The Scoop
With the 2024 presidential election a few weeks away, one question was top of mind for staff at The New York Times: Had the paper’s leadership noticed how many Democrats had become furious at it over its coverage of Donald Trump?
The Times, and the American media at large, absorb endless vitriol from the right. At a rally Sunday, Donald Trump joked that he wouldn’t mind if another would-be assassin had to “shoot through” the press pen to get to him.
But when the country’s most influential newsroom assembled at the paper’s New York headquarters for a nearly 90-minute-long off-the-record Q&A with the paper’s top editors on Oct. 24, some of its journalists voiced a different set of concerns about the 2024 election and how its outcome might shape the paper’s future.
Semafor obtained a recording of the meeting, which offers extraordinary insight into a key American institution under intense external scrutiny and internal pressure. It is, Executive Editor Joe Kahn said, “the most partisan, polarized time probably that any of us can remember, and we have the largest audience that we’ve ever had in our history.”
Moderators Astead Herndon and Jodi Kantor and other newsroom questioners repeatedly pressed Kahn and managing editor Carolyn Ryan about whether the paper’s coverage of Trump adequately reflected his authoritarian impulses, and whether the paper had deliberately grown more aggressive in the final weeks of the campaign.
“We got a lot of questions from folks worrying about what is in effect the ‘sanewashing’ of him, a term that has come up in terms of criticism of our coverage,” Herndon said on the call. “We also noticed as we were preparing these questions, it does feel like in the last month the paper has gotten more direct and more frank about Trump. Others in the newsroom noticed too. One colleague wrote in: ‘Can you talk about the decision to cover Trump’s age so aggressively in the last few weeks but not before that? Should we take that as a reaction to some of the external criticism? Why has there been a shift?’ Because it does seem like there’s been a more direct tone against Trump in the last couple months? Is that intentional?”
In a series of responses, the paper’s leaders strongly defended themselves from suggestions that the Times had alienated some of its liberal readers, and dismissed those outside critics as politically-motivated actors hoping to push the Times to the left.
Kahn said that the paper took criticism from internal voices and some external voices seriously. But he strongly pushed back against the external critics themselves. Without singling out one political camp or the other, the paper’s top editor argued that staff should tune out most of the online outrage, which he said was driven by people hoping to skew the Times’ coverage of politics and even its polling operation.
“I don’t think they’re very interested in the hard work that everyone in this room is doing. They’re not interested in genuinely revelatory fact-based reporting that helps people navigate the most polarized issues of our time,” Kahn said of the critics.
“What they’re interested in is having us be a mouthpiece for their already predetermined point of view. That’s what the most vocal critics are asking for. They’re asking us to do a better job projecting their point of view to more people. That of course is not our role, that is actually the opposite of independent journalism. That’s agenda-driven partisan journalism. They want to see The New York Times reaffirming their own priors. They’re not really interested in fact-based reporting — or frankly, independent polling — that doesn’t line up with their priors.”
Asked about whether any of that feedback is useful, Kahn was defiant.
“The left’s criticism — basically saying ‘You’re not being direct enough about what Trump’s saying and doing — that’s been very loud in recent weeks,” Kantor said at one point during the meeting. “We wanted to ask you more directly: Does that criticism count for you, and how do you interpret criticism of The New York Times, when is it useful?” she asked. “Was it true in this case that you heard that criticism from the left and said ‘Yeah, actually, we can be a little more frank with the reader in conveying what Trump is saying and doing?’”
“No, honestly, just no,” Kahn said. “I get all that incoming very powerfully in my inbox and in many conversations that I have. And I understand that that’s been a criticism of us,” he said. He noted particular criticism over the way the paper had focused on President Joe Biden’s age and had failed to promote similarly skeptical coverage of Trump, at least until the last minute.
“The truth is every once in a while there are good-spirited critics on both sides who genuinely want to see the Times lift its game. Most of what you’re describing is not that. Our focus is on doing the right thing journalistically at every step.”
He continued: “This is not about answering a critique on the left. We’ve stepped up our coverage politically — it’s a big part of our home screen experience, even more so than before as we get into the final weeks of the campaign. Of course you’re going to see some [more] of our coverage as part of that experience. Is that because the left was critiquing us? No.”
Kahn pointed out that despite the intense polarization, the Times’ audience had never been larger, with over 10 million subscribers and an enormous base of non-paying readers and listeners. The readers who angrily comment on New York Times stories represent just a fraction of the paper’s overall audience, he said, a sign that most people were not outraged by its coverage.
“We have a 1% participation rate of people who actually make comments. One in 100 people make them, as opposed to look at them. What is the percentage of people who ever look at comments versus the percentage of people who consume New York Times journalism? That is also a very small percentage. Those vocal critics are a very small percentage of a very small percentage.”
And he gestured to the conversation on Twitter, still a hub for media discourse: “It’s media-left Twitter, media-right Twitter. Those forums are catering to a very small subset of the audience out there that is consuming or eager to consume good journalism, and we are influenced by them. It’s really hard to ignore them, but we can’t let them dictate what our approach to journalism is, or what our confidence in our journalistic mission is.”
Changes in media consumption habits online lead readers to often get the wrong idea about the paper’s editorial priorities, the top editors argued. Ryan said that the paper has been frustrated by online readers who simply glanced at the site at any given moment and made broad declarations about its supposed biases and deficiencies. The Times was attempting to address this problem structurally, she said: In recent months it has altered its homepage and made changes to direct readers to older stories that they may have missed about vital topics.
“One of the challenges in this day and age is: We write a big story, it’s on the home screen, it’s gone, a new story arrives, people react to what they’re seeing right now. One thing we’ve tried to do — I think it’s been successful — is bring back coverage, remind people of themes we’ve covered in the past,” she said. “It’s important not to just write the story but remind people we’ve been paying a lot of attention to the consequences of a Trump victory for months and months — even [if] on a particular day, people might say ‘Why did you pay attention to this and not this?’”
Times leadership similarly addressed another criticism that has gained steam within the online left: that the paper unfairly focused tremendously on Biden’s age and mental decline in the months after his disastrous presidential debate performance, while neglecting his opponent’s cognitive shortcomings.
Ryan argued the recent focus on Trump’s age was simply a reflection of how the dynamics of the presidential race had changed: Trump is a greater contrast with Harris, who is nearly two decades younger.
“We did cover Trump’s age and behavior in relation to Biden, and he was the beneficiary in some ways of that natural comparison to Biden,” Ryan said of Trump. “But I do think we have very sharply told people what we are observing over time, and we have said it admirably and directly, and that’s part of the reason these stories are landing.”
But while much of the meeting focused on criticism from the left, the Times acknowledged that it was most seriously preparing for changes that could be brought about by a potential victory next week by the political right. Ryan said the Times has been getting ready both to cover Trump’s second administration and also girding itself for potential legal challenges or threats to itself as an institution.
“We would need to be structured in a way to cover the potential radical reshaping of the government. We’re talking about plans to have mass emigration. That will take a certain type of deployment for us. We’re talking about the Justice Department potentially being weaponized. The way we cover the Justice Department would have to be reshaped,” she said. “There have been very explicit threats from Trump about us in the media. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, but as an institution, we have to prepare for that as well.”
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Max’s view
Mainstream news organizations have decades of experience managing criticism from conservatives, whose political movement has been shaped by opposition to media. But while Trump’s presidency created an alignment between liberals horrified by Trump and a reinvigorated press corps with plenty of explosive stories to tell, the discontent with mainstream news organizations among a certain part of the Democratic Party still simmered beneath the surface.
Some left-leaning media critics continued to blame mainstream news outlets for Trump’s rise, arguing that they were mesmerized by the former reality television star’s antics, were addicted to the news audiences he attracted, and had disproportionately focused on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal while failing to hold her rival accountable. I felt some of this criticism, too, when reporting on the Biden White House for Politico in 2021 and 2022. At moments, I was surprised by the volume and tone of online vitriol in my email inbox and Twitter mentions among readers who felt that Biden’s missteps paled in comparison to what happened in the Trump White House, and were therefore not worthy of serious coverage.
The 2024 election saw this tension explode into open ideological revolt. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Times, whose readership and influence has ballooned as its competitors have struggled to adapt to the rapidly changing media landscape. Dismayed by Trump’s political staying power, some pointed the blame at the country’s biggest newspaper, arguing that if it just pushed harder on Trump, maybe he would go away.
Some online critics have built successful brands around complaining about the paper’s alleged unfairness towards Democrats. The New York Times Pitchbot, an account that attempts to parody Times story conceits and headlines with questionable success, has nonetheless gained a large following among Biden aides in the White House and online liberals who have grown increasingly frustrated with the Times.
As his campaign for reelection flailed, Biden allies inside the White House stoked the idea that news outlets, chiefly the Times and the Washington Post, were limiting the president’s appeal by focusing overwhelmingly on negative stories about him. Last month, the Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate reportedly prompted 250,000 subscribers who had bought into the paper’s Trump-era “Democracy Dies In Darkness” branding to cancel their subscription in protest.
Times leadership seemed at points confused on Thursday’s by reporters’ focus on liberal discontent with the paper, but those leaders have also noticed the uptick in commentary by liberals apoplectic about the Times’ coverage. And while it may not acknowledge any internal changes or reflect on any potential mistakes, the paper is clearly at least somewhat interested in pushing back against what it sees as unfair misconceptions.
At one point in the October meeting, Ryan acknowledged that institutionally, the paper was “evolving in terms of how we explain what we do, and to what degree do we engage with especially public criticism.” Later that evening, the paper did engage: In a letter to the liberal media watchdog Media Matters, the Times responded directly to pressure from some Democrats to characterize Donald Trump more directly as a threat to American democracy.
No news organization that feels it is under attack (from left or right) has much incentive, institutionally, to entertain the possibility that it is wrong, at least publicly. It takes a powerful personality and desire to be a countervailing force to change a news organization as powerful and slow-moving as the Times. Throughout the first year of his leadership at the Times, Kahn has adopted a defiant posture that seems to differ, at least slightly, from that of his predecessor Dean Baquet, who rarely (if ever) apologized for the paper’s journalism but seemed to do a better job of making some on the staff think he was hearing and considering internal and external criticism.
Whether this is a smart strategy depends on who you talk to. Some staffers insisted to me that Kahn’s approach is needlessly prickly, while others appreciated his willingness to aggressively defend the paper’s journalism. But whether this issue lingers for the Times or if it has bigger problems on its hands may depend greatly on the outcome of Tuesday’s election.
Know More
Other highlights of the meeting:
On journalism professors calling for an independent review of the Times story on Hamas fighters reportedly raping Israelis during last year’s attack: “I don’t know that in my tenure or my time in newsroom leadership I don’t remember a piece of journalism that’s undergone the kind of deconstruction that piece underwent both by people on our own staff and many people outside looking at every word every anecdote, every comma,” Kahn said.
“The truth is there were sexual assaults associated with the Oct. 7 attacks on Israelis. We documented that, many others have documented that, there was an attempt to sort of raise questions about whether or not those had occurred. They did occur. There were serious sexual abuses on the Oct. 7 attack. That piece of journalism was incredibly scrutinized but has stood up as the basic exploration of sexual assaults by Hamas members on Israelis as part of Oct. 7 happens to be true and a disturbing aspect of the attack as that piece of journalism said. And in my view the debate about it is over.”
Herndon: “Is that a yes, feeling confident that every word in that story is accurate?
Kahn: “I’m not confident that every word in any story is 100% accurate. We do our best to make sure when we publish any piece of journalism that any single word is 100% accurate. … I am confident that that story was accurate and worth publishing in The New York Times, yes.
On Kahn’s comments about young journalists not being prepared to enter the newsroom: “I think it is true honestly if you look broadly at that generation of people, even coming out of journalism school. I’m not talking about people who have come to The New York Times. I’m just talking in general, maybe about aspiring journalists or people who have done this work in college — they’re not being fully trained in what we consider to be the values of independent journalism. I just think that’s a fact. And that doesn’t mean there aren’t great people from that generation doing great journalism — fortunately, many of them are on our staff — but I do think we have had to invest in the culture and the values and what we consider to be the main mission of independent journalism. … I just don’t think it’s an assumed value, and I don’t think we can assume that generation has it. I think that’s true.
“That’s not at all the same thing as saying that I have reservations about young people on our staff. I never said that and I didn’t mean to imply it. The honest truth is you can’t imagine the breadth or depth or excellence of The New York Times without a whole new generation, literally hundreds of people who brought to us storytelling skills and some of the best beat reporters that we have, but also new ways of journalism that have completely opened an entire new wing of The New York Times to the world.”
On Ryan’s comments to New York Magazine that many staff don’t realize how precarious the media business is: “You’re not supposed to complain, but they cut off the quote,” she said. “The truth is if you talk to [Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien], if you talk to anyone who is really looking at the future — it is precarious. We still rely on a lot of revenue from print. If that went away, we’d really be in trouble. … Clearly I didn’t articulate it well, but I did get cut off. We have to keep trying things, we have to keep thriving, we have to keep figuring out how to connect for an audience. I guess I’ll ask for a correction.”