Yes, Democrats should criticize the New York Times

It won't stop the Times from doing big things badly, but there are other important benefits

Nothing about the New York Times’¹ conduct over the past three days, three years, or three decades should surprise anyone who has been paying even a little attention to the paper. The Times is a newspaper that falsely portrayed Al Gore as a serial liar and George W. Bush as a straight-talker; treated Hillary Clinton’s email hygiene practices as the most important issue in 2016; and routinely portrays Donald Trump as a law-and-order candidate despite his repeated, flagrant law-breaking. It is, politically, a Republican newspaper.

There are a lot of reasons why the Times did all that, and why it spent the last three days portraying Joe Biden as a senile old man with one foot in the grave and Donald Trump as the “After” photo in one of those testosterone-boosting scams² that advertise during televised sporting events. I’ve written about most of those reasons, often at great length, for more than 20 years, and I won’t belabor each of them here. What they add up to is that functionally the New York Times is a Republican newspaper, long has been, and likely long will be.

So there are a lot of ways I agree with this tweet from Pod Save America host Jon Favreau:

First, I very much agree that the most important thing the anti-Trump coalition can talk about for the next ten months is how thoroughly awful Trump is and how unimaginably worse everything would be under a Trump presidency than a Biden presidency. Second, I agree, the Times’ ain’t a-changing³ any time soon. Twenty years ago I co-created Media Matters for America in large part in response to the New York Times’ coverage of Whitewater, the 2000 presidential campaign, and the Bush administration’s push for war in Iraq;⁴ I’ve spent a deeply depressing amount of my life, both professionally and as the world’s worst hobby, trying to get the Times to change and, short of that, trying to get more people to understand its flaws so fewer will be led astray by it. Whatever the opposite of boasting is, that’s what I’m doing when I say: Few people alive are more aware than I am of the Times’ flaws or the long odds against the paper getting much better as long as the Sulzberger family remains in control of it.⁵ And even a change in control would not likely lead to a change in behavior: The Times’ peer news companies behave much the same way.

So, like I said: I agree strongly with Favreau’s tweet, in some ways. I also agree with something he did not state but I confident that as a founder of Crooked Media he believes: We are unlikely to make existing bad media companies become good and those of us who care about having a good media ecosystem should do what we can to build up alternative news outlets. And — again, I’m sure we agree — those of us who care about the ability of the left-of-center-right to communicate with mass audiences should do what we can to develop our own platforms for doing so instead of thinking we’ll get ever a fair shake in the existing elite media.

I think you will not be surprised to learn that I write today about the ways I disagree with Favreau, most strenuously.

Criticizing the New York Times and its elite media peers is good and important and the instinct to do so should not be suppressed and the actual way the anti-Trump coalition fails is not by spending too much time criticizing the news media but rather by explicitly encouraging and validating the news media’s bad behavior.

First, it is important to note that there is a difference between acknowledging that the Times and its ilk won’t change much in response to criticism and thinking they won’t change at all. Forceful, reasoned media critiques can shift behavior around the margins — a little more coverage of something that’s been underplayed, a little less of something over-played, a reconsideration of a unsupported assumption or an underlying bias. It isn’t particularly efficient, it isn’t going to lead to the wholesale changes it should, but in a closely-divided country changes at the margins can be decisive. (It should also be noted that marginal changes work both ways, and if the anti-Trump coalition were to stop working the refs, media coverage might get even worse.)

Second: Changing the news media is not the only goal of media criticism. Another is changing the way people react to the news media. We might not be able to get the media to stop applying a deeply stupid double-standard to Biden and Trump, but if we can get some of their audience to understand that double-standard, we can reduce the harm it causes.

Third: Not only are “Yelling about political coverage” and “telling people how their lives would be different under a Trump presidency vs. a Biden presidency” not mutually exclusive, the former can actually be an effective tool in the latter. And I don’t just mean indirectly, via the marginal improvements discussed above. I mean that media criticism is often a useful vehicle for carrying other messages. When people criticize the New York Times for, for example, downplaying the threat of Donald Trump banning abortion, we aren’t just ineffectually criticizing the Times: We’re telling our audience that Donald Trump will ban abortion.

That might seem like an absurd bank shot; like a really inefficient way of spreading a message. Why not just say Trump will ban abortion? Well, obviously, we should do that, and do it often. The primary way the anti-Trump coalition communicates with voters should not be via media criticism; it should be more direct than that. But we know that a lot of people are mad about the media doing big things badly. We know that, as John Lydon said, anger is an energy. That anger is contagious, and when you’re in the message-spreading business, contagiousness is extremely valuable.

Here’s an anecdotal example: Last summer, Donald Trump posted Barack Obama’s home address on social media, leading a January 6 insurrectionist named Taylor Taranto to go to Obama’s house in a van full of weapons, where he was arrested. The New York Times wrote about Taranto’s arrest, but did not so much as hint at Trump’s role in motivating the incident. I’ve written about this a couple times in this space, and tweeted about it several time dating back to last summer. As far as I can tell, the most successful of those tweets was one from last July that got 249 retweets and 622 likes. Until last night, when I posted this tweet linking the Times’ obsessive coverage of Biden’s age with its lack of interest in Trump inspiring Taranto:

At this writing, that tweet had been retweeted 631 times and liked 2,300 times. Not spectacular numbers, to be sure, but dramatically more than the engagement my previous tweets on this topic had yielded — and at a time when my engagement on Twitter, like that of a lot of progressives, is down due to Elon Musk turning it into a Nazi bar and most of us fleeing for new frontiers. (Follow me on Bluesky, Mastodon, right here, etc etc.!)

People are pissed about the media’s coverage of the 2024 campaign, as they should be. It’s a topic that interests them, that gets their attention, that spurs them to action. That makes it an effective communications vehicle for other messages.

This is not a novel theory of communication. The same basic principle underlies all kinds of things professional communicators do every day: We can attach Thing X we want people to know to Thing Y we know they will pay attention to and promote.

In short: The news media is not the only audience for media criticism, nor is media criticism qua media criticism completely futile. Don’t stop.

Finally: You know what is counterproductive? This:

That’s a Democratic politician who supports Joe Biden telling the New York Times: Go ahead. Keep covering Joe Biden and Donald Trump with a pro-Trump double standard. I don’t want to pick on Mark Pocan here; I think he’s a good member of Congress. What he did here is an extremely common thing among professional Democrats, and has been for decades. Whenever some dumb story comes along, or some blatant media double-standard unfolds, you can count on professional Democrats to seize the opportunity to get their name in the paper by validating that double-standard. Rep. Pocan is just the example I happened to see first this morning.

If you’re a professional Democrat who supports Joe Biden and a reporter asks you about the politics of Biden’s age, your job is to tell the truth: “Donald Trump is a delusional, addled imbecile who confused a photo of the woman he sexually assaulted for a photo of his own wife, but you biased jackasses in the media are disproportionately obsessed with Biden, just like you helped Trump win in 2016.” Your job is not to sound like some third-tier pundit straining to sound as neutral as possible⁶ in order to win a PBS contract; it’s to tell the damn truth and help stave off fascism.

1. Here, as I often do, I am using the Times as a symbol, perhaps a synecdoche, for the broader elite news media. Specific examples differ but the same basic critique applies to The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, etc etc etc.

2. Here is an actual paragraph in an actual article that ran on the front page of today’s New York Times: “Mr. Trump, by contrast, does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways. Mr. Trump often dyes his hair and appears unnaturally tan. He is heavyset and tall, and he uses his physicality to project strength in front of crowds. When he takes the stage at rallies, he basks in adulation for several minutes, dancing to an opening song, and then holds forth in speeches replete with macho rhetoric and bombast that typically last well over an hour, a display of stamina.” I promise I am not making this up.

3. I am so, so sorry.

4. I have had no affiliation with Media Matters for more than a decade, though I continue to admire their work.

5. Like I said, there are a lot of reasons the Times is the way it is. But it clearly starts at the top. A.G. Sulzberger is the current publisher of the New York Times, a massively important and influential position he attained at the age of only 37, probably on meritocratic grounds and not because of the extremely coincidental facts that A.G.’s family controls the company and his father, A.O. “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr., preceded him as publisher, as his father, A.O. “Punch” Sulzberger, Sr., preceded him. I swear I am not making up these nicknames. I’ve never knowingly met a Sulzberger but whenever someone tells me the problem with the Times is Maggie Haberman or David Brooks or Dean Baquet or James Bennet or whoever, I note that the Times had precisely the same problems before any of those people worked there. The Times employs no shortage of bad journalists — and quite a lot of good ones — but the fish rots from the top, as they say.

6. Note that “trying to sound as neutral as possible” is not the same as actually being neutral, fair, or objective.