One of the main advantages of democracies is that more voices are heard and more ideas are discussed, so they make fewer mistakes. When decisions need to be made, democracies can seem painfully slow, but as long as the participants are acting with an eye to the national interest, democracies generally do better than systems where decision-making is concentrated into a few hands. It is therefore disturbing, especially at this moment when we stand on the knife edge of war at a scale the world hasn’t seen in generations, that The New York Times is showing signs of further failing as a journalistic institution.
Don’t get me wrong. There are some superb journalists at The Times. But bad editors can turn good journalism into misleading mush. Dan Froomkin (Ex WaPo) has done a piece analyzing the failures of an article by Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam on Biden’s response to Ukraine. The issues are so badly framed that it inspired an anonymous satire titled “Nazis Sharpen Message After Stock Market Crash,” which Froomkin re-prints. It’s worth reading.
Especially given the history of the NYT in failing to report Joseph Stalin’s murder of something like 10% of the Ukrainian population through an artificially-created famine, Hounshell and Askarinam’s article on modern day Ukraine is shocking. In describing the Walter Duranty’s failure to report on the Ukraine famine of the 1930s, Anne Applebaum wrote:
British by birth, Duranty had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and skeptical “realist,” trying to listen to both sides of the story. “It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one,” he wrote in 1935—the kulaks being the so-called wealthy peasants whom Stalin accused of causing the famine. But “in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done with a noble purpose.”
This position made Duranty enormously useful to the regime, which went out of its way to ensure that Duranty lived well in Moscow. He had a large flat, kept a car and a mistress, had the best access of any correspondent, and twice received coveted interviews with Stalin. [emphasis added]
Froomkin describes the piece about the current conflict in Ukraine this way:
The premise of the story was that after a “free-for-all” response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are coalescing around a new narrative: That the invasion was bad, but the real villain is Joe Biden.
…
Then came this astonishing paragraph:
“Although some aspects of the Republican critique crumble upon closer inspection, the newly coordinated message is unifying the right after the fractious intramural debate over Putin. And with inflation soaring, linking Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine to his domestic woes could prove to be a potent argument with voters in the fall.
The idea of ‘closer inspection’ is dismissed as irrelevant, and the authors never come back to explain what parts of the message are, in fact, groundless and gratuitous.”
They casually adopt the Republican framing of Biden’s “domestic woes” – just a day after a jobs report that indicated a roaring recovery is under way.
The United States under Joe Biden has done an extraordinary job of preventing the Ukraine conflict from turning into a wider war while providing unprecedented support to Ukraine. He has made it impossible for Putin to concoct a plausible excuse to use nuclear weapons.
Putin may yet use nuclear weapons but, if he does, the world will clearly understand that this is because he is a mentally unstable dictator. Most important, the Russian military is far less likely to follow orders to bring on Armageddon. It is the realization that Vladimir Putin is lying and violating all laws of war that brought together all but five nations to condemning or, at least, refusing to support Putin’s invasion.
By contrast, the Republican Party has systematically blocked aid to Ukraine, attempted to discredit its government’s legitimacy, attacked Joe Biden over specious claims that he is somehow involved in corruption in Ukraine, and even has at least one member (not to mention Donald Trump) openly applauding Putin and Russia.
We are at a moment when America needs to make good decisions. The fate of the world may depend on it. We need to be genuinely unified, not just for one moment at a State of the Union, but in word and deed. That means setting aside the political horse race and calculations of who may benefit. If we Democrats must lose an election, but do so while preventing a nuclear war and preserving Ukrainian sovereignty, that will be unfair… but it will be a price worth paying.
But having the New York Times continuing to play its little games is not just unfair. It’s reminiscent of Walter Duranty’s failure to report Stalin’s famine. It’s unforgivably bad, unethical, and disloyal to this nation.
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added: For those who haven’t followed The Times over the years, this Vox article is very illuminating. The Times may have changed over the years, but the style—with all its caveats, whataboutism, and unwillingess to call evil “evil” is intact. An excerpt:
But the really extraordinary part of the article is the three paragraphs on anti-Semitism. Brown acknowledges Hitler's vicious anti-Semitism as the core of Hitler's appeal — and notes the terrified Jewish community was fleeing from him — but goes on to dismiss it as a play to satiate the rubes (bolding mine):
“So violent are Hitler's fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums…
...
But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded….
A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: "You can't expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism.”
The Times was certainly not anti-Semitic. And anti-Semitism was widespread; Hitler was hardly unique. But notice how the article uses an anonymous source it calls “sophisticated” to suggest that Hitler is simply a clever politician--it’s all just a game, even though the Jews of Germany are poised to flee; the “sophisticated” see through it.
That is The Times style, and it never dies.