but it’s not always clear as the news unfolds what “right” means. Claims to the moral high ground in the moment, like the War on Terror or Defund the Police, haven’t always aged well.

Yes, but sometimes it is obvious what’s right. Defending democracy would age just fine, I assure you.

Second, seeking to drive toward a particular “right” outcome creates incentives to twist reality — hyping facts that align with your case and downplaying facts that don’t. That approach is fundamentally at odds with journalism’s responsibility to inform the public and undermines the long-term trust any news organization depends on. This is the trap Fox News is in, contorting the news to serve a political mission and leaving its own viewers badly misinformed, believing that President Obama was born in Kenya or that President Trump won the last election.

What a nasty little straw man argument that is. We’re not asking the Times to become the Fox News of the left! We’re not asking anyone to hype or downplay anything. We’re asking it to report accurately on a hell of a news story – the possible loss of our democracy – and stop obsessing over Biden’s age at the expense of writing about his achievements.

Simply put, journalists don’t serve the public by trying to predict history’s judgments, or to steer society to them. Our job as journalists is firmly rooted in the present: to arm society with the information and context it needs to thoughtfully grapple with issues of the day. The belief that an informed public makes better decisions is perhaps the most hopeful conceit of an independent press.

Let’s be real: Nobody looking at the recent poll results could possibly argue that the public is adequately informed. Maybe it’s time to change course?

As I’ve written before, it is not appropriate for news organizations to tell people who they should vote for. But it is appropriate for them to actively strive to correct misinformation, clear up public misunderstandings of key issues in public policy, and advocate for democracy.

Now let’s take a closer look at Sulzberger’s comments about not wanting to be alarmist.

[W]hen I look at the forces keeping society from coming together to rise to the challenges of our era — whether in the Middle East, Ukraine, the United States or anywhere else — I see no lack of passionate, morally confident actors sounding the alarm. Indeed, the alarm seems so loud and so constant that much of the public has by now put in earplugs.

I view the posture of independence as the better, more optimistic path. As independent journalists, we empower our fellow citizens with the information they need to make decisions for themselves. That is a profound act of trust, of confidence. I remain clear eyed about the ways misinformation and polarization conspire to block the shared reality society needs to come together. But I believe that the answer to those scourges can be found not in an advocate’s crusading righteousness, but in a journalist’s humbler mission: to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

But I don’t know of any job more important for a news organization than to sound the alarm when there’s a real emergency. That’s not “crusading righteousness.” It’s very much “helping people understand the world.”

What the Times Has Done and Not Done

I should note that the Times doesn’t completely ignore the threat Trump poses to democratic governance. During a panel discussion after the speech, Sulzberger himself gave a shout-out to the Times’s “Trump 2025” series:

One of the most important bodies of work we created in the last year, our colleagues Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage spent basically the entire year digging into what does Trump’s first year – it’s called like the Trump 25 project. They got to know everyone in his world, in orbit, the folks who are shaping the sort of intellectual architecture of his term. But also they’ve gotten in his head and understood like what is his mindset. What did he learn from the last term about how effectively to wield the powers of the office? And I think when you get that whole picture together, he is clearly running on a more overtly antidemocratic platform than any candidate in well – than any major party candidate in well over a century. Right? There’s no disputing that. He’s taken direct aim at countless institutional norms, you know, with plans to dismantle the civil service, with plans to weaponize the Justice Department, with plans to greatly expand executive authority. You know It’s a really, really important story.

The series was impressive, with individual stories on Prosecuting Foes, Executive Power, Lawyers, Immigration, Weaker Checks, NATO, and Trade War.

So evidently Sulzberger understands the stakes himself.

The problem is that the endless drumbeat of daily coverage, which should be constantly repeating these conclusions about the stakes, instead continues to be standard-issue both-sides horserace coverage and stenography, with a surfeit of negative stories about Biden.

So for instance you get a story the morning after Super Tuesday headlined “On a Bright Night for His Campaign, Trump Again Conjures a Dark Vision” – where the dark vision is not Trump’s own plans for office but his “sinister evocations of what he portrayed as a grim fate for the country if President Biden is re-elected.” There was no pushback from reporter Michael Gold, just stenographic mention of Trump’s “meandering list of grievances, insisting that the nation was descending toward chaos under Mr. Biden’s leadership.”

Salon columnist Lucian K. Truscott IV recently channeled the widespread fury over the way the Times blasted its coverage of a poll that asked if Biden and Trump are too old but not whether either of them are too deranged. The top-of-the-front-page headline “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to be Effective” came after a number of overly critical articles, including “How Old Is Too Old to Be President? An Uncomfortable Question Arises Again“, “Special Counsel’s Report Puts Biden’s Age and Memory in the Spotlight,” and an episode of “The Daily” podcast headlined “The Biden Problem Democrats Can No Longer Ignore.”

Meanwhile, an article headlined “Fewer Voters Think Trump Committed Crimes, Polls Show” neglected to mention that a majority – 53 percent – still did feel that way. (h/t Jamison Foser.)

Chief White House correspondent Peter Baker even cast the challenges Biden has faced as a violation of his campaign promises, in a story headlined “Biden Promised Calm After Trump Chaos, but the World Has Not Cooperated.”

The Times frequently reports on how views of the economy are unrealistically bleak and that Biden gets no credit for shockingly good economic growth, wage growth and low unemployment. What the Times does not do is recognize how it has contributed to the negative perceptions — and it certainly doesn’t try to correct misunderstandings. That wouldn’t be crusading, it would simply be making up for an information deficit.

And finally, in a major article about the “kickoff” to the real presidential campaign – coauthored by Maggie Haberman of the Trump 2025 project – there was no mention of the word “democracy” nor any indication that it is under threat. Instead, the article declared that Biden is behind and “is hampered by widespread concerns about his age and his handling of the job, fractures in the Democratic coalition over Israel and a general sourness about the state of the nation.” It only mentioned in passing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol or his criminal trials.

All of this makes sense if you understand that there is a powerful incentive at the Times to make the publisher happy.

But contra Sulzberger, there is, in fact, cause for much more alarm than the Times reflects in its daily coverage. There are misconceptions to clear up. This is not just a popularity contest. Too much is at stake.

And I dearly wish (to use his own words) that Sulzberger would listen to and respond to his journalistic critics from “a posture of curiosity rather than conviction, of humility rather than righteousness.” We might just help save democracy.