The Scoop
The New York Times responded directly Thursday to pressure from some Democrats to characterize Donald Trump more directly as a threat to American democracy.
The Times forcefully rejected a report from Media Matters For America, a liberal media watchdog, that complained that major media organizations gave evidence recently unsealed in the Jan. 6 indictment dramatically less attention than they did coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email server during the 2016 election.
“The former president continues to benefit from news outlets grading him on a massive curve, resulting in relatively muted coverage for his nakedly authoritarian, unfathomably racist, and allegedly criminal behavior,” MMFA’s Matt Gertz said, pointing to the fact that major US newspapers ran “26 combined articles mentioning Trump’s indictment in the week after the unsealing of Smith’s filing.”
In a response shared first with Semafor Thursday evening, a spokesperson for the paper responded in detail to Media Matters’ analysis. The statement said the new October indictment was “so heavily redacted that it didn’t reveal a great deal of new information beyond what was already reported.” Further, the statement argues that the paper covered the fallout from January 6 much more extensively than it covered the Clinton email investigation.
“This extensive coverage amounted to more than 2,600 online and print articles, visual investigations, audio and other multimedia journalism discounted by MMFA’s report. For comparison, The Times published 300 news and opinion articles about Hillary Clinton’s server and emails since 2015. This includes coverage following former FBI director James Comey’s letter to Congress in the days leading up to the 2016 election, a breaking news story that evolved in a more compressed time frame,” the statement reads.
The Times also argues that its critics were too focused on its print media, and did not take into account the emphasis that the paper placed on its much more highly trafficked digital products including its mobile app and online homepage.
“MMFA’s focus on print stories specifically shows a lack of understanding of digital news delivery and the prominence stories receive online. The Times’s audience overwhelmingly engages with our digital report, including newsletters, alerts and social media programming, where these stories were given heavy prominence,” the Times said.
In an email, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said the Times did not engage with his organization’s critique.
“If print or front pages don’t matter, then how come at major moments the NYT itself promotes images of their front page?” he said. “We look at front pages and print because it’s a way of teasing out and gleaning insight into editorial decision making and priorities. What gets printed says a lot. They know this. But instead of engaging with our point, they suggest we’re stupid? Come on.”
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Max’s view
The backlash to the New York Times from a group of Democratically aligned partisan readers has emerged as a major theme this election cycle, and a source of deep frustration in the Times’s 8th Avenue headquarters.
Some left-leaning readers had been grumbling about the paper’s coverage of Trump for years, accusing it of creating the appearance of balance between two viewpoints that were objectively not equal. But it was the flurry of critical stories and op-eds following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June that seemed to harden the views of some liberals. The Times not only held Democrats to an unfair standard, they argued — but would help elect Trump. Readers and critics on X, Threads, and BlueSky wrote that if only the news organizations had covered Trump’s mental fitness in the same way it covered Biden’s, Trump would be headed for another presidential defeat.
It’s a new position for a publication that is much more accustomed to being attacked from the right and from further left readers who have been critical of the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza. Partisan Democrats remain squarely among some of the Times most loyal readers.
Part of what these liberal critics complain about touches on an issue that many mainstream media outlets struggle with. Trump’s regular disregard for facts, his disregard for norms, and his war with the press present a challenge for news media organizations attempting to remain neutral in the eyes of all (or at least most) readers.
But the liberal fixation on the wording of New York Times headlines or the physical placement of stories in the paper requires ignoring much of the institution’s work.
The fact is that Times, Post, and other outlets have published some of the most damning revelations about Trump and his administrations and campaigns in the nine years since his political ascent in 2015. They’ve run countless op-eds about the dangers of his presidency, and rarely featured flattering or glossy coverage of his presidency. While these stories may have sufficiently convinced half of the country that he should not be president again, millions more remain unconvinced of the severity of Trump’s return.
Their support for Trump comes in spite of mainstream news’ outlets coverage of him, not because of it. And if a fragmented media landscape means that a near-majority of Americans either aren’t seeing the news in these outlets, or simply don’t care, it reflects a much more alarming reality for some of these critics than the fantasy that sharper wording of a New York Times headline would draw Trump’s nine-year run in national politics to a close.
Room for Disagreement
“If you and I had a private roundtable with a randomly selected group of mainstream political reporters who cover this election, they would agree with us. They would say that what we’re saying about Trump and the bad acting at the heart of it is true,” liberal media critic Brian Beutler told TNR’s Greg Sargent earlier this month. “They have generally been unwilling to treat that as an emergency on the level of having a private email server or being old.”