Wow. The @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the “Trump phenomena.”
—Donald Trump, Nov. 13, 2016 (The Times circulation was in fact increasing at four times its usual rate)
I’d be a pretty good reporter …
—Donald Trump, Feb. 16, 2017
IN FEBRUARY 2017, barely a month after Inauguration Day, Stanley Dearman died. The New York Times ran an obituary but, outside of Mississippi and in a few places that care deeply about journalism, his name was unlikely to have triggered much of a memory. Stanley Dearman had spent 34 years of his life as the editor of The Neshoba Democrat, a tiny newspaper in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
In 1964, three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, two white, one black, were found murdered near Philadelphia. They had been arrested on June 21 by the local police, released, and then disappeared. Their burned-out car was located a short time later, and then in August the three bodies were uncovered, buried in an earthen dam. Dearman’s predecessor as editor of The Neshoba Democrat had referred to the three as “agitators” and “so-called civil rights workers.” Federal authorities convicted seven men of conspiracy charges in the deaths—none of them served more than six years—but years passed, and no one was ever prosecuted for murder.
As the years drifted into decades, many readers of The Democrat were happy to let that dark chapter pass into obscurity. Not Stanley Dearman. “I can say without exaggeration that in 40 years, not a single day has gone by that I don’t think about those boys,” he told The New York Times in a 2004 interview. “It’s just something you can’t wash off. People may not want to talk about it, but it will never go away. The thing won’t let us forget.”
Dearman had used his editorial page to keep prodding Mississippi officials to do something to bring the killers to justice. In his searing 2000 editorial “It’s Time for an Accounting,” he wrote:
There are those in this community who will say that it’s been too long. The trouble with that position is that they were saying it after five years, after 10 years, after 15 years. If it involved a member of their family or a friend, they would never say it’s been too long. And if they claim that right for themselves, how can they in good conscience deny it to anyone else?
Dearman went on:
None of this would be an issue if a group of self-appointed saviors of the status quo had not taken it upon themselves to murder three unarmed young men who were arrested on a trumped up traffic charge and held in jail like caged animals until night fell and they could be intercepted by the Ku Klux Klan, a group whose bravery increases in direct proportion to their numbers and how long the sun has set.
His paper kept the case alive, and four decades after the crime, prosecutors finally brought a murder case against Edgar Ray Killen, a 79-year-old sawmill operator. He was convicted.
Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, one of the country’s best investigative journalists, understood what Dearman had been up against. “He called on his community to prosecute the very killers who shared the sidewalks he did in downtown Philadelphia. People in town told him to leave it alone. They told him to forget it, but the truth is, Stanley Dearman never forgot,” Mitchell wrote in a tribute after Dearman had died.
Stanley Dearman was worth thinking about in February 2017. His story was not just about standing up to people in power but about standing up to his readers. It takes a particular kind of courage for newspapers to take on the powerful, to keep hewing to the truth despite the threats and the beratings and the daily frustration of trying to get over the huge walls of secrecy that every government manages to build around the information that the American people need to know most. But standing up to readers can be even harder at times. (I often make a similar point to editors when some newsmaker calls and points out an error. The easy part is dealing with the angry caller; the hard part is confronting a dug-in reporter.)
The newspaper industry over the past two decades has been devastated by fundamental changes in how companies advertise and where readers go to find news. Between 2000 (when I first went in-house at a newspaper) and 2015, print newspaper advertising revenue fell from $67 billion to less than $20 billion, shedding all the gains of the previous 50 years, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Over a decade, more than 100,000 jobs in magazines and newspapers had disappeared, The Atlantic reported.
In 2011, The Times had defied the experts who said that a paywall that required readers to pay for content would never work. “Information wants to be free,” would-be visionaries would write back then, meaning … well, who knows what they meant? All we knew was that the paywall had worked financially. At the start of the century, 26 percent of The Times’s revenue came from circulation. Fifteen years later, circulation was accounting for 60 percent of revenue, and the percentage was growing as Google and Facebook ate up the advertising market. And while everyone from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to college professors to guys on the street would be happy to tell you that print was dead, the truth was it had remained alive at The New York Times, thanks largely to subscriber loyalty. In 2016, nearly 70 percent of The Times’s revenue still came from the print edition’s subscriptions and advertising.
By the time of Trump’s election there was no doubt about the politics of our core readership: it skewed left, and, in any measure of its opposition to Trump, it went off the charts. In the aftermath of Election Day, the numbers were growing in ways that were hard to imagine. Trump was just flat wrong about the “failing New York Times,” as he liked to call the paper. Shortly after Election Day, he lobbed a tweet about how The Times was “losing thousands of subscribers” because of its coverage of his campaign. It was so inaccurate that The Times’s senior management decided to do what it had not done before: go mano a mano, or at least tweet to tweet, with a sitting president. There on the @RealDonaldTrump Twitter account was the paper’s response:
fact: surge in new subscriptions, print & digital, with trends, stops & starts, 4 X better than normal.
It was an undeniable Trump Bump. In the first quarter of 2017, The Times had a net gain of more than 300,000 digital subscribers, the biggest jump in any quarter since it had implemented the online paywall in 2011. The paper had grown to more than three million subscribers, online and in print. As our CEO Mark Thompson pointed out, every time the president criticized The Times, he drove up our subscription numbers. Americans concerned about what Trump might do next were looking to The Times to be the watchdog that the First Amendment envisioned, and they were willing to put their money down to support the paper. Even before the rise of Trump, a Pew Foundation study in 2014 showed that about two-thirds of Times readers identified as left of center (compared with 38 percent of all web respondents). Trump’s election, along with the polarization of the country in both its politics and its choice of media, only reinforced that trend.
The Times had long prided itself on being an honest broker on the news side of its operation. The editorial page might swing left, but the news columns were to be on the other side of a very high wall, playing it straight with the facts, no matter who might be lifted up or skewered by the reporting. During the 2016 election, Dean Baquet was quoted in the public editor’s column: “We have to be really careful that people feel like they can see themselves in The New York Times. I want us to be perceived as fair and honest to the world, not just a segment of it.” It could be a challenge. Early in 2017, a friend who was a Trump-hating conservative and a careful reader of The Times told me he had grown increasingly unhappy with our coverage. He pointed to a story we had just done about Trump’s new policy of embracing the autocratic Egyptian government and tamping down American criticism of that country’s deplorable record on human rights, which had been a cornerstone of Obama’s policy. After reporting out the White House policy announcement, the story then gave prominent coverage to both a human rights activist in the U.S. and a former Obama official, who each condemned the Trump approach. Many respectable experts actually think the new approach makes sense for America, my friend pointed out. He wasn’t suggesting anyone had to agree with them, but why did no one at The New York Times think to include their views in the piece? Wouldn’t it make a difference to know that Trump’s view had some traction beyond the Trump foreign policy team (whose dysfunction and misdirection we had chronicled often)? They were good questions.
As the lawyer for The Times, I get to be an agnostic on most issues of fairness and bias. My job is to give our journalists my best judgment on what the law allows us to do, not to opine on whether a story could have been fairer or told more dispassionately, or have incorporated different voices. The calculation is pretty simple: when I am vetting stories before publication, I want journalists to take my legal opinions seriously. (OK, I actually want them to embrace my legal opinions as wise and prudent and the absolute embodiment of the law, but I’m a realist.) When I start serving up opinions on how journalism should be done, editors should be free to ignore me. They’re the journalists. They get to make that call. I have seen too many press lawyers get ignored because they could not resist appointing themselves as uber-editors. Lawyers who get ignored end up in a very unhappy place, and so do their clients.
Of course, the line between fair and legal is often translucent. At its fundamental level, the law of libel addresses false statements that harm reputation. A story can be wildly unfair and still true and not harm the reputation of the subject of the story. But in many libel cases, the issue is not whether the story is true or false, but whether a factual error was made with reckless disregard of the truth or as a result of careless reporting that failed to live up to professional standards. Defending a fair story—a story that gives people who are criticized a chance to respond, that avoids insinuating language, and that isn’t flavored by the personal judgments of the reporter—is always a lighter lift for lawyers.
For much of the campaign, it was often hard to find anyone outside The Times who thought the paper was being fair. My conservative friends thought the coverage of Trump was a daily takedown of the candidate, dismissing him as a sure loser and loose cannon (perhaps an unhinged cannon) who deserved to go down. (They were strangely silent when a controversy erupted over whether The Times had misled the public on the eve of the election with a story that suggested the FBI had cleared the Trump campaign of charges of collusion with Russia.) The Clinton supporters railed about “false equivalency,” the deeply held belief that journalists were so caught up in trying to look fair that a negative story about Trump would be matched with a negative story about Clinton, even though in their minds Trump’s missteps were felonies and mortal sins while Clinton’s failures were the equivalent of alternate-side parking violations. Liz Spayd, The Times’s public editor, waded knee-deep into the controversy at her own peril in September 2016, the height of campaign frenzy. She blasted away at those who seemed to think that Trump should get tougher coverage because, well, he was Trump and doing all kinds of Trump things all the time, or that The Times investigation into the Clinton Foundation—which didn’t turn up much news—was just a lame attempt to have fake balance. To her, The Times should neither be counting stories in the pursuit of balance—one for him, one for her, one for him, one for her—nor making the judgment that one candidate deserved to have harsher coverage than the other. Liz came out for going after both candidates aggressively and letting readers decide how much weight to give to any story. Readers hated Liz’s column with a passion. I happened to agree with her, and told her so, which probably didn’t matter much in the scheme of things when online commenters by the dozens were treating her like a Trump shill.
The criticism of the political coverage from both sides was tinged with a certain disregard for readers’ intelligence, or at least their complexity as human beings. Powerful news organizations undoubtedly shape public opinion, but it’s complicated. We all bring our own filters to what we read, and we form our own opinions about what we read based on—pick as many as you want—our existing biases, our station in life, how critically we read a particular story, what we’re hearing from those around us, and what we’re reading elsewhere in a media environment that is saturated with alternative news sources. Maybe people expect nothing more than that both candidates will be covered fully. Maybe people see the difference between the parking ticket and the mass murder.
None of that proves (or disproves) whether there was bias one way or the other. And I don’t buy the facile answer that if both sides are criticizing you, you must be doing something right. The exact opposite is just as likely true: you are doing a truly terrible job all around and hiding that fact from absolutely nobody.
But here is what I do know. I did the prepublication review, and was often involved in post-mortems, of the most controversial reporting that the paper did during the campaign: The stories about Trump’s issues with women and about the claims of groping. The articles about whether Hillary Clinton had been an enabler for her husband’s sexual misconduct, attacking women who dared to complain publicly. The whole saga of the Clinton emails and the investigation that followed. The Trump tax returns. The campaign-altering disclosures that came after the Democrats’ emails were hacked. The ties between the Clinton Foundation and dubious foreign governments. Trump’s breathtaking disregard for the truth. None of those stories struck me as cheap shots, taken out of anti-Trump fervor or a desire to “get” Hillary and even the score. Not once did I feel that the story was a hack job motivated by a personal agenda or an editor’s agenda or some agenda of the newspaper. (I would not be able to say the same thing if I were the lawyer for Fox News.) When I do a legal read of an article in advance of publication, I am all about the villains—the doctor who botched the surgery, the insurance company that shafted its customers, the professor who hit on the student, the greedy industrialist who ground up workers to make a fortune. I try to see the story through their eyes, to look for the counternarrative that could be built from the same set of facts. It’s a counterintuitive reading. I spent the 2016 campaign in the tank for Clinton and Trump, whoever happened to be the piñata on any given day, making certain, or at least as certain as you get in an uncertain world, that our stories were as close to right as they could be. But whether it is Clinton or Trump or just some poor shlub who wanders into the unforgiving spotlight of a Times story, I routinely go back to the editor or the reporter and ask the questions that the subjects of our stories would ask. There’s no magic here. More often than not, at least at The Times, the best journalists have already asked themselves those same questions somewhere along the road from the first interview to the last edit.
Late in the campaign, I was on a panel at NYU Law School with Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard law professor and former Justice Department official in the Bush administration. Amy Davidson of The New Yorker and Jameel Jaffer, formerly of the ACLU, were also there. Of the four of us, only Amy was convinced that Trump was going to win. Jack offered, based on his own time in government, that no president has as much power as you would think to move Washington in a certain direction. Deeply rooted institutions, offsetting sources of power, the permanent government that is made up of long-term civil service employees—they all hem in a new president. I weighed in with the idea that it wasn’t really clear which of the two candidates was going to have a more open administration. Trump had been abusive to the press on the campaign trail, worse than that actually, but he came to the phone when our reporters called, and his campaign staff appeared to be genetically unable to stop leaking. Megan Twohey, who had been one of our lead reporters on gender issues during the 2016 campaign, spoke to my law school class in the fall and talked about what it was like to seek comment from the campaigns. She had walked both sides of the street, writing about Trump’s problem with women and Clinton’s role in turning back the accusers of her husband. Trump himself returned her call late at night when she was already at home (and, yes, after the expected charm offensive, he proceeded to denounce her and The Times). Clinton ducked her calls for comment and had a high-level campaign official try to get editors to pull back on the story.
I had never understood why so many Clinton supporters saw the email scandal as trivial and overblown. Maybe you had to be sitting where I sat to understand what it said about her and the administration she would be putting in place if elected. Elected officials use private email accounts for official business for only one reason: to keep the public from getting at the emails—as is the public’s legal right—under the Freedom of Information laws. It was a tired dodge. I had seen variations of it with officials in New York City and the governors’ offices in both New Jersey and New York. Not exactly the giants of public service whom one would choose to emulate if one were running for president, although, in fairness, none of them had been crafty enough to have a private server (they tended toward the random Gmail or Yahoo! account). FBI director James Comey would ultimately make a hash of the election with his public announcements about the investigations, but that had nothing to do with the reason the emails were there in the first place—to deny the public its rights and be free to govern in greater secrecy. As I made my case at NYU, I could feel the unhappy stirring of the audience. The Clinton email story was a trigger, especially coming from someone from The Times.
We had no one to blame but ourselves. On July 23, 2015, Times reporters Mike Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo had landed a bombshell front-page story: two inspectors general, who act as internal governmental watchdogs, had asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation into whether Clinton had “mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as secretary of state.”
A tsunami of protest from the Clinton campaign followed, and before it was over The Times had published two corrections and an editor’s note, saying that the matter had not been a referral for a criminal investigation but a lower-level “security referral.” The Times’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, blasted The Times for running with the story. The Clinton campaign piled on with a letter to The Times from Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton communications director: “I feel obliged to put into context just how egregious an error this story was,” wrote Palmieri. She could not understand why The Times “rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page charging that a major candidate for President of the United States was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement.”
I knew Mike and Matt. They were among the best reporters I’d encountered, resourceful, connected, dogged (sometimes literally: Matt once was so excited about a story he sent me an email with the subject line “Woof, Woof”). I knew that a source had flip-flopped on them after publication and pulled back an earlier statement. What none of us could know then was why. Political pressure? Change of heart? Just plain error? It didn’t matter. The criticism was scathing, both in public and inside The Times building. You can’t get a story like that wrong.
It was only later that the truth finally came out: They hadn’t been wrong. They had been right.
As Erik Wemple of The Washington Post put it two years later when the full story finally got out, “Now we know that the New York Times was understating matters.” Two weeks before the Schmidt and Apuzzo story ran, the FBI had opened a criminal investigation. It was code-named “Midyear,” and its focus was Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information. Two dozen investigators were assigned to the inquiry.
That all came later. At NYU I was, to the large swath of the audience, just another talking head serving up a false equivalency between Trump and Clinton. I don’t think I was wrong about Clinton—she had a hostility to openness that doesn’t befit a public officeholder, whether in Albany or Washington. But on what a Trump presidency would be like, yes, Jack Goldsmith and I had a very bad day predicting the future.
Like much criticism of journalism, the charge that the convention of journalistic objectivity led to mindless and misleading coverage is not baseless, but it became more an easy cliché than a real critique in 2016. It’s a well-rubbed stone. We talked about it in journalism school forty years ago. Somebody announces that the earth is flat, reporters quote him deadpan, and then they get an expert to say that, no, the earth appears to be round. The reader is left to sort out the truth. That was certainly the fashion in 1950s journalism, when the pursuit of objectivity could devolve into stenography. It played a role in fueling the rise of the demagogue senator Joe McCarthy, whose wild proclamations about the number of communists employed inside the U.S. government were reported without much pushback from the press, at least in the beginning. Trump’s wild-eyed claims—there’s too many to pick from: that Muslims were dancing in the street in New Jersey on 9/11, that Obama was born in Kenya, that Trump’s own inauguration crowd was the largest ever (period), that he won the popular vote, that millions of ineligible voters went to the polls in 2016—were not blindly reported out as statements with the proper attribution “Trump said” at the end of the sentence. Nobody in America who was consuming the news even casually (except perhaps those Fox viewers hunkered down in front of their flatscreens) failed to learn—from the news media—that those claims were false. The strange idea that journalists should just ignore his most fanciful pronouncements was otherworldly in its own way. Journalists, when they are doing their best work, are reflecting what is going on in the real world. And if someone running for president of the United States starts spouting off like your crazy Uncle Al after the fourth drink on Thanksgiving afternoon, reporters do a disservice to their readers by ignoring the prattle. He is not your crazy Uncle Al; he wants to be president of the United States.
The harder question is how to report it out and where to put it in the report of the day. In the midst of the dust-up over the size of the crowd on Inauguration Day, a Times reader expressed her exasperation. She wanted to know what would happen if Trump said he had been to the moon and whether reporters would spend the next four years tracking down the serial numbers of spacecraft in the hopes of definitively proving him wrong (while back here on Earth an administration was quietly changing everything). As the campaign wore on and then later, when Trump took office, the debate over the L-word—lying—blossomed. Readers demanded that we call a lie a lie. The Times had never been there before—“wrong,” “misrepresented,” “misstated” … those were the words of choice in covering presidential candidates and presidents, even when they were, yes, lying. The Times editors finally decided the old rules could no longer hold when there was no doubt that the misstatement was knowing and willful. The L-word made its way into our coverage with two stories in September 2016, both about Trump’s decision to stop suggesting that Obama was not born in the United States. Times editors saw it as a word that should be used sparingly, and Dean Baquet said it was not a Trump-only rule but something that would apply to future coverage when called for.
After the inauguration, with Trump in the White House, The Times rolled out the “definitive list,” an ever-growing, day by day, ledger of the untruths of the president. The then-editor of The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker, was not impressed. In an interview with Katie Couric, he said:
What I think is not really important. I think the president probably lies a lot, right? I think the president makes things up at times. I think I’ve got a fair amount of reasons for believing that.
The difference is not what I think or what I might express [as] an opinion or even given reasonable grounds to believe, but what my reporters can report as facts. And if you’re going to report as a fact that something is a lie, you have to know that it’s not only an untruth, not only a falsehood, you have to be able to impute two things in the mind of the speaker: one, knowledge that it is actually untrue; and two, a deliberate intent to deceive.
An astute reader of The Times had gotten to the point much more quickly. She wrote in to urge us to stop saying Trump was lying. Didn’t we know the difference between a delusion and a lie?
Whenever one of the periodic updates to the list of lies was going to be published, an editor from the opinion section would send me the latest version to read. All of Trump’s tub-thumping threats of suing people made many journalists wary, even though the possibility of a lawsuit by Trump over a story alleging he was a habitual liar was roughly the same as the likelihood he would someday prove that his inauguration crowd was the largest ever. For one thing, truth is always a defense, even when, or maybe especially when, a newspaper is calling a public official truth-impaired. But I was never in love with the list. Trump’s wacky theories, off-target predictions, and misleading explanations were treated as the equivalent of out-and-out lies. As one anti-Trump New Yorker wrote to me, “I thought the article the other day that included as one of Trump’s exaggerations/falsehoods in his Davos speech basically accurate economic statistics on the grounds that in the first year of his term, a President has not yet begun to influence the economy was beyond lame. The guy tells lies (actual lies) on a daily basis, and there’s just no point in NYT making hairsplitting distinctions that it has never applied to other politicians (and with good reason, since they all take credit for shit they didn’t do).”
The decision to call Trump a liar was part of a larger reckoning at the paper about how to cover a politician who was like no one before him. After the election, senior management held a town hall–style meeting for employees. The questions told the story. One person from the newsroom who said she had grown up in the Midwest thought we had failed to grasp what was going on in the country. We had missed out on comprehending how many people who were not racists or bigots but felt left out and disrespected by the coastal elites were attracted to Trump’s promise of shaking up the government. You can sneer at Trump, but you can’t sneer at his followers, an editor at a rival news organization told me one night as he critiqued our coverage. During the last month of the campaign, I saw my stepsister in Illinois. Her husband had lost his job at a local factory. It had cut the hourly wages twice and then told the workers they had to take a third cut or see the factory shut down. At some point, when wages are cut nearly in half, the job just isn’t worth it anymore. The workers refused, and the plant closed. The Democrats weren’t to blame for that, and Trump didn’t really have a solution, but something had gone terribly wrong, and who would blame the workers for wanting to punch the establishment in the face?
There were others at the town hall meeting who thought the paper had “normalized” Trump, failed to help readers understand how far outside the American mainstream he was on race and immigration and the place of women and common decency. (Had anyone imagined, say, four years ago, that a presidential candidate could refer to his opponents as Liddle Marco and Lyin’ Ted in a nationally televised debate … and win?) I had been suspected of something akin to normalizing. After my letter to Trump’s lawyer went viral, I had done a piece for The Times Insider section talking about how the letter had come to be written. I mentioned that the point of writing the letter was to defend the newspaper’s coverage of the two women who claimed to have been groped and to lay out how the law protected our story. Then I said the unthinkable, at least in the minds of some people, about the reaction I had received from readers:
Lots of people took the opportunity to vent about Donald Trump. Not surprising, but not really my point. I grew up in a small farming town in Illinois. Both my father and my mother were World War II veterans who served in Europe. Unlike many of my Manhattan friends, I get why Mr. Trump appeals to good people like the ones I grew up with.
Months later, an old friend still remembered it and cornered me at a reception. What had I meant by that, by the reference to “good people”? I wasn’t trying to be mysterious. They were people who volunteered at the local hospital or fire department, had kids who joined the military, went to funerals of people they didn’t know that well because it seemed like the right thing to do. It was not a profound point. No medals needed to be handed out. They just shouldn’t be painted with a broad brush as haters and racists. That answer didn’t seem to please.
It was impossible not to get whipsawed in covering Trump. The coverage felt adversarial to conservatives. It was an easy argument for them to make. Part of the problem was the very nature of an internet news site. The print paper has an architecture that signals readers where they are going and what they will see when they get there. The editorial page and the op-eds are cabined in the back of the first section. When news analysis appears in the news pages, it is labeled and set off typographically. The news is over here, opinion is over there, and the latter does not color the former. That architecture breaks down on a newspaper’s home page. Our op-ed columns and contributors are overwhelmingly anti-Trump, every day. It is hard to think of an op-ed piece from the campaign days that had anything to say on Trump’s behalf, other than the occasional backhanded “he may actually be right about something—for once” sort of offering. On the home page all of the negative-opinion pieces, with blazing anti-Trump headlines, sat cheek to jowl with our news coverage of Trump, which was often, and necessarily, critical. That kind of coverage was unavoidable for a candidate who encouraged violence at rallies, made preposterous claims, insulted his opponents, and got caught on tape bragging about groping women. But the overall impression many days, with op-eds next to news coverage, was of a full-on slapdown of the Trump candidacy. And then there was that gauge we printed showing how unlikely a Trump victory would be as Election Day approached.
The perception of Times prejudice became, in its way, a legal issue. We were in a long-running legal fight with a libertarian professor named Walter Block. He had been a bit player in a story we had done in 2014 about Rand Paul and the libertarian heritage Rand had taken on from his father, retired congressman Ron Paul. Block had been mentioned in passing and quoted as saying that while he opposed slavery because it was involuntary, he thought it was otherwise “not so bad.” Block did not deny the quotation—he had said it on his blog on multiple occasions. But he thought the story had not conveyed his point in context: that the problem with slavery was not the conditions under which slaves lived but the immorality of the forced economic relationship between master and slave. He sued for libel.
When Block’s lawyers filed a brief in the first week of 2017, they jumped on the notion that The Times had gone partisan: “The idea being, in its role as social engineer, the NYTimes’ agenda supersedes the central tenets which have always defined real journalism.” They pivoted off a column that The Times’s media columnist Jim Rutenberg had written in August, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.” It began:
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.
But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?
Jim ultimately answered the question in his column: journalists had a duty
to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world. It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.
That point was made provocatively—that is what a column is supposed to do—but in the end Jim was saying something pretty unexceptional: that reporters needed to give readers a meaningful account of Trump and his campaign. Block’s lawyers didn’t see it that way: “In short, [Rutenberg] implored his colleagues to join him on the dark side and allow their partisanship to pervade their reporting, which no longer need be objective/truthful.”
It was just one brief, in one case, but it was concerning, and not just because Block would ultimately prevail on an appeal, sending the case back to the district court. The Times had regularly been viewed by courts, whether the judges said it out loud or not, as something of the gold standard for journalism: trusted, straight, impartial. It helps in tough cases. Call it the benefit of the doubt. Every lawyer wants it, or needs it, in litigation. It can be a difference maker. I could see that, in the hands of plaintiffs’ lawyers, our Trump coverage could feed a very different narrative: that of a news organization that was waging jihad against conservatives. Before the spring of 2017 was over, we would be sued for libel by a group of companies owned by the coal baron Bob Murray, an enthusiastic Trump supporter and bringer of libel suits, and Sarah Palin, the former vice presidential candidate. They both, in differing degrees, pushed the story line of a liberal newspaper that couldn’t play it straight.
Many journalists are biased—just not in the way that most people think about it. The easy rap is that most reporters lean liberal (true), and that dictates how they cover a conservative like Trump (false). Journalists are brought up to see their role in the world as shedding light on wrongdoing and holding the powerful accountable. They believe, all other things being equal, that the little guy is getting screwed, economically, politically, and in every other way. The reportorial default is to think that most regulations are good, the rich and connected don’t need more money or more power, and most social policies in the long run hurt the poor, the sick, and the disadvantaged, whose individual stories are profound and worth telling. A president who comes into office promising to cut regulations, give tax breaks to rich guys, and round up immigrants is a president walking full blast into the most basic prejudices of the profession. Bad coverage of a particular politician is rarely driven by personal animosity, although undoubtedly at times that does happen. The real explanation for most unflattering coverage is that beat reporters stand close enough to the politicians they cover to grow deeply skeptical of all of them. It is not a left or right thing. Based on nothing more scientific than my own conversations around the newsroom, Trump may actually have been better liked than Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, both liberals and both also combative in their dealings with journalists (made worse by the fact that neither of them was as entertaining or strangely likable as the president—they weren’t even in the same league). The first time most politicians will get the fawning coverage they think they deserve will be the day after they die, when their legacy and contributions will finally be duly noted in their obituaries.
Jimmy Carter would say in 2017 that no president he knew had been treated to as much negative press coverage as Trump. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation,” Carter said. Carter, it is worth recalling, never felt the need during the entire course of his presidency to publicly declare that he was a “stable genius.” He didn’t try to guide the ship of state with cable TV as his North Star. He never had the chance to fire an FBI director who was investigating his inner circle or proclaim the right to pardon aides and allies who were suspected of colluding with a hostile foreign power. The news is about—let’s get basic—what is new. This was new. No president before Trump has tried managing by chaos. As Peter Baker reported in The Times when the administration was barely 13 months old, “Mr. Trump is on his second press secretary, his second national security adviser and his third deputy national security adviser. Five different people have been named communications director or served in the job in an acting capacity. The president has parted ways with his chief strategist, health secretary, several deputy chiefs of staff and his original private legal team. He is on his second chief of staff.” The supply of White House aides ready to dish on each other and the president as anonymous sources is apparently bottomless, not surprising in an office where the exit door is never far from view, and nothing helps a career along like a well-placed shot at a rival.
Was the press prone to doing critical stories? Were they giving short shrift to the accomplishments of the administration? Yes and yes. That is how journalism works. Reporters aren’t meant to be the royal scribes of a monarchy or portraitists removing the wrinkles and the warts. That is true for every presidency, but Trump was a hell of a story, and his administration seemed incapable of managing its own message. His White House was an all-you-can-eat buffet of news stories, open 24/7, with gigantic serving platters. No reporter was going to push back from the table, walk away, and instead do a story about, say, the daring new irrigation initiative that the Department of Agriculture was unveiling. Yes, it sometimes felt as if Jimmy Carter might have a point, that the press at times stretched too far in hopes of finding the negative. In the first minutes of the Trump administration, a journalist reported that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office. He was wrong. The bust was still there. He just hadn’t seen it. He posted a correction. It was fair to ask why, on that impossibly rich day for news, a reporter was focused on whether Trump had removed the MLK bust. But if Americans want to worry about whether the press is doing its job, their time is probably better spent wondering not whether the president is getting a fair shake but whether major changes are taking place and going unreported as federal agencies dramatically change course, regulations are stripped down, agency information is quietly pulled from public websites, and regulated industries are being set free.
The Times itself was not spared the divisiveness that was fracturing the country. In early 2018, Dean Baquet and CEO Mark Thompson took the unusual step of reminding Times employees in writing that they needed to work a little harder at being civil. Some Times staffers had been enraged by the editorial department’s decision to give space to conservative commentators and to mark the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration with submissions from Trump voters. Then in February a new hire for the editorial board was forced to quit before she even started when social media users discovered tweets mentioning her friendship with a neo-Nazi and using gay and racial slurs. The memo to employees from Baquet and Thompson was delicately worded. It said the right things about free speech in the workplace, but it chided employees who failed to meet the company’s “expectation of respect and courtesy toward one another.” It was a worthwhile message, and on target, but it was chasing a problem that wasn’t easily solved by politely reasoned memos.
Living in the Time of Twitter further complicated the lives of our editors who were concerned that the paper was seen as biased. Twitter had become a perpetual open mic night for the world, and some reporters got in line to audition. Some smartly curated all that was happening in the world, others took it as a soapbox, and the line between the two was not always clear. In November, shortly after the election, a small brouhaha erupted after Times journalists tweeted about the president-elect’s daughter hawking her jewelry online and how Trump’s cabinet selection process resembled the beauty pageants he used to operate. A third tweet posted an Atlantic article that suggested the electoral college could reject Trump. Liz Spayd, the public editor, was pilloried for going on a Fox News program, calling the tweets “outrageous,” and saying that consequences should be visited upon the tweeters. Spayd took a public beating for overreacting and failing to grasp that social media was now part of life’s fabric for reporters, although some of the criticism, to be fair, seemed to be rooted in her having committed Venal Sin No. 1—going on a Fox TV show.
The truth was that the house was divided inside The Times building. Lots of editors didn’t like the idea of reporters airing their sarcasm about the Trump White House or venting low-burn outrage about whatever had just happened in D.C. And it wasn’t just reporters. After a Times businessperson stationed in Europe tweeted, “Last week was my first time back in the states since Trump was inaugurated and I thought that America, as I knew it, had died,” editors came to me asking what could be done. It was complicated. A company devoted to free expression hates to play Twitter nanny shushing its own employees. Social media was hugely important to our brand, a way to push out our stories to a bigger audience and introduce our reporters to readers. There was also the reality that leaders at The Times were reluctant to put any policy in writing, not only because it was hard to set out social media rules but also because the document would more or less instantly be launched onto the internet by someone. It didn’t make management easy, and any misstatement was bound to become the outrage of the day online in journalism and political circles. We also weren’t keen to call public attention to the errant tweets. So editors mainly watched the internet and made private entreaties to newsroom employees who seemed to cross a line on social media. Glenn Thrush, the newest of The Times reporters covering the White House, was a particular flash point for critics. Glenn had become a journalism celebrity thanks to his ever-present hat and Saturday Night Live’s spoof of his daily battles with Sean Spicer. He had joined The Times from Politico after the election and done exceptional old-fashioned reporting on the White House, but he wasn’t shy about airing his views on Twitter (“Would you keep working for a boss who consistently refuses to distance himself from virulent racists, antisemites and white supremacists?”). In September 2017, Thrush closed down his Twitter account after realizing, he said, just how much time he was spending wading through tweets and responding. He conceded his bosses were not unhappy about the decision.
A month later The Times unveiled—in writing—its newsroom social media policy, which had been in the works for months. The editors no longer thought the whisper-in-the-ear approach with individual Twitter miscreants was working. The authors of the memo had come up with a strategy to win over the hearts and minds of the staff: they quoted high-profile journalists from around the newsroom talking about how an unthinking tweet by anyone identified with The Times could make their lives harder by undermining the paper’s credibility with sources and readers. The nub of the new policy was stated up front: “If our journalists are perceived as biased or engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom. We’ve always made clear that newsroom employees should avoid posting anything on social media that damages our reputation for neutrality and fairness.” The policy ended with a series of questions people should ask themselves before they posted: “Would someone who reads your post have grounds for believing that you are biased on a particular issue?” “If readers see your post and notice that you’re a Times journalist, would that affect their view of The Times’s news coverage as fair and impartial?” “If someone were to look at your entire social media feed, including links and retweets, would they have doubts about your ability to cover news events in a fair and impartial way?”
The policy seemed to go down smoothly enough in the newsroom. Across town at the right-drifting New York Post, they were not so impressed. The headline for a column about the policy’s rollout read “The Times’ New Policy to Hide Reporters’ Bias.”
In the first year of the new administration, I kept coming back to Stanley Dearman’s lesson about the difference between serving readers and catering to them. Over the past half-decade, the paper has committed itself to reader-centered journalism: opening up more stories to comments, creating a Reader Center to encourage dialogue between Times journalists and the reading public, and exploring new content to address the real-world needs and desires of our readers. For years, the paper had almost prided itself on its distance from its readers, as if knowing who they were and what they wanted would somehow taint the purity of the journalism. The shift in attitude was like opening a window after a long winter. Journalism should be done as if people mattered. But in a polarized America there was a risk, too—the risk that we would set our compass by what people wanted rather than giving them the journalism they needed. The appetite for tough Trump stories among our audiences seemed insatiable. There were times, though, when we needed to tell other kinds of stories if we hoped to reflect the world as it was, and the pushback from readers could be ferocious.
In late November 2016, Scott Shane of The Times’s Washington bureau, one of the best and most conscientious journalists in the country, did a profile of Steve Bannon, at that time Trump’s go-to aide. Scott’s piece was a well-reported piece of journalism done by the book, a profile of a newsmaker with no ambition beyond letting readers know who this Bannon character was. As Scott put it:
To understand what to expect from the Trump administration means in part to fathom the driven, contradictory character of Mr. Bannon, whom the president-elect has named senior counselor and chief White House strategist. Rarely has there been so incendiary a figure at the side of a president-elect, thrilling Mr. Trump’s more extreme supporters while unnerving ethnic and religious minorities and many other Americans.
How did this son of Richmond, Va., who attended Harvard Business School, spent years at Goldman Sachs and became wealthy working at the intersection of entertainment and finance, come to view the political and financial elites as his archenemy? Why does a man who calls himself a “hard-nosed capitalist” rail against “globalists” of “the party of Davos” and attack the Republican establishment with special glee?
As a reader watching Bannon make his way from the loony fringe of the right to the center of Washington power, I had wondered those same things. A day earlier, The Boston Globe had done an insightful profile of Bannon from his days at Harvard Business School. His classmates remembered him as a charismatic navy veteran, older, with a different life arc than many of his peers: “He, like they, was gunning for a top Wall Street job, and wanted to make a lot of money in a hurry. And yet, as classmates recall, something set him apart early on. Brash even by Harvard standards, intellectually dominant but also easy company. What most can’t find in their recollections is the harshly divisive Steve Bannon they read about today.”
Our Bannon piece set readers’ hair on fire. Part of it was the headline describing Bannon as “combative” and a “populist” when many readers thought “racist,” “white supremacist,” or “xenophobe” might have done the trick. Reporters don’t write their own headlines (editors have that job), and the word “populist” had become one of those terms that had slipped its anchor and drifted off into a sea of ambiguity. Bernie Sanders? Donald Trump? Neither? Both? Meaning what exactly? But the profile itself was attacked for serving up a balanced portrayal of Bannon rather than denouncing him. “I think what was particularly disappointing is that a lot of young, educated people saw a 4,500-word story and said ‘You didn’t use the right label,’ instead of reading the story and drawing their own conclusions,” Scott said in the aftermath for a column by the public editor. If people wanted to see Bannon as—choose your favorite term—a racist, white supremacist, or xenophobe, the facts for getting there were to be found in the story. But if readers preferred to see Bannon as an enigmatic figure with a résumé that should have led him anywhere but where he ended up, the story gave that narrative, too. It was discouraging that so many people apparently believed that the time-honored journalistic act of telling a story straight had become a problem and that The Times needed instead to be in the business of taking sides and coaching readers on what to think.
Almost exactly a year later, the same fight was waged anew when reporter Richard Fausset did a story headlined “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland.” That voice belonged to Tony Hovater, a 25-year-old newlywed who had become a white nationalist. “He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux,” Richard wrote. “Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, an homage to the TV show ‘Twin Peaks.’ He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big ‘Seinfeld’ fan.” Hovater came across not as a monster but just another aimless guy from the Midwest with a fondness for Applebee’s and a wedding registry at Target—only one with abhorrent racist and anti-Semitic views that he couldn’t shut up about. To me, that was pretty much the point. Hannah Arendt had written about the “banality of evil” in her legendary book Eichmann in Jerusalem, suggesting that the truly frightening thing about Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal, was just how ordinary he appeared to be, how easy it was for people not that different from us to become, in the wrong circumstances, evil incarnate. As he wrote the piece, Richard struggled to find an explanation for Hovater, but it never came. “Sometimes a soul, and its shape, remain obscure to both writer and reader,” Richard wrote later. “I beat myself up about all of this for a while, until I decided that the unfilled hole would have to serve as both feature and defect.”
Lots of readers didn’t see it that way at all. They responded with unbridled anger, and they refused to give The Times a pass. It is always hard to know whether the people who take the time to go on Twitter or lob dispatches at The Times via email represent a small motivated core or speak for a larger group of readers, but those who wrote saw Richard’s piece as a “long, glowing profile” of a Nazi, a shameful effort by The Times to normalize the worst elements in American society. Back at The Times, the response stung. Before it was all over, The Times’s national editor, Marc Lacey, had apologized in a fashion: “We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them.”
Those civil words masked the darker response we were seeing. The story appeared on a Saturday night, and on Monday I was alerted by our security staff that Antifa, the hard and often violent edge of the left, was going to “doxx” Richard—publish his address and contact information so people could target him for harassment or worse. Dealing with threats against journalists had become a sadly routine part of my work life, but each time a new one surfaced a feeling of discouragement about what the country had become would come over me again. I understood that the threats were not reflective of the nation writ large, but they now came too often, with too much hatred and viciousness. Most of it was just passing noise on the internet, but it was impossible to forget that it only takes one person. Witness the shooting of a Republican congressman and others at a ballfield in Virginia, or the “Pizzagate” incident in which a North Carolina man fired a gun inside a Washington pizza parlor after right-wing websites fabricated accounts of a child porn ring linked to Democrats operating there. I checked in by phone with Richard. I told him I thought his story did exactly what journalism was supposed to do: reveal the reality that exists out there, even when it goes up against what we think the world is or ought to be. The response had been brutal but he was philosophical. We both knew that, in the politics of 2017, it would only be a minute before something else suddenly happened, shocking the senses, exploding people’s brains, and sending the national conversation hurtling toward the next great outrage.
Journalism was hard in a polarized country where people felt the failure to take sides was in and of itself a surrender. I knew that The Times didn’t get it right all the time, that words could both mask and antagonize, and the discussion of what to call things—alt-right or white nationalist, lie or misstatement—kept cycling through the newsroom. Still, I remained a believer in a particular vision of journalism. I believed that there was a place for journalism that told stories without partiality, that followed the facts wherever they led, even if our readers (or our president) didn’t want to be taken there. We needed to tell the truths that we found, no matter how imperfectly we did that, day after day. The alt-right had become the masters of trying to shut down and silence all the voices they found disagreeable. It was not a model I thought we should emulate. The great risk we faced came not in giving them voice but in taking their worst instincts and making them our own.