No Matter Who Wins, A Media Reckoning Is Coming
In the past week and a half since the billionaire owners of The LA Times and The Washington Post stopped their editorial boards from publishing endorsements of Kamala Harris in the presidential election, the fallout from customers has been brutal, particularly at the Post. Post owner Jeff Bezos argued in an op-ed that publishing an endorsement would create “a perception of bias” at a time when both sides equally distrust the media, but his decision, criticized by historian of fascism Timothy Snyder as “obeying in advance,” has led to 250,000 subscribers cancelling their subscriptions, potentially losing the paper as much as $30 million in recurring revenue.
Meanwhile, Semafor just published notes from an internal meeting at The New York Times in which executive editor Joseph Kahn attempted to answer those who’ve criticized the paper for not pushing back more aggressively against former President Donald Trump while over-criticizing the Democrats. Kahn, who has repeatedly defended the tone of the paper’s coverage, delivered the same response to his liberal critics (both within the paper and outside it) that he always uses — that liberals unreasonably demand that the paper cater only to their point of view:
“I don’t think [critics are] very interested in the hard work that everyone in this room is doing. They’re not interested in genuinely revelatory fact-based reporting that helps people navigate the most polarized issues of our time. What they’re interested in is having us be a mouthpiece for an already predetermined point of view…That of course is not our role, that is actually the opposite of independent journalism. That’s agenda-driven partisan journalism. They want to see the New York Times reaffirming their own priors. They’re not really interested in fact-based reporting — or frankly, independent polling — that doesn’t line up with their priors.”
It is dismaying that as the nation stands on the precipice of a potential fascist takeover, the owners of some of the largest and most respected publications in the United States once again refuse to address their critics with anything other than strawman arguments. Yes, journalists perform an important public service, and yes, we would be poorer without them. But regardless of who wins on Tuesday, they are going to face a reckoning for how they have behaved this past decade — and if this response to their critics is any indication, they are not ready for it.
Let’s start with what Trump will do. He has already called journalists “the enemy of the people,” threatened to take away the broadcasting licenses of networks who cover him critically, and, just this past weekend, called the media “seriously corrupt people,” adding that if an assassin were to shoot through the bulletproof glass surrounding him, “they’d have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.”
Trump’s staff has behaved no better, promising to enact retribution on the press if he wins again. Trump advisor Kash Patel articulated this best last December when he said “we’re putting you all on notice. We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute [journalists] for crimes they say we have been guilty of.”
These words should strike terror into the hearts not just of every journalist, but every free citizen in this country. Like all dictators, Trump demands that institutions bend to his will, constitutional statutes and oaths of duty be damned. Why should he be any different than his idol, Vladimir Putin, who presides over a country that has seen multiple journalists killed in mysterious circumstances since he took power?
But at the very least this reckoning, god forbid it arrives, has some historical precedent. The other reckoning, which will come if Harris wins, is one that, if the conversations at the Times and Bezos’s fatally mistimed op-ed defending the Post’s decision indicate, they are completely unprepared for because it will come from liberals who have had enough.
This reckoning is more than 30 years in the making, going back at least to Whitewater, the Clinton “scandal” which The New York Times hyped up as the next Watergate despite the fact that it was all smoke and no fire from the very beginning. It extends to the “Gore rhymes with bore” takes from Maureen Dowd and others of her ilk during 2000, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and Joe Biden being so old that he’s spending his rallies telling stories about how he tied an onion to his belt (which was the style at the time!) It’s taking the Bush Administration’s justifications for the Iraq War at face value; the Trump-voters-in-diners articles; the disguising of die-hard Republicans as being on the fence about Trump; and so many other failures that not only insult readers’ intelligence, but journalistic ethics itself.
But the reckoning is not for the Times’ alone. It’s CNN’s 24–7, fear-stoking coverage of events like the arrival of the first ebola patient in the United States; and its giving Trump a town hall to lie without any filter. It’s headline writers using passive language to turn “Policeman murders unarmed Black man” into “Unarmed Black man dies in officer-involved shooting.” It’s decades of conservatives being allowed to criticize city-dwellers as vermin, or out-of-touch with “the real America” while journalists drive news cycles when Democrats call these residents of the so-called “real America” “bitter,” “deplorables,” or “garbage.” It’s journalists being told they can’t say “Black Lives Matter” or “Free Palestine” on social media. It’s covering the odds and not the stakes of major events. It’s Fox News being allowed to dictate the rules by saying everything has to be “fair and balanced.” And this is all the tip of the iceberg.
Journalists hide behind the antiquated veil of objectivity to justify their reporting, and when they’re not not saying critics don’t know what they’re talking about, they insist unsubscribing will hurt the work they do. But if I decide to stop going to a restaurant that spits in every other dish because they have a policy to serve both me and people who want saliva in their food, then I’m not only fully justified in my decision to stop going, that restaurant would be laughed at if they insisted I stay because it would hurt the waiters. And it’s not just me making these arguments. Plenty of respected journalists have joined this chorus, from Margaret Sullivan and Jay Rosen to James Fallows and Michael Tomaskey. (The Columbia Journalism Review has collected much of their work in this article.)
But the people who’ve cancelled their subscriptions to the Post will not abandon the media outright for its failures. They are simply transferring their money, and their clicks, to institutions who understand the stakes this country faces, even if Harris wins. Following the The Washington Post yanking its endorsement, The Philadelphia Inquirer got 4,200 new subscribers, which is even more than The Washington Post got from January to September of this year. The Boston Globe has also received an influx of new subscriptions (although they have not released the numbers.) And that’s not to mention the other places doing vital work right now, both nationally and locally — ProPublica, The Seattle Times, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and The Juneau Empire (just a wonderful local paper), to name a few.
People want journalism that gives them the news without spitting in their food. If the Times, the Post, and the rest of the media want to play catch up to them, they should finally do the self-reflection that they’ve avoided for so long. And that will be far easier under a Harris Administration than a second Trump one.
