The New York Time's Point Shaving Scheme

  It all comes down to that 93%.

This is key. If the Times et al plan to cover hacked Trump emails differently from hacked Clinton emails, fine. But then they owe the public a detailed mea culpa for their conduct in 2016, including transparency over how and when they decided they were wrong. https://t.co/CHygn85qVE

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) August 11, 2024

I wrote this (or at least the first draft of this) back in May with the intention of getting around to it one of these days. This seems to be an appropriate time.

Back in 2018 Amy Chozick wrote an essential article on the press's handling of the Clinton email leak. It was also, as far as I can tell, the only example of anyone from the New York Times taking any responsibility for what went wrong.

I figured that if anyone knew whom Mrs. Clinton was referring to with that insidious “they” that, like some invisible army of adversaries (real and imagined), [I'd say more real than imagined. -- MP] wielded its collective power and caused her to lose the most winnable presidential election in modern history, it was me.

They were the vast-right wing conspiracy. They were the patriarchy that could never let an ambitious former first lady finally shatter “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.” They were the people of Wisconsin and James Comey. They were white suburban women who would rather vote for a man who bragged about sexual assault than a woman who seemed an affront to who they were.

And yes, they were political reporters (“big egos and no brains,” she called us) hounding her about her emails and transfixed by the spectacle of the first reality TV show candidate.

It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history. Months after the election, every time I heard the words “Russia” and “collude,” this realization swirled in my head, enveloping everything.

 ...

 Editors and reporters huddled to discuss how to handle the emails. Everyone agreed that since the emails were already out there — and of importance to voters — it was The Times’s job to “confirm” and “contextualize” them. I didn’t argue that it appeared the emails were stolen by a hostile foreign government that had staged an attack on our electoral system. I didn’t push to hold off on publishing them until we could have a less harried discussion. I didn’t raise the possibility that we’d become puppets in Vladimir Putin’s master plan. I chose the byline.

...

A few weeks before Election Day, I was stuck in my cubicle poring over John Podesta’s emails. I wanted to be on the road. “I just feel like the election isn’t happening in my cubicle,” I said. “But it’s over,” an editor replied, reminding me that the Times’s Upshot election model gave Mrs. Clinton a 93 percent chance of winning. The ominous “they” who would keep the glass ceiling intact didn’t look that powerful then.

In addition to Amy Chozick's article, I've read accounts of the NYT's handling of 2016 from the former executive editor, the current executive editor, the former opinion editor, and the publisher. Out of all of these it appears that Chozick was the only one who came out of this with the big takeaway that it was a mistake to knowingly help the Russian government influence a presidential election. All of the rest, sometimes in very much these words, came away with the conclusion that they looked bad for underestimating Trump, and that the most important thing going forward was to avoid the appearance of anti-Republican bias.

The essential background here is the relationship between Hillary Clinton and the national press corps in general and with the New York Times in particular. I was living in Arkansas for almost all of the 90s and had the opportunity to observe the whole ugly affair up close. Driven by class bigotry, regional prejudice, and a then still common desire to balance the scales by going after a major Democratic scandal the way the press had gone after Watergate and Iran contra (based on public comments and a private conversation I had with a journalist who was there, this was very much a thing in newsrooms and editorial meetings of the 90s and early 2000s).

The resulting coverage was uniformly ugly and often blatantly unprofessional and much of the press corps never got past the idea of poor white trash in the White House, but Bill Clinton's charm and popularity tended to blunt the criticism. (It didn't hurt that the man was fun to cover.) The real viciousness was saved for Al Gore and, thanks to a generous helping of misogyny, Hillary. To give you an idea of the tone, Spy magazine published issues with one mock-up photo of her as a dominatrix and another where she appeared to have a penis and it was all dismissed as good clean fun.

Hillary's response to this was, under the circumstances, amazingly civil and professional, but there was always an understandable element of distance and distrust. To their credit, an increasing number of these critics came to question their own roles in the bullying, but it wasn't until the advent of Donald Trump that the majority stepped back and took a hard look at their own biases.

The notable holdout was the New York Times.  While papers like the Washington Post loudly and publicly called for a re-examination of past practices, especially regarding Hillary Clinton, the NYT not only refused to admit the possibility that anything they'd done in the past had been wrong; they actually doubled down.

This is where the point shaving analogy comes into play. In sports and politics, the general public mainly cares about wins and losses. It is only a relatively small group that cares about the specific score. Throwing a game will make more people upset and will attract more scrutiny than will simply keeping the lead down a little. You can get away with missing a few shots if you know you are still going to win.

The New York Times had an opportunity to indulge its worst impulses because everyone knew Hillary  was going to win. (Well, not everybody. Nate Silver actually predicted a real possibility of a Trump victory, but unfortunately the editors of the NYT were listening to the wrong Nate.) The paper could pay back longtime personal grudges and give its institutional misogyny free reign and no one would care. It could bury two out of every three Trump scandals, run ominous non-stories about Hillary, even knowingly play along with an obvious Russian scheme to influence the election, and as long as their own forecasts were correct, they would not only avoid any consequences; they would be able to puff out their chest and brag about speaking truth to power.

They thought they had a 93% chance of getting away clean. They were wrong. We can debate whether it would have made a difference. If the New York Times had vigorously investigated Trump, given proportional treatment to negative stories about Clinton without the ominous clouds and shadows framing, not published dubious Steve Bannon funded "research," or given heavy coverage to what they knew at the time to be a Russian effort to influence the election, would the outcome have been different? We can never know for certain. All we can say is that the paper of record put us at risk and something bad did happen and as long as they continue to do so, we need to hold them responsible.