Some Modest Concerns of a Loyal New York Times Reader

Questioning the questioning of a top editor.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Criticizing the New York Times is one of the most popular parlor games in American journalism, and mostly (although not always) I try to resist it. The Times is the best newsroom in this country, perhaps in the world, and it produces an astonishing amount of great content. I have been a subscriber for half a century, and literally don’t get out of bed in the morning without having canvassed its iPad app pretty thoroughly. I think it has done a very good job covering the tumultuous events of this year, and its publisher has been steadfast in championing press freedom. I am decidedly not one of those who think it has been too soft on Donald Trump

But sometimes the Times drives me crazy, and not just with its snooty movie reviews or the lower quality of writing in The Athletic. One of those times came earlier this month when it published an interview with its top editor, Joe Kahn. (I have known Kahn for 30 years, since we were colleagues at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones earlier in our careers.) It wasn’t so much Kahn’s answers that irked me, but rather some of the questions from Patrick Healy, the paper’s relatively new standards editor.

False comfort

Healy repeatedly set up questions he had earlier solicited from readers by noting that the Times is criticized from two or more directions at once: by those who want more investigations of Trump and those who seek more on his effectiveness; by readers calling the President a “fascist” and others terming him a “patriot;” by readers saying the newsroom is “biased toward Israel,” “pro-Palestinian,” or “a mouthpiece for Hamas.”

Here’s the key point: being attacked from multiple sides should not reassure journalists that they are getting a story right.

Things aren’t always so transparent. Photo: New York Times Co.

First, in our current politics, relentless partisans will never be completely satisfied with even the fairest coverage, and will continue, as they say inside the Beltway, to “work the refs.” That, of course, is part of the Times’s own point—Kahn said in the interview that the “most challenging part” of his job is “producing an independent news report when some readers really want a more partisan one.” And that must make it an especially frustrating experience to be the standards editor. But it isn’t evidence that your coverage is on the mark, as the complaints will come no matter what you publish.

Next, charting the range of criticism, even from subscribers, is no more indicative that you are landing where the facts lead than would be tallying comments on social media. Such an approach threatens to surrender some aspect of editorial judgment, at least in defining the outer limits of a story, to the loudest voices in the room. The disaster currently playing out at CBS News, where an offsetting of opinions is being substituted for original reporting in a drive for “balance,” is an analogous error.

A lesson from history

Most significantly, as history repeatedly teaches us, it is entirely possible, even (or perhaps especially) on the biggest questions, that one side of a current debate will eventually be proven entirely right, and another simply wrong. Great editors never forget this.

People often say that this country is more bitterly divided than at any time since the Civil War. I am not sure that is so, but, if it is, one side of that earlier debate—those calling for the immediate abolition of slavery— in retrospect simply saw what others did not or would not. Yet, abolitionism was a view held until well after the war began by only a minority of a minority among whites.

Almost a century later, in my own lifetime, the same could be said about the debate over whether to immediately end legal segregation and stop the denial of voting rights based on race. Every time I read about the history of the Weimar Republic, as I did again recently, I am reminded how few people understood just how critical it was to prevent the Nazis from ever achieving power they would never peacefully surrender.

Overall, the Healy-Kahn interview deepened my sense that the Times, and its leading competitors, made a mistake when they did away with public editors, reader representatives and ombudspeople. While an internal irritant, I think journalists in these roles could and frequently did help the best newsrooms sense when they were losing their way on important stories, or failing to recognize systemic errors, and to find a truer course.

What the editor knows

Apart from the public editor question (such second-guessing is something for which very few editors would wish), I think Joe Kahn actually understands all of this. His own background and specialty focus on China, where he spent years as a reporter and editor. The interview this month offered reflections on a recent trip he took there, and, on this point, was remarkably free of bothsidesism.

He noted that China “has taken the lead” from the West, has built the world’s best road and rail systems, and “dominates manufacturing in too many industries to count.” “It has an (over) abundance of modern housing and new parks and walkways in its orderly and largely safe cities. America seems relatively stagnant by comparison.” All Kahn said he wants is more freedom to report this huge story, and more journalists with which to do so.

What I wish for my favorite newspaper is that that clarity of vision, and editorial self-confidence in charting a big story, could infuse even more of its reporting and editing, no matter from what direction criticism comes.