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71. New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won't do it

https://presswatchers.org/2024/05/new-york-times-editor-joe-kahn-says-defending-democracy-is-a-partisan-act-and-he-wont-do-it/

Joe Kahn, right, and Dean Baquet, in happier times. (NYT photo)

Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing. He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency. But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor. Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party:



But critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak. Kahn’s position is, not coincidentally, identical to that of his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who I recently wrote about in my post, “Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.” And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.

Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way. “I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that,” he said. I translate that to mean that the old guard has reasserted total control over the rabble. But how, exactly, the Times lost its footing, he doesn’t explain. I’d love to see him point to a few articles that he considers went too far. Best I can tell, his real complaint is that the Times under Baquet hired too many young and diverse people who — in his view — don’t understand the rules. “I think there’s a larger number of people who we might at some point have hired, but we’ve asked the kind of questions or looked at the sort of work that they do, and wondered whether they’d be a good fit for us,” Kahn said, making it clear he won’t make that mistake again. His example was hyperbolic and not even vaguely credible:



I’d be willing to bet a large sum that no job candidate at the Times has ever said any such thing.

On Democracy

In one small paragraph, Kahn outdid himself. He:

Here’s what he said:



(Smith had asked Kahn to respond to Pfeiffer, a former Obama official, who recently complained that the editors at the Times “do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.”) That one paragraph, posted on social media by NYU professor Jay Rosen, elicited a storm of critiques. Cartoonist Ruben Bolling was among those upset by Kahn’s dismissal of democracy as a key issue.



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