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And the Times’ Position on Endorsing Is…?

Behind The New York Times’ recent mishmash of a non-endorsement editorial – the one urging readers not to choose Zohran Mamdani for mayor – lies a backstory (or two or three) worth parsing.

Let’s begin with the sudden announcement, in an August 2024 news story, that the Times would no longer endorse in local contests: “The New York Times editorial board will no longer make endorsements in New York elections, including in races for governor and mayor of New York City,” the Times’ Opinion editor said.

“The change will be immediate: The paper does not plan to take a stance in Senate, congressional or state legislative races in New York this fall, or in next year’s New York City elections, when Mayor Eric Adams is seeking a second term against a growing field of challengers.” 

Quite a definitive statement. As both a former member of the Times editorial board and a New York City voter, I was distressed. I was also surprised by how little reaction it seemed to evoke. Perhaps this was because the Times was giving up only local and state endorsements, but would still be endorsing in national elections? 

Certainly the announcement was less sensational than the two that would follow a couple of months later, as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times announced there would be no presidential endorsements – both in the wake of their publishers’ decisions to kill the one the editorial writers had prepared.

The Times publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, had done nothing of the sort. 

Still, to understand any major change at a newspaper, it’s wise to ponder what role the publisher may have played. So it’s worth looking a few months further back, to a major address Sulzberger delivered on March 4, 2024. “Simply put, journalists don’t serve the public by trying to predict history’s judgments, or to steer society to them,” he said. Rather, a journalist’s job is “to arm society with the information and context it needs to thoughtfully grapple with issues of the day.”

Responding to critics who say the Times’ “posture of independence represents some kind of moral abdication,” Sulzberger said, “I see no lack of passionate, morally confident actors sounding the alarm. Indeed, the alarm seems so loud and so constant that much of the public has by now put in earplugs.”

Sulzberger was addressing the paper’s role as a whole, with an emphasis on the news side.  Still, might the decision not to endorse locally – not to steer society or sound the alarm – have followed logically from the views he expressed?

But wait: The tale evolves. The Times announces on Feb. 28 this year that David Leonhardt is moved from the Times newsroom back to the editorial board. “It is time to carve out a new vision for the board that is true to our longstanding values and updated for today’s world,” writes Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Leonhardt, she adds, “will become an editorial director, overseeing the editing and writing of our editorials and serving as part of my leadership team.”

Then, in May, New York Magazine features article about the Times opinion operation: “Under Kathleen Kingsbury, the New York Times’ ‘Opinion’ section has doubled in size. What kind of publication is she building?” The endorsement issue is raised. Mentioning local criticism of the previously announced decision “to give up this power to do some good,” the piece continues, mysteriously: “The Times insists it is just stopping the practice of automatically endorsing for every local office for mayor to comptroller.” ‘We reserve the right to endorse,’ said Leonhardt. Kingsbury would not say whether the board would endorse in the upcoming mayoral race, saying, ‘I don’t want to spoil it for you.’”

And thus we arrive at the curious mayoral-election editorial, which includes this rather forthright statement: “We do not believe Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” It’s a puzzling path from the publisher’s aversion to “sounding alarms” or “steering” society, to the flatly stated decision to “no longer make endorsements in New York elections,” to the addition of the word “automatically,” to reserving “the right to endorse,” to whatever that editorial was. (A “nondorsement,” maybe?)

The puzzle begins, of course, with the failure to explain the initial decision. Knowing how much work goes into preparing for an endorsement, I wondered if it might have been a staffing issue. But the Times ended up doing a fine job of informing us about what the candidates stood for, what they said in debates, who endorsed them, what controversies surrounded them and how a selective group of city voters felt about them. Indeed, the richness of the coverage counters another possible explanation – that the decision was another step in becoming a less local, more national and international newspaper. 

So who can explain it? Certainly not the lowly reader. The Times is a serious newspaper treating its readers unseriously. Without a reader representative to press for an explanation, only the Times knows what will come next.

Come to think of it, maybe they don’t, either.

Leadership, Media revolution, Newspapers, Press and politics, Uncategorized

Journalism failed us badly. Here’s how.

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People will be parsing this election for years to come. Here’s one thing I know: Journalism failed us badly. Since we are going to need good journalism more than ever in the days ahead, I offer some thoughts about what went wrong:

  1. The bottomless well of Trump coverage early on. This is mostly attributable to cable, but it was true of television more broadly, and it influenced print and online media as well.

screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-5-42-33-pm

I included this chart from the New York Times in my March 28 blogpost: A tough test for Journalism and the Midterm Grades Aren’t Good.

As the Times story said, “Over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history. It is also twice the estimated $746 million that Hillary Clinton, the next best at earning media, took in.”

Of this development, CBS Chairman Les Moonves famously said: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”  Here’s what else he said: “Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

He did. So did they.

Continue reading Journalism failed us badly. Here’s how. →

  1. Near abandonment of issues coverage.

A Harvard study by Tom Patterson, released in late September, looked at 10 major news outlets, including the New York Times. It concluded that “substantive policy issues have received only a small amount of attention so far in the 2016 election coverage.”

Another study, released in late October, looked at the networks’ news coverage to determine how much of it concerned issues:

Total ABC CBS NBC
1988 117 36 40 42
1992 210 112 38 60
1996 98 29 53 17
2000 130 45 39 46
2004 203 40 119 44
2008 220 41 119 66
2012 114 13 70 32
2016 (YTD) 32 8 16 8

(Andrew Tyndall 10/25/16)

“With just two weeks to go, issues coverage this year has been virtually non-existent. Of the 32 minutes total, terrorism (17 mins) and foreign policy (7 mins) towards the Middle East (Israel-ISIS-Syria-Iraq) have attracted some attention. Gay rights, immigration and policing have been mentioned in passing.

“No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates’ terms, not on the networks’ initiative.”

 

  1. Data journalism gone haywire.

The Times’s Nate Cohn may have no regrets, as per this tweet:

Nate Cohn ‏@Nate_Cohn Nov 10 Most of our journalism this year was about how people were ignoring the importance of white working class to Dem chances. I have no regrets

But something surely went wrong, since virtually everyone else in the world was in shock, no matter where they stood politically.

As Nick Bilton put it: “Every big-data, number-crunching Web site, from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight to The New York Times’ Upshot; every poll, from Fox to Bloomberg to Rasmussen, had predictions that were so off that it now seems surreal. And while we now all have to swallow the noxious potion that is President Trump, the chaser is that polling is completely and utterly broken.”

 

4. False equivalence. And more false equivalence. And more…

As in: They’re both unpopular. They both tell lies — no matter how vastly different the proportions:

screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-5-58-41-pm

Ethan Coen’s sarcasm in his “thank you notes” in the Times rang painfully close to how the stories read:

“You balanced Donald Trump’s proposal that the military execute the innocent families of terrorists, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced pot-stirring racist lies about President Obama’s birth, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced a religious test at our borders, torture by our military, jokes about assassination, unfounded claims of a rigged election, boasts about groping and paradoxical threats to sue anyone who confirmed the boasts, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced endorsement of nuclear proliferation, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced tirelessly, indefatigably; you balanced, you balanced, and then you balanced some more.”

The Times’s columnists tried to tell ‘em so:

“I know some (many) journalists are busy denying responsibility, but this is absurd, and I think they know it,” said Paul Krugman in “The Falsity of False Equivalence.”

And Nick Kristof:  “Of course we should cover Clinton’s sins, but when the public believes that a mythomaniac like Trump is the straight shooter, we owe it to ourselves and the country to wrestle with knotty questions of false equivalence.”

The primary response came from the then fairly new public editor, Liz Spayd, in an exceptionally weak column, urging Times journalists not to be intimidated by the false balance charge.

They weren’t.

Does this kind of flawed journalism happen because a news organization wants to avoid driving away the right?  Did it make for more interesting stories?  Did it seem harmless, because Clinton was sure to win?

The New York Times — this newspaper on which I depend (as is evident in this post), and which leads much of the other news coverage in America — is deeply implicated here. It is perhaps the most important news outlet in the country, one of the most important in the world, and it must be better than this.  A statement from its publisher and  executive editor, after the election said this:

“As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.”

Rededication? Yes.  “Same level?” Please, no.

 

  1. My fifth point moves beyond traditional, legacy news operations, which are no longer the gatekeepers that they were (though I believe firmly that their power continues to matter sufficiently to worry deeply about how they conduct themselves).

Organizations like Google and Facebook make decisions that have enormous power over what Americans know and believe. Outrage over the fake stories that proliferated during this campaign is finally being recognized by these reluctant corporations.

It’s a step, albeit a belated and limited one. And one reason it’s belated and limited is this, as one employee told Gizmodo about Facebook: “They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, “there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics,” and that “a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.”  (Some things, new and old media share.)

 

After every election, we agonize about journalism’s coverage. But this one feels bigger, the stakes higher. Legacy media still matter. The choices they make will affect our future, just as they affected this election. They are searching for economic survival in a Wild West of media change. My conviction is that, if they distinguish themselves by being trustworthy and fair-minded, dedicated to the truth as close as they can determine it, committed to purveying news that is proportional and comprehensive — well, that will be their best chance of survival.

Ours, too.

 

 

 

 

Leadership, Newspapers, Uncategorized

An Early Read on Baquet as New York Times Leader

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In the swirl of the Jill Abramson firing, a couple of things being said about the new executive editor, Dean Baquet, didn’t sync with my impression of him. I looked back at this video of a forum I hosted at USC Annenberg with Baquet when he had just become managing editor of The New York Times, and saw why

What I had found most worrisome was Glenn Greenwald’s charge that Baquet has “a really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American national security state.”  When I looked back at the video of Baquet at the USC Director’s Forum on Oct. 27, 2011, I was struck by the fact that he had opened the session with an impassioned call for national-security reporting.

He talked about a call he got, when he was executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, from George Tenet, then director of the CIA. Tenet asked him to hold a story about the CIA, which was spying on the Iranian community in the U.S. Baquet told us that he held the story for a day so as to be able to review it, then called Tenet back and said he’d be running it.

Baquet talked to the gathering of students and faculty about other such stories, as well, including the New York Times reporting on National Security Agency surveillance. He noted that he had had conversations with folks in both the Obama and the Bush administrations on national-security issues, “and the argument is always the same.”

“But so far, not a single bit of evidence — even in the case of Wikileaks, which I edited – has emerged to prove that any of these stories has threatened national security. I’d argue that, in each case, it’s the newspaper that’s being the patriot.” Continue reading An Early Read on Baquet as New York Times Leader →

Like most editors I know, Baquet has indeed presided over decisions not to print. But his remarks at the forum speak to a strength of conviction that I found reassuring. (More reassuring than Baquet’s retort to Richard Prince, calling Greenwald “idiotic” for making the charge.)

The second striking thing in the video was what Baquet had to say about Jill Abramson’s hiring as editor.

A piece about Abramson by Ken Auletta had just run in the New Yorker when the USC forum occurred. I asked Baquet about the notion in that story that, in the end, Arthur Sulzberger’s choice had come down to Jill or Dean, and if the publisher had chosen Dean, he would have lost Jill. In picking Jill, he got both of them. Baquet nodded, adding: “I actually think…Arthur made the right decision. “

“I think that Jill had a lot going for her. She had worked in that newsroom.” (Baquet had been running the New York Times Washington bureau). “She’s a terrific editor.” The Auletta piece “didn’t capture some of the things she had done,” he added, saying it should have been “more about the journalism.”

Baquet continued: “When Arthur called me, I thought, ‘terrific!’ “ (He also noted that he’d been a managing editor twice, and executive editor once. “Being managing editor is about a billion times more fun. Like being coach versus being general manager: You get to hang out with the players.”

As for some of the things Auletta reported about Jill’s leadership style, “I do think that when women in leadership – the tradition of this sort of a cantankerous editor is a much more acceptable tradition for male editors than it is for women who become editor.”

Referring to the infamously difficult Times editor Abe Rosenthal, Baquet said: “In her defense…Abe is portrayed by history as a tyrant. I don’t think that’s Jill. That’s not Jill at all.”

One other thing worth noting about the forum is that Baquet speaks at length about his great enthusiasm for journalism’s new tools. Given that his supposed relative lack of passion — and relative inexperience – on the digital side of things was another concern voiced in the wake of Abramson’s firing, the eagerness with which he talked to students on this topic is noteworthy.

Leadership, Newspapers

Abramson and Sulzberger: The Two Who Couldn’t Tango

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The reasons for Jill Abramson’s firing as editor of The New York Times are no doubt many and complex. But one thing is clear: the editor-publisher relationship failed, spectacularly.

This classic journalistic partnership, when it works, is like a good marriage. Full of successes and challenges, warmth and tension, it requires constant open communication and full-hearted dedication on the part of both parties. Also loyalty. A good editor ensures that the publisher is never blindsided.  A good publisher ensures sufficient editorial independence to do good journalism. And a newsroom relies on believing that the two have confidence in one another.  The successful combinations are legendary: Punch and Abe, Katharine and Ben. (I learned how essential this partnership is when I was fortunate enough, as editor of the Des Moines Register, to work with publisher Charlie Edwards.)

What happened in this case, according to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., is that his editor, Abramson, had to leave because of her management style. But, really: Editors are famed for being difficult.  Every journalist has stories about newsroom leaders throwing fits – or, better, potted plants. Hot tempers, arrogance, polarization:  these have practically been job requirements for editors.  I’m not saying this is a good thing.  I’m saying that it’s striking that we’d become sensitive to the unpleasantness only when a woman makes it to the top.

Actually, though, there IS cause for newsrooms to be even unhappier today than usual.  They are being made to change (though not quickly enough), and change is difficult. So, if it has always been true that newsrooms were fertile ground for anyone seeking anonymous gripes, it is even truer now. Indeed, my word to wise publishers would be to be wary today of the universally loved editor.  He’s probably not doing what you need him to do.

Of course, the editor does have a managerial responsibility to the publisher: To ensure that the staff is doing good work.  In this, Abramson seems to have succeeded. Her “management style” became a firing offense only because the editor-publisher relationship was broken.

Continue reading Abramson and Sulzberger: The Two Who Couldn’t Tango →

Similarly with another, more serious issue cited in the aftermath of the firing: pay equity. If Abramson was in fact paid less than her predecessors and perhaps even her deputies, this is indeed a worrisome matter — and one that an editor and publisher with confidence in one another would have been determined to work out.  That she hired a lawyer to represent her in this matter shows just how deeply dysfunctional the publisher-editor relationship had become.

Then there are the reports of conflicts over business issues.  When Mark Thompson was hired as chief executive in 2012, the already existing challenges of leading journalism through the dangerous shoals of business experimentation grew even more complex. Remember that newspapers are strange enterprises in that they have as a central element a unit whose behavior may, when it is at its best, be inimical to the financial fortunes of the business. Add in the fact that far-reaching innovation is now essential to the very existence of these endangered species.  Imagine the tensions that arise naturally, then, if the main business executive and the main editorial executive are both doing their jobs. Only a publisher (and chairman of the board) in open communication with each, confident of both, could make this work.

What’s striking to me in this regard is the story of the effort to hire the Guardian’s Janine Gibson as an additional managing editor.  This seems to have caught Managing Editor Dean Baquet by (understandably unpleasant) surprise.  But both Thompson and Sulzberger had met with Gibson as well as Abramson, and apparently were involved in the effort to hire her.  Had the publisher and editor never discussed how this matter would be presented to the managing editor? This is believable only in the utter absence of communication that a failed relationship implies.

Finally, of course: the gender question. It isn’t news that the newsroom culture is proudly male. Women have long struggled to figure out how to thrive in it. So it’s no wonder that Sulzberger’s vague assertion about management style opened the door to outrage. Imagine Abe Rosenthal hiring a coach to help him with his management style! Imagine if Abramson had been the one to slam her hand against the newsroom wall, as Baquet reportedly did after a disagreement with her (with no apparent dint to his reputation for being unfailingly polite and amiable).

I am happy about one side effect of this sad affair, and that is the outpouring of powerful pieces by women documenting the challenges facing women in journalism – and showing how meaningful it was for women in the Times newsroom to have a woman at the top. See, for example, Amanda Hess, Rebecca Traister, Ann Friedman, Susan Glasser and Rachel Sklar. With any luck, these beautifully crafted and deeply felt pieces will be helpful to the next person who decides to “give a woman a chance.”

It is said that Sulzberger was torn when he named Abramson editor, thinking perhaps he should have picked Baquet instead. Of all the unknowables here, this one rings especially true. It would explain why these two key relationships — publisher-editor, and editor-managing editor – were doomed.  In the end, Abramson may have felt very much as if she were standing between two people who just wanted her gone.

(Full disclosure: I know Sulzberger, Abramson and Baquet, and admire them all.)