I apologize for plunging us back into the murky depths of The New York Times again so soon. But please bear with me – they get even murkier.
On Sunday afternoon, James Bennet, editor of the Opinion section of the Times, resigned. Capping off what can now only be described as a saga, Bennet stepped down after five days of internal and external turmoil following the publication of an Op-Ed written by Republican Senator Tom Cotton advocating for deploying the U.S. military to “restore order” in U.S. cities. The rollercoaster ride of published responses, staff protests, internal memos, Slack messages, and town halls was the subject of last week’s Chumbox, and I won’t get back into it here. But Bennet’s resignation is important, both for the Times (Bennet was assumed to be the leading heir apparent to the executive editor position, after Dean Baquet retires; it’s also worth noting, he’s the brother of Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, who ran for president last year) and for journalism and media more generally.
The rout at the Times is indicative of a dramatic realization in mainstream, or traditional, journalism. All of a sudden, the “neutral”/“fair and balanced”/“view from nowhere”/“voice of God” tone so prized by American media (prestige newspapers especially) has been exposed as woefully, even offensively, inadequate. It’s now becoming more widely understood that such an “objective” voice is not really objective at all (big surprise there) and instead contains its own biases and a constant if implicit siding with/defending of the status quo.
Joan Didion saw right through the media’s obsession with “objectivity,” describing, in 1996, “the genuflection toward ‘fairness’” as “a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal.” She continues,
In this business of running the story, in fact in the news business itself, certain conventions are seen as beyond debate. “Opinion” will be so labeled, and confined to the op-ed page or the television talk shows. “News analysis” will be so labeled, and will appear in a subordinate position to the “news” story it accompanies. In the rest of the paper as on the evening news, the story will be reported “impartially,” the story will be “evenhanded,” the story will be “fair.”
Often in journalism, there is an insistence by management on neutral or “unbiased” coverage, which often manifests itself in the suppression of “progressive” or under-represented voices, while, on the other side of the coin, raising up racist, violent, and/or corporate voices, even subtly. The “neutral” voice we’re often left with is one that errs on the side of defense of the status quo. But “apolitical” does not mean “unbiased.” The “official account” is often not true in any meaningful sense of the word, but it is nevertheless seen as “objective” and will be presented as the truth: a police report, a company press release, or the words of a politician, for example. In fact, writes Didion, “‘fairness’ has often come to mean a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”
These are important and long-time-coming conversations for the media – and The New York Times is not the only place having them. This past week also saw staff outrage and senior resignations at other outlets over bad/inappropriate coverage of the murder of George Floyd and the anti-racist protests that followed. Relatedly, it’s also becoming clearer and clearer that newsrooms aren’t diverse enough, an issue that often reveals itself in the coverage that they produce.
In Pennsylvania, managers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette told Alexis Johnson, a black reporter, that she could no longer cover the protests in the city after she posted a tweet that was seen as biased by editors. The union that represents the Post-Gazette’s 140 staff members demanded that Johnson be reinstated to protest coverage, and said that they would pursue legal action. Also last week at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, two stories about the protests were apparently removed and rewritten, then reposted with more police-friendly photos and no bylines. And at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the senior editor resigned after dozens of staffers called in sick in protest of a column the paper published about property damage during the protests, headlined “Buildings Matter, Too” (it’s since been renamed, I believe).
This “revolt” in America’s newsrooms is also the topic of Ben Smith’s column this week. He writes,
The shift in mainstream American media – driven by a journalism that is more personal, and reporters more willing to speak what they see as the truth without worrying about alienating conservatives – now feels irreversible.
Smith talks to Yamiche Alcindor, the PBS White House correspondent, who covered the protests in Ferguson in 2014 after Michael Brown was shot and killed by the police. She says her experience in Ferguson “changed the way I thought about reporting – it made me think I have to question everything, including the rules of our reporting.”
And Smith interviews ex-Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, who also covered the Ferguson protests in 2014. (He’s written a book about his coverage, too.) Lowery says how he was repeatedly disciplined by Marty Baron, the “famous” Washington Post executive editor, for tweeting things that expressed his views, which were deemed to be in conflict with the Post’s social media policy. (In 2019, Baron compiled examples such “misconduct,” everything from Lowery’s “tweet mocking attendees at a Washington book party as ‘decadent aristocrats’ to one tweet criticizing a New York Times report on the Tea Party.”)
In a “tense” meeting (it’s always tense meetings with these journalists!) last September, Baron handed Lowery a memo, which states, “You have frequently expressed views that are political in nature and impact on the ability of The Post to assign you to stories about which you have expressed those views.” It continues, stating that Lowery had failed “to perform your job duties by engaging in conduct on social media that violates The Washington Post’s policy and damages our journalistic integrity.”
Lowery defended himself by sending his own memo to Baron:
Generations of black journalists, including here at The Washington Post, have served as the conscience not only of their publications but of our entire industry. Often those journalists have done so by leveling public criticism of both their competitors and their own employers. News organizations often respond to such internal and external pressure.
Lowery has since left The Washington Post. Last week, he tweeted about the Times-Bennet “debacle”: “American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.” Smith writes, “That argument is gathering momentum in key American newsrooms.”
In the the Times’s piece – of course they wrote a piece – detailing Bennet’s resignation, Marc Tracy writes that Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, after apparently defending Bennet on Friday, “concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required.” (In his column, Smith says Sulzberger told him, cryptically, not to “interpret” Bennet’s departure as a “philosophical shift.”)
So what is the next leg of change that is required? I don’t think the Times really has any idea. For now, a woman named Katie Kingsbury has been put in Bennet’s place, as “acting editorial page editor through the November election.” I suppose that will give them some time to come up with a plan? And who is “Ms. Kingsbury”? As Tracy writes, in full self-mythologizing mode, she “was hired in 2017. Previously she was on The Boston Globe’s editorial board, where she won a Pulitzer for editorial writing and edited another Pulitzer-winning series.”
Reading between the lines, Pulitzer’s aside, her mandate seems to be, for lack of a better term, to limit controversy, to make sure another Cotton situation doesn’t occur. In a note Kingsbury sent to the Opinion staff on Sunday, she said, anyone who sees “any piece of Opinion journalism – including headlines or social posts or photos or you name it – that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.” At least until a more “technical solution” is in place. This seems more like self-preservation than a thoughtful new approach to journalism – the Times capitulating to the demands of the moment without thinking through what it means.
But it’s the final paragraph, though, that’s most telling:
Mr. Sulzberger said at the Friday town hall meeting and in his note on Sunday that a rethinking of Opinion was necessary for an era in which readers are likely to come upon Op-Eds in social media posts, divorced from their print context next to the editorial page.
This innocent insistence on process, on layout and pagination, on their own internal logistics, and not really at all on the actual content itself is a problem. Sulzberger’s years-late and glaringly obvious admission – “readers are likely to come upon Op-Eds in social media posts, divorced from their print context next to the editorial page” – betrays an organization that thinks too highly of, and too narrowly about, its own systems and fails to take into account how loopholes in those systems can be – and often are – exploited. It has become even clearer in the wake of the Cotton affair that it never occurs to journalists that their large platforms and hard-won legitimacy may be sought out and manipulated precisely because of the size of the platform and the legitimacy it signals.
If one person benefitted from the outrage and fallout around the Tom Cotton Op-Ep, it’s Tom Cotton. The “entire episode could not have gone better for Tom Cotton if he wrote the script himself,” tweeted New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi on Sunday. If he wasn’t before, he’s now a household name – especially in the households he cares about. After the Times announced his piece didn’t meet their “standards” after all, Cotton went on Fox last week and happily skewered the paper (“My op-ed doesn’t meet The New York Times’s standards. It far exceeds their standards, which are normally below left-wing sophomoric drivel”), while still reaping the benefits and prestige that came with the Times publishing it in the first place. It’s an unfortunate tic of journalism to refuse, as Didion writes, “to consider outcome or meaning or consequence.”
Getting the piece published in the Times was a savvy and legitimizing move by Cotton; outraging almost the entire Times staff, getting a senior Times luminary to resign, and turning one little Op-Ed into dozens and dozens of articles and lots of TV coverage, all spread out over a week, was an extremely valuable by-product. Cotton also leveraged his new status as renegade snowflake-angerer to raise about $200,000 in campaign donations for himself last week, according to The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel. And, since Cotton is running unopposed this year, he’s using the money to make and air an anti-Biden commercial. (Trump also got a jab in at the Times/Bennet, while shouting out Cotton, tweeting Sunday, “Opinion Editor at @nytimes just walked out. That’s right, he quit over the excellent Op-Ed penned by our great Senator @TomCottonAR. TRANSPARENCY! The State of Arkansas is very proud of Tom. The New York Times is Fake News!!!”)
Simply put, the actions of The New York Times have real-world consequences. The Times’s leaders know this, and, usually, this power is boasted about. The Times (and other media companies) are proud of the idea of their reach, their importance, and their real influence, but only in the abstract. When specifically called into question, that influence is denied. One recent repudiation at the highest level came from Times executive editor Dean Baquet in a January 2020 interview. After fielding the gentle accusation that the Times’s coverage might have had an influence on the 2016 election – specifically, by treating Hillary’s victory as a forgone conclusion from the start and consistently sidelining Sanders – Baquet denied the Times has that kind of power, saying the accusation was a “little narcissistic for my taste.”
For much more extreme examples of both denial of influence and misguided neutrality, we can look at history. It’s widely acknowledged that American media generally, and The New York Times specifically, systematically failed to sufficiently report the atrocities of the Holocaust and the political environment in Germany that lead to it.
In her 2005 book Buried by the Times, journalism professor Laurel Leff looks at how the Times minimized, normalized, or just basically ignored the murder of millions of Jews in Germany, often placing the stories deep inside the paper, and without appropriately alarm-raising headlines. Leff begins her book by looking at the March, 4, 1944, edition of The New York Times, a typical example of the period: “On page four, amid 13 other stories, appeared a five-paragraph item with a London dateline.” The first two paragraphs, she says, “described the House of Commons’ decision to appropriate 50,000 pounds to help fun the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees.” Then this:
During the discussion, S.S. Silverman, Labor member, read a report from the Jewish National Committee operating somewhere in Poland, saying: “Last month, we still reckoned the number of Jews in the whole territory of Poland as from 250,000 to 300,000. In a few weeks, no more than 50,000 of us will remain. In our last moment before death, the remnants of Polish Jewry appeal for help to the whole world. May this, perhaps our last voice from the abyss, reach the ears of the whole world.”
Then the story continues, “without skipping a beat,” with more talk of appropriated funds for the Red Cross to open an office in Shanghai. The journalists at the The New York Times, writes Leff,
did not respond to that anguished cry – not the London correspondent who filed it, or the cable editor who read it, or the copy reader who edited it, or the night news editor who determined its placement, or the managing editor who signed off on it, or the publisher who had ultimate responsibility for the newspaper in which it appeared.
(The publisher, by the way, was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, great-grandfather of A.G. Sulzberger, the current publisher of the Times.)
Leff continues,
From the start of the war in Europe, on September 1, 1939 to its end nearly 6 years later, The New York Times and other mass media treated the persecution and ultimate annihilation of the Jews of Europe as a secondary story.
In a newer book, 2018’s Berlin, 1933, French media critic Daniel Schneidermann explores the Western media’s insufficient coverage of the Holocaust – and what could have caused it to be so. In a New Yorker piece from last year, Elisabeth Zerofsky talked to Schneidermann about his book and his findings (the book is written in French). Pace Leff, Schneidermann describes the Times’s coverage of the Nazis and their murder of Jews as “fragmentary, incremental, and buried in ‘dry’ briefings on interior pages.” Some examples:
June 16, 1942, page 6: a short piece noting that sixty thousand Jews in Vilnius had been murdered. June 30, 1942, page 7: a press conference given by a Polish government official in exile concludes that around a sixth of the European Jewish population of six to seven million has been annihilated.
Why this thorough downplaying, this burying in the interior pages? Schneidermann says it was the Times’s “quest for credibility with its public – to not seem like a ‘Jewish newspaper’ or a ‘Communist newspaper’ – that prevented it from attaining the decibel level that we would now consider appropriate.” (Leff also charges that Sulzberger, who was Jewish, and other Times editors harbored anti-Israel and anti-Zionist stances, which mainly contributed to their downplaying of Jewish victimhood in their coverage of the Holocaust.)
The New York Times routinely minimizing reports of mass genocide during World War II is disturbing, to say the least. But those “editorial decisions” become even stranger when you consider what else they were publishing at around the same time. On June 22, 1941 – about six months before the United States entered the war – they published, in The New York Times Magazine, excerpts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. (Last week, after Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed was published, I saw jokes on Twitter along the lines of “they might as well just publish Mein Kampf!” Well.)
I’m not really a World War II buff, but by 1941 I think Times readers would have had a pretty good idea of who Hitler was, his and his party’s violent anti-Semitism, and what he was capable of – if not the full extent of the horrors. The Night of the Long Knives – when Hitler ordered a series of executions so he could consolidate power – happened in 1934; Nazi propaganda framed the murders as necessary to preempt a coup. The Kristallnacht – the massacre of Jews in German cities by SA patrols and civilians – happened in 1938. And World War II itself began in 1939.
From what I gather, Mein Kampf was a popular book in the late 1930s, an important document of a powerful and dangerous leader’s mind. There were a few English translations. The Times quotes from the Reynal & Hitchcock edition, which was published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1939 (you can see the copyright at the beginning of their article). It seems the Times published the excerpts, as James Bennet might say today, in celebration of the full spectrum of ideas. To show Americans how the other side thinks, to reveal what kind of principles under which Hitler and the Nazis were operating. Before the excerpted text, a brief editor’s note begins, “Germany is now waging a psychological war against this country as well as a military war in other parts of the world. That psychological war is based on principles laid down by Adolf Hitler, in his autobiography ‘Mein Kampf.’ Below the book’s more important passages on propaganda are published.”
Even given the assumed general knowledge of Hitler at the time, that minor piece of context doesn’t seem like enough. Hindsight is 20/20, but even in 1941 I think The New York Times could have contextualized Hitler’s words a little bit more. The introduction to the Reynal & Hitchcock edition of the book, from which the Times quotes, frames Mein Kampf more urgently:
Mein Kampf is a propagandist essay by a violent partisan. As such it often warps historical truth and sometimes ignores it completely. We have, therefore, felt it our duty to accompany the text with factual information which constitutes an extensive critique of the original. No American would like to assume responsibility for giving the public a text which, if not tested in the light of diligent inquiry, might convey the impression that Hitler was writing history rather than propaganda.
Short of that small “Germany is now waging a psychological war against this country…” note, the only context Times readers seemed to get was the whimsical, if not impressed-sounding, headline, “The Art of Propaganda.” (“Laid down by,” “most important,” are also tonally questionable.)
I think it’s the impressed detachment that is the most worrisome aspect of the Times’s coverage of Hitler. There’s that trademark Times neutrality, the clinical tone, always erring on the side of endorsement. This is even more apparent, and chilling, in a profile of Adolf Hitler and his mountain retreat, published in The New York Times Magazine on August, 20, 1939, and headlined “Herr Hitler At Home In the Clouds” (subhead: “High up on his favorite mountain he finds time for solitude, politics and frequent official parties.”).
The profile reads like any other New York Times Magazine profile today, chronicling Hitler’s stylish and healthy daily rituals in flowery, aspirational magazine prose. For example, here is the Times on Hitler’s breakfast routine:
The Fuerhrer does not always take his meals in company. His breakfast, which he rarely has before 9, is frequently served in a small breakfast room with a northeastern view looking downward over the slope which forms the extensive estate. The tops of beech trees and a variety of firs are the foreground to the distant Salzach valley, which loses itself in the dim mists of the sub-Alpine plains.
On vegetables:
He likes to see color on his table, and excellent tomatoes are supplied from near-by greenhouses, in which ultra-violet lamps ripen fruit for his table. A fresh salad is served with almost every meal.
On walking with his dogs:
He is fond of his climb above the clouds, and no one can say how far east his mental vision roves. He stands there, seemingly lost in thought, until the gambols of his two Alsatian dogs bring him back to what is expected of him: then he picks up a stick and throws it down the hill for them to retrieve.
On afternoons:
An afternoon with the Fuehrer at the Berghof has many possibilities. Hitler sometimes takes a nap, or at any rate retires for a quiet hour of reading or thinking by himself. However, nap or no nap, the Fuehrer leaves his guests to amuse themselves after their own fashion.
The profile was written by Hedwig Mauer Simpson, the wife of Stanley Simpson, a British journalist based in Munich who contributed to The New York Times and Times of London. The Simpsons were some of the first reporters to have access to Hitler. (And Stanley was the first person to report on Dachau, a piece Times of London turned down.)
The content of the profile – the dogs, the vegetarianism, the fresh air, the hiking, the hearty meals, the thoughtful self-discipline, the perfect German lifestyle – is verbatim with the Nazi propaganda representations of Hitler produced throughout the 1930s (found, for example, in the photo books by Heinrich Hoffmann). Reading the profile now, it’s impossible to reconcile the aspirational lifestyle-magazine tone or to understand its purpose as anything other than propaganda. This gets at another deep-seated problem of journalism: taking officials’ actions and words at face value.
This is the Hitler Hitler wanted the world to see. Simpson had access to him and made a decision, whether consciously or not, to accept what was shown and said to her, write it down, and have it published it in The New York Times. This is what Didion meant by “scrupulous passivity…an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.” The careful, mundane cuteness today is chilling – but one would hope it would have been chilling back then as well? Eleven days after the profile was published, Hitler invaded Poland.
The first mention of Adolf Hitler in the The New York Times occurred on November 21, 1922. It was a short item, which appeared under the very odd, positive-sounding headline, “New Popular Idol Rises In Bavaria,” with the subhead, “Hitler Credited With Extraordinary Powers of Swaying Crowds to His Will.” The article begins,
“Der Hitler” and his “Hakenkreuzlers” are the popular topic of talk in Munich and other Bavarian towns. This reactionary Nationalistic anti-Semitic movement has now reached a point where it is considered potentially dangerous, though not for the immediate future.
Again, the tone here is…bemused? Excited? This was written a hundred years ago, but “popular idol,” “extraordinary powers,” “potentially dangerous, though not for the immediate future” seem unsettlingly relevant.
None of this is to say that Tom Cotton, or Donald Trump, is comparable to Hitler (though that comparison has been made often, including in the Times). But it is to say that the Times has long been in interested it in, if not sympathetic to, powerful people, to fascists, and authoritarian ideas – even if only out of some attempt to seem impartial. As Schneidermann tells Zerofsky, about the Times’s inability to properly report on the Holocaust, “The problem is there weren’t any journalists with enough credibility to tell what was really happening in Germany without being suspected of being biased or taking sides.”
“Normalizing” was the charge leveled at the Times and other mainstream media outlets in the early part of Trump’s presidency. The classic example of this “normalization” is the Times’s 2017 profile of a neo-Nazi, entitled “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland.” The piece was perceived as too open-minded, presenting racism as a mere personality trait. Upon release, the piece inspired the same kind of outrage among readers that Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed inspired last week. And the Times defended “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland” in a similar fashion: it sheds light on the normalcy of racism in United States.
In the wrong hands – or in the wrong eyes – “shedding light on the normalcy” can also just become “normalizing” – an admittedly unfortunate reality that the Times seems unable or unwilling to comprehend. “Sparking debate” or “shedding light on” are still very valid and noble goals, but the world is changing quickly, and with it the meaning of “responsible journalism” must change, too. As Schneidermann says,
Activist journalism, journalism that subordinates the quest for truth to the quest for a truth that is useful to its cause, is the only journalism that, today, doesn’t have to feel ashamed about what it produced… Everything reasonable, scrupulous, balanced, in my opinion, contributed to lulling the crowd to sleep.
The Times’s 2005 review of Buried by the Times (“yes, we cover ourselves sometimes”) is, as one would hope, honest and sorry about its neglectful coverage of the Holocaust and the events leading up to and during World War II. But they can’t resist some defensive pushback, via denial of influence:
How could Sulzberger or any other newspaper executive have comprehended the extent of what was happening in Europe? This is not said to relieve anyone of guilt; there’s plenty to go around, and The Times was seriously negligent throughout the period. But it is naïve to imagine that more stories on the front page of any newspaper would have changed the course of history.
How could he have possibly known? And in any case, it wouldn’t have made any difference! The media cannot change the course of history! You’re naive to even imagine such a crazy thing! When criticized, the diminutive pose of the unimportant, non-influential, powerless little newspaper is struck. But, only a few lines later, that pose is completely forgotten:
A more sophisticated writer would have seen the whole picture and not been on such a high-minded crusade against one newspaper, no matter how powerful, influential and humanly flawed it was, and continues to be.
By its very nature, the mainstream media has the power to inure large swathes of the population to ideas, for better or for worse. Is it naive to imagine that more stories on the front page of a newspaper would have changed the course of history? In reality, it is naive to think they wouldn’t.
Now that Bennet has resigned and Times leadership is starting to think about, as Sulzberger put it, the “next leg of change that is required,” I propose they begin by updating the newspaper’s current slogan, “All The News That’s Fit To Print,” to a more accurate reminder: “Powerful, Influential And Humanly Flawed, And Continues To Be.”
Live Bait 🐡
Eight journalists discussed the realities of “reporting while black.”
On Monday, Adam Rapoport, editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit, resigned after a post he wrote was criticized on Twitter, and then a “brown face” photo surfaced.
On Monday, Christene Barberich, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Refinery29 resigned after “former employees speak out on racism.”
Claudia Eller, editor-in-chief of Variety, was put on “administrative leave” after a “heated” Twitter exchange about lack of diversity in the Variety newsroom.
Axios announced its reporters are allowed to attend protests.
The Washington Post “recreated” Trump’s church photo-op.
Tucker Carlson attacked Mitt Romney for marching.
Many, many brands who voiced their support for Black Lives Matter on social media last week continue to advertise on Fox News.
Amazon has started giving better placement to its own private-label products, “raising anti-trust concerns.”
Cops was canceled, after 32 seasons.