People are so fed up with The New York Times’ sanewashing of Trump they are protesting, pleading with employees on 8th Avenue
Good News, Bad News: September, 26 2024. With 40 days left until Election Day we need political coverage that uplifts and defends democracy.
Every week until the election, we’ll bring you Good News, Bad News, a column comparing our pro-democracy election coverage guidelines with ongoing election coverage to highlight which newsrooms are standing up for democracy and which are sleepwalking us towards a dictatorship. We hope this inspires you to make more informed choices about where you get your news and strengthens your resolve to join us in advocating for the pro-democracy media Americans need. And now…
THE GOOD NEWS
Peaceful Protest Outside The Times
The New York Times is the most powerful news organization in the United States. The narratives created by its editors and journalists have a cascading effect; the rest of the political press internalizes the Times’ agenda and then spits out its priorities and frames to the wider masses. The editorial decisions made on 8th Avenue in New York have a real impact on Americans’ understanding of the stakes of the upcoming elections and the future of our democracy.
An increasing number of regular people are joining media critics in pointing out that the Times is failing catastrophically with its election coverage, in what feels like their leadership willfully ceding to abnormalcy. This month, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote an exhaustive chronicle of worldwide threats to press freedoms, yet still drew the conclusion that he mustn’t direct his staff to accurately contextualize, or warn of, the threat to democracy here at home.
By failing to join the fight and act as partisans for democracy, Sulzberger and the Times are failing in their critical role to accurately inform American citizens. Drew Magary recently commented in SFGATE that the “Times cares more about its place in the power structure than in actually affecting that power structure.” Magary’s piece goes further to say no one should care what the Times says anymore and we should all ignore its political coverage. His righteous dismissal is a response to the Times’ efforts to reject criticism, both internal and external.
When A.G. Sulzberger’s father eliminated the Public Editor position in 2017, he assured his readership that they were now the most important critics. Dan Froomkin chronicled this for his Press Watch website:
At the time, Sulzberger wrote in a memo to the newsroom that “our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.”
The charade of newsroom responsiveness to outside criticism did not last long. Only a few years later, Times chief Dean Baquet was completely dismissive of “followers on social media,” saying “I could care less about the unnuanced voices on Twitter. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about what our readers think, but I don’t pay as much attention to Twitter as Twitter might want me to.”
We’ve explored all manner of tactics to get the Times to improve its coverage and regain its credibility, including calling on them in January to reinstate the position of Public Editor. We have not heard back as of the writing of this piece.
While some, like Magary, believe it’s no longer worth anyone’s energy trying to effect change at the Times, we disagree. A workplace is not a monolith and there are many employees there who disagree with the Times’ normalizing coverage of the Trump/MAGA threat to democracy. We want to aid those workers by facilitating a culture of dissent.
On September 18th, we joined a peaceful protest outside the Times building organized by Rise and Resist, a New York City-based direct action group. Flyers with criticisms of A.G. Sulzberger and senior editors were handed to employees entering the building with the goal of inspiring the humans who power the New York Times to activate their moral core and advocate for a change in political coverage.
No more excuses can be made for the upper management’s normalizing and sanewashing of the most manifestly unfit person ever to run for president. It is unlikely that the Times’ HR department would approve a person like Trump for any position in their building. So why are the powerful people who run the Times deceiving America about his fitness to take a job leading us all?
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Extra Credit: Pro-Democracy Quote Of The Week
“The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
Democracy’s Survival Requires That Newsrooms Reset to Focus on What’s at Stake
You can be part of the solution. We’ve attached our pro-democracy guidelines to an open letter for you to sign on to. This letter has already been signed by thousands of Americans. We will be regularly sending your signatures to the leadership of all major news organizations.
The guidelines serve as a model of what pro-democracy election coverage can—and should—look like. Signing our letter ensures that your frustrations with media’s failure to stand up for American democracy will be heard loud and clear.
Help others advocate for positive change. Share the letter and guidelines with friends, civic organizations, and everyone who cares about the future of America. Ask them to sign on. Demanding better media is an action we must all take.
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This is so heartening. I dropped my NYT subscription after many years because their political coverage, especially coverage of Trump, has been abysmal.
Thank you for this. Even if the NYT wants to be neutral on the issue of democracy, however unconscionable that may be, it's failing abjectly in the whole reason journalism exists: to tell the truth. After nine years, they still call Trump's lies "falsehoods." It's the equivalent of using Putin's preferred euphemism for the the war in Ukraine: "geopolitical conflict." The NYT is now in the propaganda business, not the journalism business, and yet they're too self-righteous and myopic to realize it.