As the process of normalizing the unthinkable continues, the New York Times’ Public Editor signals that the Times is ready for its Leni Riefenstahl close-up:
In a strange move that bodes ill for the paper’s future coverage, The New York Times’ public editor devoted her review of the paper’s election work almost entirely to detailing ways in which she thought the paper hadn’t been understanding enough of Donald Trump’s supporters.
Fresh after hastening the demise of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy through its grotesque and (apparently very time-sensitive) coverage of the non-existent horrors to be found in Clinton’s email server, and assisting in her electoral defeat at the hands of the most unqualified, corrupt and venal Presidential candidate in American history, Liz Spayd, the paper’s “public editor,” has decided it’s time to extend an olive branch to Trump’s racist base of support.
It was all a misunderstanding, she soothes, and promises to make it better. Never once deigning to mention the empty abyss of the Times’ months-long fictional “email” fixation, she opts instead to quote some upstanding Trump supporters to make her point that “Better coverage was needed,” as her headline intones. Here is her Exhibit “A:”
Horst Gudemann of Jackson, Wyo., says he doesn’t want to be spoon-fed opinions that The Times thinks he should have, and he doesn’t want his primary news source to stereotype half the country as racists. “We shouldn’t judge Black Lives Matters by its most extremist members, and we shouldn’t judge Trump followers by theirs,” Gudemann told me.
Because people of color protesting an indisputable national pattern of racially-based violence and discrimination towards minorities among our nation’s police, a pattern that has been on bald display for all to see again and again this past year, is equivalent to castigating Trump supporters for his divisive Nuremberg-style rallies they all knew about and gave their blessing to in the voting booth. There is simply no equivalency between these two things. And yet, there it is, without comment:
Few could deny that if Trump’s more moderate supporters are feeling bruised right now, the blame lies partly with their candidate and his penchant for inflammatory rhetoric. But the media is at fault too, for turning his remarks into a grim caricature that it applied to those who backed him.
Say what? His “penchant” for inflammatory rhetoric?
Every one of those Trump voters who just elected their hero was fully aware of everything he said and did during this campaign, from threatening his opponent with “Second Amendment remedies” to refusing to call out the worst elements of his base of racist support, to attacking journalists and threatening women who came forward with stories of his abusive behavior towards them. Every single one of those Trump voters felt that racism, sexism, even the prospect of widespread forced deportations, was not a “deal-breaker.” So where, exactly is the “grim caricature?” Every one of his voters sanctioned him either through active support or knowing, nodding complacency.
But perhaps that concept is too prosaic for the Times public editor to comprehend. So let’s just talk about the consequences to their coverage. As Media Matters points out:
If the main lesson the Times newsroom is being taught from the election is that the paper was too tough on Trump, too mean to his supporters, and that readers think the paper’s “liberal” bias is evident, guess what kind of coverage that produces?
It produces the kind of coverage where, one day after Trump’s attorney announced the newly elected president was settling a huge $25 million consumer fraud lawsuit filed against him (an unheard-of development in American politics), the Times published a mostly-upbeat, front-page Trump piece that portrayed him as “confident,” “focused,” “proud,” and “freewheeling.” (To date, the Times has published exactly one news article about the Trump University fraud settlement.)
Days after Trump appointed a sympathetic white Supremacist and Neo-Nazi supporter as his chief advisor, coupled with his intent to elevate to power some of the worst-bottom-scraping racists ever to appear in public life, the Times ‘ front page reported not the implications of real, institutionalized racism and anti-Semitism that these types of appointments could unleash against American schoolchildren, immigrants, Muslims and others, but a puff piece on the apparently media-pleasant face of Jared Kushner.
Meanwhile, the Times’ response to the kerfuffle that recently broke out when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by audience members while attending “Hamilton” on Broadway was oddly passive and defensive. At least two Times staffers, including one reporter currently covering Trump for the newsroom, seemed to denounce the boos as being disrespectful. And in its news report on the incident, the Times noted Trump tweeted about the booing, but failed to inform readers that Trump’s tweet was completely inaccurate: Cast members were not “very rude” to Pence. (It was audience members who booed, not the performers, who thanked Pence for attending and asked that he work on behalf of all Americans.)
After cementing a legacy that began with William Safire’s near-psychotic attacks on the Clintons’ vacuous “Whitewater” conspiracy and decades of Maureen Dowd’s churlish anti-Clinton columns, the Times did heroically still cleave to a modicum of actual journalistic integrity—in its back pages:
That’s not to say the Times hasn’t published any worthy news articles during the early stages of the Trump transition. On November 19, the newspaper reported on the morass of looming conflicts for the new president:
President-elect Donald J. Trump met in the last week in his office at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners who are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai, raising new questions about how he will separate his business dealings from the work of the government once he is in the White House.
Where was was this burning piece of journalism found in the “paper of record?” Page 20.
Spayd claims that the Times has also received numerous letters and emails from liberals who purportedly agree with her that the paper’s reporting was too one-sided. However, none of them are quoted in her article. Rather, she cites a group of Trump supporters, “all in their 50s, all white...college educated with successful careers" who are urging the New York Times to “come visit them” to get their side of the story.
The problem is that we’ve seen their side of the “story,” Ms Spayd. And we all know how the story ends.