7 Smart Responses to Semafor's Interview with New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn
"The newsroom is not a safe space." Okay, but who said it was?
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Hi, all. Parker here.
This newsletter doesn’t shy away from criticizing The New York Times. In fact, I get quite a few emails saying, “Hey, you focus a bit too much on the Times for my taste.” (Sorry.) To those emailers, I am sorry to say that this is yet another “WTF is up with the Times and its political coverage?” piece.
But really, since the particular interview I’m interested in criticizing (we’ll get there in a minute) has already gotten a lot of really great responses from a lot of really smart commentators, this is more of a “best of” round-up of some other media writers worth checking out. So, if you’re not in the mood for another piece about the Times, feel free to skip this one. If you’re still on board, stick around.
Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn recently sat for a friendly interview with Semafor’s Ben Smith.
“Joe Kahn: ‘The newsroom is not a safe space’” (Semafor, Ben Smith, 5/5/24)
Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?
Joe Kahn: Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.
It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?
Dan Pfeiffer, who was named in this question, responded to a mischaracterization of his words and followed it with a more thorough explanation that I’d love to see Kahn or Smith grapple with in good faith.
“A Response to the Editor of the New York Times” (, Dan Pfeiffer, 5/7/24)
I haven’t argued that the New York Times or anyone stop covering negative stories about Biden or become a state-owned propaganda outlet (not that Kahn knows my argument). No one else has argued that either. What most people want is for the media to spend less time on the horserace and more time on the stakes of this election; and to specifically call out the threat that is a second Trump presidency. There have been a lot of very good stories, but there could always be more. In general — and this is a complaint I have had about the New York Times that is two decades old — I wish they would take good faith criticism from the Left with as much seriousness as they take bad faith criticism from the Right.
Others in the world of political media criticism offered their own responses to Kahn’s interview:
“The Mainstream Media's Guilty Conscience” (, Brian Beutler, 5/7/24)
[T]he interview is instructive. Its purpose, presumably, was to reassure consumers that mainstream news outlets like the Times use well-calibrated methods to insulate themselves from grubby partisanship. Liberal critics—the scapegoats who supposedly want the New York Times to be a Democratic Party mouthpiece—were mere collateral damage. But the methods Kahn described are anything but satisfying. If anything they suggest that some of the Times’s critics’ worst fears are well placed.
“What Is Going On at the Gray Lady?” (, Daniel W. Drezner, 5/7/24)
Kahn is not completely wrong. Immigration is a leading issue for voters. The economy is always important. And it is far from clear whether more sympathetic New York Times reporting on other issues would move the needle for Biden.
Still, democracy is one of those “necessary conditions” for a free press, so it is worth asking just how much the Times is focusing on what Trump would do if elected president again. Kahn acknowledges in the interview that, “there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that [Trump] will win that election in a popular vote.” A similar calculation based on the polling caused the Times to disproportionately focus on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 general election campaign.
If Trump is leading now, shouldn’t the Gray Lady be taking a harder look at Trump’s proposed policies and personnel choices? If the Times really wants to talk about inflation, shouldn’t its business and political reporters provide more in-depth reporting about how Trump’s proposed policies — tax cuts, protectionist barriers, forced expulsion of migrants, eroding the independence of the Fed — would cause a massive spike in inflation?
“Top New York Times Editor Offers Stunning Defense of Coverage of Trump” (The New Republic, Greg Sargent, 5/7/24)
Kahn’s answer is stunning in its simplistic rendering of the dilemma raised by Trump’s hostility to democracy and its resolute lack of awareness of what many liberal critics have actually argued about the Times, the media, and the democracy question.
“New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it” (Press Watch, Dan Froomkin, 5/7/24)
Maybe the most telling element of the interview is who Kahn picked as his interlocutor: A shmoozy former Times media critic whose interview style is sycophantic.
You know what would be nice? If Kahn sat down for an interview with a truly independent journalist. Why is he avoiding that? What is he afraid of?
“Why the New York Times Won't Admit Its Power” (, Paul Waldman, 5/6/24)
Kahn seems to think that polls about what people see as the most important issue should, at least in part, guide the paper’s decisions about what to cover. As a snapshot in time that sounds appropriate; if Americans care deeply about health care access, the Times should make sure to cover the issue of health care access. The problem comes in which way the causal arrow runs. Most of the time, news media don’t cover particular topics because the public thinks they’re important. The public thinks particular topics are important because the media are covering them.1
This is called “agenda setting,” known by communication scholars as one of the most important effects news media produce. As political scientist Bernard Cohen wrote in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”
“The Info Wars” (CNN’s Reliable Sources, Oliver Darcy, 5/6/24)
In the interview, Kahn said that the role of the press is "not to skew" coverage toward one candidate or another, but "just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters." He went on to tell Smith, "To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda." Democracy, Kahn added, is "not the top" issue for voters.
That's a lot to unpack — probably too much to do so in the limited space we have here. But, suffice to say, Kahn's answer feels overtly disingenuous. It is, of course, entirely feasible to express concerns about Trump's anti-democratic rhetoric and acknowledge them in a real way without morphing into a "propaganda arm" for President Joe Biden. In fact, I am not aware of anyone who has called for The NYT to treat Biden like Fox News treats Trump (an aside, but has Kahn's outlet yet worked up the courage to label Fox News "propaganda" or is that only a term that gets thrown around when smacking down straw men?). As Hunter Walker posted on Threads, "If we agree that democracy is an objective good then, we must also grapple with what it means that Trump has tried to stay in power a different way. We need to be clear about authoritarian and even fascistic tendencies. This can, in fact, be objective." To be fair to Kahn, he is not the only news chief dodging the uncomfortable math before him. I'm not aware of any major newsroom leader who has discussed its complexities openly in public. But it is worth asking: If newsrooms are pro-democracy, and if their reporting indicates one candidate is opposed to democratic values, how can they feign ignorance on the 2024 race?
This is one of those occasions where, by the time I got done reading everyone else’s responses to the original interview, I didn’t have much of my own to say.
Still, I wanted to share these seven smart responses with the rest of you in case they are of interest. I hope you’re all having a great day. Thanks!
Parker
My favorite example: Trump says, repeatedly in his stump speeches, that he wants to eliminate all absentee voting and require everyone to vote on in-person on election day. OK, he could very well become President, so we should take this seriously, right? Where's the coverage of the practical consequences of this? The interviews with state and local election officials on how they would handle this change? The interviews with elderly and disabled people who would be most affected? Nope, none of these things happen, because the media decides in advance this will never happen, so no need to go beyond occasionally reporting the Trump does say this, buried inside much longer roundups of all the other crazy shit he says. Because Trump has a track record of lying, of saying he will do things and then not following through, so why waste our readers' time, right?
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has a track record of follow-through, when he says there will be an infrastructure bill, there IS an infrastructure bill, so every promise Biden makes will get taken apart, examined and critiqued in detail.
Is this the "very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates" that Kahn says he's delivering, or is it an obvious double standard, a deliberate choice to go easier on Trump because "Eh, he probably doesn't really mean that"?
What Kahn refuses to notice (or acknowledge, I don’t know or care which) is that I’m not asking the Times to consciously do anything for my benefit; I am noticing what they do as a habit, and am reacting accordingly.
And because I actually remember things (which is inconvenient for fascists and the NYT), I remember when the Times felt that being in favor of bringing democracy to Iraq by invading them was just a common sense, apolitical position to take. Which is how they still feel about the “oooh look at how big the deficit is” stories they reflexively pump out whenever Republicans tell them to.