The dilemma the New York Times and other news organizations that follow its lead face with a Trump Biden matchup is genuinely painful for them:
On one hand, second Trump Administration would mean an authoritarian, anti-democratic, arguably fascist state. This is not just speculation; this is what the candidate himself has explicitly promised. It is difficult to imagine a responsible journalist not doing everything in their power to stop this. On the other hand, going all out in support of Biden would go against longstanding and deeply held ideas about the role of the press, ideas that go to the very heart of the New York Times' sense of identity.
The NYT and many other journalists and news organizations have fully internalized fifty years of intense and focused conservative manipulation and working the ref. They have come to genuinely believe that bias largely boils down to saying things that make Republicans angry. We saw this play out with what we thought at the time were lower stakes back in 2016. The Washington Post explicitly took the position that the old standards and ethics were flawed and it would be far too costly to hold on to them given the risk that Trump presented. The New York Times took the position, also explicitly, that there was nothing wrong with the old standards and it had no intention of abandoning them. (Some current and former NYT journalists have even convinced themselves that the country went off the rails because the paper didn't hold to these old standards tightly enough.)
As we discussed before, barring a major black swan event, this will be a Biden Trump race, leaving journalists with only two realistic choices. If, however, we aren't constrained by realism, then there is a third: go all in on supporting Trump's rivals in the primary.
Since the paper's de facto definition of bias is largely limited to doing anything that helps Democrats and hurts Republicans, writing slanted news stories and wishful analytics does not violate this ethical code. No major conservative can accuse them of being anti-GOP because they are writing puff pieces for Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Quite the opposite, the Republican establishment would overwhelmingly prefer either of those candidates to Donald Trump.
It is the nature of cognitive dissonance that people faced with ugly choices on one hand and an unrealistic but appealing choice on the other, will not only make themselves believe in the unbelievable, they will fanatically embrace it.
In this case, the New York Times has abandoned their nominal ethical standards of balance and objectivity across the reporting, analysis, and commentary. The results have been predictably embarrassing. the paper has run data analyses arguing that being crushed by Trump in the polls was actually great news for DeSantis. They have managed to collect the world's most unrepresentative focus group. They have run multiple pieces insisting that Haley breaking 10% and coming off as better than Ramaswamy put her on the fast track to the White House.
But as entertaining as this has been, it looks like reality is finally coming for the narrative.
Betting markets think the GOP primary is basically over pic.twitter.com/iHDIXgCmmi
— Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) December 17, 2023
Donald Trump is now the GOP establishment
Analysis by Harry Enten
Mark:
ReplyDeleteI think you're missing a fourth possibility, which is that (a) NYT management wants to do whatever it can to prevent Trump from becoming president again, and (b) they think that avoiding advocacy journalism is the most effective way for them to pursue that goal. That is, they judge that an abandonment of an objective stance would, by reducing their credibility to opinion leaders and swing voters, make the newspaper less likely to affect outcomes through news stories, analyses, and opinion pieces. From that perspective, "going all out in support of Biden" in the news section would be counterproductive.
I don't know how much of the above is accurate, but it seems like a possibility, at least for some of the reporters and management at the Times.
- Andrew
Andrew,
DeleteI could hardly miss that argument. For the editors of the NYT it's virtually a mantra, but while they probably believe it themselves, I don't buy it. They start with a flawed and self-serving definition of "objectivity" and then fail to hold even to that. Proactively slanting reporting to ward off charges of liberal bias to ward off charges of liberal bias is itself bias. Any paper that would give less coverage to the leaking of state secrets than to a literal dog-bites man story cannot be called balanced and objective. No one can read the puff pieces about DeSantis and Haley in the news, analysis, and opinion sections of the NYT and argue that the paper has a sincere aversion to advocacy journalism; they are just averse to it when it gets them in trouble.
And, yes, "going all out in support of Biden" was badly worded. "All out" can cover some extreme territory, but in the case of Trump vs. Biden, actual objective coverage would give us lots of stories that make Biden look good and tons of stories that would make Trump look bad.
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