What's happening over at The New York Times?
I love The New York Times -- in an obsessive, disappointed-parent, borderline-cheesy way. So I'm not the guy you'll generally find tweeting about how I've called them up to cancel my subscription (do people really still do this over the phone?) about some article that made me angry.
But that doesn't mean the Times doesn't occasionally make me angry. And it's becoming increasingly obvious that I'm not alone.
Margaret Sullivan -- ever the shadow Times public editor, her current Washington Post perch be damned -- ably walks readers through the litany of the Gray Lady's self-inflicted wounds in recent days, ranging from its handling of reporter Glenn Thrush's sexual misconduct controversy to its genteel treatment of the proverbial Nazi next door.
For many readers (myself included), however, the coup de grâce is still the infamous article dated October 31, 2016 -- 8 days before the presidential election -- with the assertive headline: "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia." (Ron Howard voice: Not exactly.)
This piece has achieved the dubious honor of looking even worse as more time has elapsed. As Sullivan (and others) pointed out, perhaps nothing has consigned it to the hall of shame as decisively as this other Times article from five days ago, detailing the fact that the FBI became aware of Trump advisor George Papadopoulos' shady Russia connection all the way back in July 2016, a full three months before the Times published its aforementioned article that contained the following claim:
And no evidence has emerged that would link [Trump] or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.
Sullivan diagnoses the Times thusly:
With unique access to power, the Times is addicted to it — too often allowing those at the top of government and business to seize its megaphone, sometimes while wearing the invisibility cloak of anonymity.
This criticism has been ricocheting around the media landscape for some time now. Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy posted "The Timid Times: What's Wrong With Political Coverage At Our Leading Newspaper" yesterday, the same day as Sullivan's piece came out.
The piece labeled the Times "a paper that has come to overvalue access," pointing (as an example) to the outsized prominence accorded to star reporter Maggie Haberman, whose tick-tock, behind-the-scenes vignettes on the inner machinations of Trumpworld would feel right at home in the pages of a broadsheet like The New York Daily News (her former employer, not coincidentally). Indeed, as an unnamed colleague of Haberman's noted: "Maggie’s success is very much part of that tabloid, Twitter-fied sensibility bleeding into the Times."
However, Kennedy's concerns extended beyond access journalism:
But there is a timidity to some of the Times’ political coverage — a deep institutional need to offer balance when the truth is overwhelmingly on one side, to cover Trump as though he is an undisciplined, falsehood-spewing, but essentially normal president.
"Timid" was also the word of choice for former Times public editor Liz Spayd all the way back in January of last year, when she wrote of the newspaper's trigger-shyness in regards to blockbuster stories on Trump's Russia connections: "I believe a strong case can be made that The Times was too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had."
Indeed, as a target of intensive online criticism over perceived acquiescence to official government narratives, it must be noted that Haberman is hardly alone at The New York Times. Michael Schmidt, a national security reporter, came under heavy fire over the past week for his impromptu interview with Trump at his West Palm Beach golf club over the holidays, during which he rarely interrupted or pushed back on countless lies, half-truths, and exaggerations. (To his credit, Schmidt wrote a companion piece explaining the ad-hoc nature of the interview.)
More dramatically, yesterday The Intercept published an exhaustive, long-form account by former New York Times reporter James Risen, who (along with Eric Lichtblau) broke the newspaper's landmark NSA warrantless wiretapping story in a 2005 article that later earned the reporters a Pulitzer Prize (Risen's second). Risen recalled how the NSA story was published only after he engaged in a prolonged and heated battle with the Times' top brass, who had steadfastly withheld the story at the request of the George W. Bush administration for over a year -- and finally only agreed to publish the story after Risen told them he would reveal the NSA program in his forthcoming book anyway.
(In an ironic twist, Risen's colleague on that NSA story, Eric Lichtblau, was also the co-author of the aforementioned October 2016 piece on the FBI's inability to connect Trump to Russia. Then, in June of last year, Lichtblau -- who had been hired by CNN just two months earlier -- was forced to resign from the cable news giant for his role in a major reporting debacle that resulted in a retraction, regarding alleged ties between Trump advisor -- and soon-to-be White House communications director -- Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund.)
Taken together, these accounts paint a picture of a news organization distinctly cognizant, almost certainly overly so, of its rarefied place in the pantheon of American journalism. The carrot-and-stick duality of proximity to power and fear of an administration's wrath has coalesced into a Times editorial stance that leans towards the validation of official accounts -- at the precise moment in American history when the national government is less credible than ever.
It's worth noting that, even as the Times comes under increasing pressure to take a more aggressive approach in its political coverage, The Washington Post -- which boasts virtually none of the intimate access to the White House that's afforded to Trump's hometown Times -- is winning broad acclaim for doing just that.
In the span of just over a year, the Post broke the bombshell Access Hollywood story (in which Trump said that, as a TV star, women let him "grab them by the pussy"), revealed that U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R-Alabama) had initiated a sexual encounter with a minor, and subsequently uncovered an attempt by notorious right-wing scam artists Project Veritas to plant a fake news story in response to damage the Post's reputation and bolster Moore's candidacy.
Indeed, in an indication of the Post's supreme confidence in its own reporting and its keen understanding of the need to match guerrilla anti-journalism tactics with an offensive thrust of its own, the paper took two bold steps in unmasking the attempted Project Veritas ambush. First, Post reporters secretly recorded the sting and published the video online. Secondly, in a decision approved by the editor in chief, journalism legend Marty Baron (of Spotlight fame), the paper published quotes by the Veritas employee that had been given off the record. As Baron explained:
We always honor 'off-the-record' agreements when they're entered into in good faith. But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an 'off-the-record' agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.
As Northeastern professor Dan Kennedy notes, "journalists at the Post give the impression of knowing who they are, why they’re here, and what they’re doing. I wish I could say the same about the Times — and I hope the day will come when I can."
So do I.