The New York Times' publisher understands the threat Donald Trump poses. The Times should act like it.
Sulzberger wrote more about Trump & Viktor Orban for The Washington Post than his own newspaper's political desk has in months
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s extraordinary 4,300-word warning in today’s Washington Post about the authoritarian threat Donald Trump poses to the news media and to America is true and important. It is also an infuriating reminder of the role the news media, led by Sulzberger’s New York Times, continues to play in exacerbating that threat.
Sulzberger devotes his first four paragraphs to summarizing how the Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orban “effectively dismantled the news media in his country” as part of a successful effort to “consolidate unchecked power in ways that left the nation and its people worse off.” Sulzberger then devotes the rest of the essay to detailing the assault on the free press being carried out by authoritarians around the globe, and the “inspiration” Trump draws from them.
This is a natural setup and structure for an essay about the authoritarian threat Trump poses to the news media — and, indeed, to the every other aspect of American life. But it’s jarring to see AG Sulzberger deploy it. Sulzberger is, after all the publisher of the New York Times, a newspaper that turned a blind eye to Trump’s devoting a portion of his speech at the Republican national convention this year to praising foreign autocrats and touting their fondness of him — including, yes, Viktor Orban. This was the highest-profile speech Trump was likely to give in the entire campaign, and he used it to telegraph his clear intent to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Orban and Kim Jong Un … and the New York Times looked the other way.1
To be sure, the Times has occasionally mentioned Trump’s fondness for Orban et al. A news company of the Times’ scale mentions pretty much everything at least occasionally. But they’ve given it nowhere near the prominence in their campaign coverage that it deserves. The Times’ publisher taking to the pages of a rival newspaper in order to sound the alarm about Trump’s authoritarian plans and role models is a clear indication that the newspaper’s leadership understands the magnitude of this threat. It’s an extraordinary step; I can recall nothing like it. But if the threat is that serious (and it is) it should be a dominant theme in the newspaper Sulzberger publishes, not something that is only occasionally mentioned. In the seven weeks since Trump’s convention speech, his fondness for Orban has been so rarely and briefly mentioned in the New York Times the vast majority of readers have probably never seen it.
Yesterday, the Times gave brief mention to Trump’s most recent praise for Orban:
As he often does, Mr. Trump cited the praise of Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, whom critics have said has been leading his nation toward authoritarianism, as proof that world leaders preferred his leadership on foreign affairs to Mr. Biden’s.
Describing Mr. Orban as a “strongman,” Mr. Trump, who has praised contemporary strongmen leaders and whose violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the campaign trail has raised alarm from his critics, added, “sometimes you need a strongman.”
That’s it. Nothing connecting Orban’s actions to Trump’s plans; nothing about the substance of what life is like in authoritarian regimes like those Trump openly admires. The Times just treats it as a matter of rhetoric.
Before that, the last time the words “Trump” and “Orban” appeared in the same New York Times piece — news side or opinion — was an August 16 piece by Shawn McCreesh about a Trump press conference:
But he appeared to get bored with the grocery talk after a few minutes. And so, there he stood, beside the Froot Loops and the Wheaties and the Lunchables and the Folgers and the Oreos and the Wonder Bread, talking about MS-13 gang members and Elon Musk and communism and artificial intelligence and John Kerry and windmills and “bird cemeteries” and diesel fuel and Bagram airport and Viktor Orban and the homicide rate in Chicago.
That’s all McCreesh tell us about Trump’s comments about Viktor Orban: Just that they existed. What were they? Who knows? McCreesh2 was too bored to say. He did find time to include this vital information:
Siggy Flicker, a former cast member on “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” who is friends with the former president’s lawyer, Alina Habba, wandered by. Ms. Flicker explained that her time on reality television taught her “all about false narratives and selective editing and fake story lines, that’s why I can relate to the greatest president in the history of America, Donald John Trump.”
Priorities!
Of course, explaining Trump’s fondness for foreign autocrats and dictators is not the only way the paper could illustrate the threat Trump poses. The larger failing is that the paper chooses not to give the danger of a Trump presidency the proportional coverage that it deserves.
Writing in the Washington Post, Sulzberger attempts to preempt such criticism:
As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence, I have no interest in wading into politics. I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection. It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away.
This is a familiar stance, and it is bullshit.
It is bullshit because critics of the Times do not ask the paper to “cast aside neutrality and directly oppose [Trump’s] reelection.”3 That’s a straw man Sulzberger invents because he does not dare engage our actual argument, which is that the Times is not neutral, and does not even define the term correctly, and the paper often deploys double standards and false equivalencies that benefit Trump and the Republican Party. As I wrote back in May, in response to a previous fight Sulzberger picked with his favorite straw man:
“Balanced” “objective” “neutral” “impartial” journalism doesn’t mean giving the reader an equal amount of good and bad information about each candidate. It means applying the same standards to each candidate. It’s about applying an equitable process, not ensuring equal outcomes.
So I come back to this: The news media should tell its audience true things, in proportion to their importance, with no concern for how anyone feels about it.
That’s what democracy requires of journalists. And that’s what it means to practice independent journalism, “without fear or favor.”
You will never, ever see AG Sulzberger engage with the argument that the news media should tell its audience true things in proportion to their importance. He is terrified of it, because he knows the Times fails that test every day. And so he instead pretends that critics want the Times to “cast aside neutrality and directly oppose” Trump.
We do not. To the contrary, we recognize that the Times’ coverage is not neutral.
Let’s consider some obvious examples, shall we?
The New York Times made Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness for office the defining issue of this year’s presidential campaign, for months on end. They gave the topic wall-to-wall coverage at several junctures, running literally dozens of pieces about it after a Trump appointee took a cheap shot at Biden, and dozens more after the June debate between Biden and trump. It has never made Donald Trump’s age and mental fitness such a dominant story, despite the fact that Trump is only four percent younger than Biden and is a blithering idiot who can’t string a sentence together. Instead, the Times sanitizes Trump’s incoherence. Where is Sulzberger’s precious “neutrality” in the Times’ handling of candidates’ mental acuity? It is nowhere to be found.
Where is the “neutrality” in The New York Times declining to publish material hacked from the Trump campaign just two presidential campaigns after gleefully publishing material hacked from the Clinton campaign?
Let’s go back to Sulzberger in today’s Washington Post:
At The Times, we are committed to following the facts and presenting a full, fair and accurate picture of November’s election and the candidates and issues shaping it. Our democratic model asks different institutions to play different roles; this is ours.
I agree that is the New York Times’ role, but The New York Times simply is not doing this.4
A “full, fair, and accurate picture” requires proportionality, and the Times won’t even pretend it is attempting that, much less accomplishing it.
Sulzberger considers the threat of Donald Trump imposing an Orbanesque autocracy on America so dire he wrote 4,300 words on the topic for a rival newspaper “because I believe the risk is shared by our entire profession, as well as all who depend on it.” But that’s about 4,200 words more than Sulzberger’s own newspaper has published about Trump and Orban since the former dedicated a portion of his convention speech to praising the latter seven weeks ago.
If Sulzberger really believes what he wrote for the Washington Post, the New York Times should behave accordingly. That doesn’t mean shedding objectivity, it means actually embracing it as a journalistic value, not just a talking point. It means telling its audience true things, in proportion to their importance.
To date, there has been only one mention in the New York Times of Trump’s convention speech praise for Orban: A passing mention in a Maureen Dowd column: “he soon strayed from the teleprompter and the unity theme, going back to the stream of consciousness he prefers, talking about Hannibal Lecter — ‘He’d love to have you for dinner’ — and slamming ‘Crazy Nancy Pelosi,’ praising Viktor Orban and blasting the ‘green new scam.’”
If McCreesh’s name sounds familiar it may be because he recently wrote a piece downplaying the extremism of the right-wing group Mom’s For Liberty in which he excused the group’s quite intentional quotation of Adolf Hitler as a mere accident. Or maybe because he recently wrote a piece that framed Donald Trump’s incoherence as a rhetorical style.
I’m sure you could probably find an example of someone, somewhere calling on the New York Times to run “VOTE FOR KAMALA HARRIS” headlines every day but this is not the stance of any serious media critic of influential Democrat or … anyone.
As I often do, I am simultaneously writing specifically about the New York Times and as using it as an illustrative example of the broader corporate news media. None of the Times’ failings (except employing Bret Stephens) are unique; most are common.
Thanks for calling out Sulzberger's hypocrisy. I will be citing you tonight in my newsletter. Keep up the good work!
So . . 🤔 Why is the editor ✍️ of Thee NYT unable to publish his opinion in his own paper?