The Mainstream Media's Guilty Conscience
Legacy journalism leaders have cornered themselves into peddling a bunch of nonsense to avoid conceding that their liberal critics have a point.
The rift between Democrats and mainstream media institutions might have been unavoidable, but it didn’t inevitably have to force mainstream news leaders into a defensive crouch or to take leave of their reasoning skills.
And yet…
In an interview with New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, Semafor founder Ben Smith reduces the most essential and bracing criticism of mainstream news into the following straw man: “Why doesn’t the executive editor [of the New York Times] see it as his job to help Joe Biden win?”
Smith’s decision to frame the conversation this way is telling. Here’s a bull session of fairly vigorous agreement between two mainstream news sentinels, staged for public consumption, and they chose to engage in a kind of sophistry that wouldn’t withstand the editing process at Times opinion. Why is that?
I suspect it’s because, despite the years they’ve had to prepare, they have no good response to the fair-minded version of the critique. They are at the same time determined not to relent to their liberal critics. And that leaves them no choice but to caricature the critique and then tear down the caricature.
Nevertheless, the 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.