As the Times broke a story today on Hillary Clinton, some of us brought up the New York Times's journalism and a frustration at this falling into a pattern of behavior for them. Others responded incredulously "It's News, why wouldn't it be reported"? And yes, it is news and deserves to be reported on and examined. But news can also be framed and reshaped. A single headline can drastically change public perception of a story in a "glass half-full" or "glass half-empty" way. And over the course of the last two years, the New York Times has engaged in a pattern of behavior that deeply concerns many who had previously relied on them for news and caused them to question their agenda.
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This started with their campaign coverage in the lead-up to the election.
"In just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”
From the article - "The researchers found that the Times devoted much more online and print real estate to the campaign horse race and personal scandals for both candidates than it did to their policies on topics such as health care and taxes."
Now, while the NYT was
far from the only journalistic entity exhibiting this during the election, as one of the US's premier journalistic institutions, seeing this type of ratio from them without any public accounting or contrition for their coverage decisions is concerning.
And this campaign coverage piece in particular only serves to further worry people.
Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia
The issue with this piece is simple: It's completely false. We know now that the FBI had independently opened an investigation into Donald Trump prior to this piece being published. By the time Christopher Steele presented them with his compiled Dossier, they had already opened an investigation due to George Padadopolous getting drunk in London and revealing things to Australia's chief UK diplomat.
How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt
Someone wanted this piece out there pushing a false story. And the New York Times played ball. And unfortunately, it appears to some that they continued playing that ball game. Once Trump was elected, patterns in their reporting have concerned people about editorial decisions.
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The first sign that something unusual was going on w/ the Times's behavior was been their fascination with "Trump Voters". Since Trump's election, we have seen a slew of stories treating a trip into rural Ohio as something akin to a British adventurer diving deep into a far off land, sending back word at how different those people living there are.
One indication that something unusual was going on was when in June of last year, Michael Cohen, a Boston columnist, caught that the Times cited the same pro-Trump Small Business owner in two entirely different articles as evidence of support for Trump. (Even photographing him twice!) Twitter Chain here-
https://twitter.com/speechboy71/status/871056260417933312
This pattern has only escalated since, with similar articles about "Real Americans" continuously coming out of the magazine. At the end of the year, they published a Trump Presidency year-in-review article on twitter as
President Trump has brought a reality-show accessibility to a once-aloof presidency, invigorating voters who felt alienated by the establishment Recently, it got so bad that they gave their own editorial page over entirely to letters from Trump Supporters:
New York Times’ Trump-voter fetish hits a low point as it turns over its opinion page to them And just today the Washington Post has thrown journalistic shade the New York Times with a piece titled
Deep in Clinton country, voters stand by their candidate
Now, this again isn't unique to the NYT, the Post themselves have published a piece like this and gotten pushback on it. (
A Hill piece looking at the WaPo piece and its context leads to an article pointing out the WaPo themselves have done this type of piece) But it's been especially noticeable out of the NYTimes, and there exists a concern that the pattern of behavior we've seen out of the organization is based on one thing:
Access.
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In a piece by NYU Professor Jay Rosen, he details concerns he and others have regarding the NYT's new social media policy, instituted this year.
Pricing access to the Trump White House: the strange case of the Times social media policy In it, he details how NYT managment has locked down expression of poltical viewpoints by their reporters. Whereas before they would get into it blow for blow on twitter, now they must project a much more sterile, neutral facade to the world. And they're not really hiding what their motivations are.
Here the Guidelines swerved to include the voice of Peter Baker, senior White House correspondent for the Times who is not known for his dexterity on social platforms. (Thrush has three times as many followers on Twitter, Maggie Haberman 6X.) Baker spoke not about social media but his concern for what the White House thinks:
"It’s important to remember that tweets about President Trump by our reporters and editors are taken as a statement from The New York Times as an institution, even if posted by those who do not cover him. The White House doesn’t make a distinction. In this charged environment, we all need to be in this together."
You not only had to watch what you say but what you linked to. To stay on the right side of the policy, you had to be aware of where your links were headed, and distribute the destinations around.
The reason for concern becomes more obvious when you consider that Maggie Haberman, the Times' Chief WH correspondent, is known as "
The Trump Whisperer". She's the crown jewel of the paper's White House coverage. She's known for having access to many sources within the adminstration.
And she has also gone on record w/
reCODE calling reactions to Trump "Shrill" and offered the following take on views of Trump in NYC vs rural areas.
“The five-borough view in New York City, of Trump, is so unbelievably different than the national view of Trump,” Haberman said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher,recorded live in Austin, Texas at the 2017 Texas Tribune Festival. “The national view was formed over 14 years of ‘The Apprentice.’ I was amazed and people would go to Iowa and people would describe him like Thomas Edison: ‘He’s this innovator, he formed this huge business, he’s decisive’ and it’s, like,
he fired Gary Busey. That’s who we’re talking about.”
The problem inherent in access journalism, just like in Video Games journalism, is that if a subject doesn't like you, they can have you excommunicated. If a publisher doesn't like the scores you're giving a game, they'll stop sending you review copies and giving you access to demos at trade shows. And if a White House doesn't like the way you cover them, they can stop giving you interviews and off-the-record talks.
Michael Wolff's book, "Fire and Fury", succeeded largely because he just burned all his bridges. He never intended to go back for a second helping of information, so once he had been blacklisted by Trump's new Chief of Staff, he sat down and spilled all he knew, free of the consequences. Someone like Haberman is going to be in a much more delicate situation, given the need to balance information with access.
And it's here that we enter the reason I wanted to create this thread, to create context for why there was criticism of the NYT's Clinton story today. It was not about the newsworthiness of the story. It absolutely was, and the tweets that USA Today found from 2017 showing pictures completely recontextualized the story for all of us who had a more forgiving and charitable outlook on the circumstances.
But the byline for the story was quite unusual. Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent, was on there in addition to a second reporter. Haberman has been at her post covering the Trump administration for over a year now. An investigative piece on the Clinton administration was awfully strange coming out of her. And especially one with that strong a title, given that "Shield" implies complete protection, and that wasn't quite the case given the information presented in the NYT piece:
Hillary Clinton Chose to Shield a Top Adviser Accused of Harassment in 2008
But it was less strange if you were to click on her name and look at the story she had broken 12 hours earlier. This one was hard to miss:
Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit This story, one that could single-handedly bring down a Presidency, one that somehow went unreported in June despite bizarre subtweeted statements by political officials at the time as well as rumors circling at the time, is one that could make you a legend. And it could also cut off your access to the West Wing.
In the film "The Post", the events surrounding the Panama Papers are examined by the film, and the precarious nature of access journalism is put on display. Be too mean, publish the wrong leak, run the wrong story? With a capricious, narcissistic President in tow, traditional norms are in short supply, and journalists risk being cut off at a moment's notice if they get on the wrong side. The consequences are real.
Which is why the open question for many reading that NYT headline and byline for many: Was the timing coincidence? Or was a piece aimed at Donald Trump's 2016 general election opponent, timed to run 12 hours later w/ a byline credited to the "Trump Whisperer" simply the price of maintaining access to a man with a notoriously short attention span?
