The New York Times is on the wrong side of history

A newsroom built on “Neutrality Island” doesn’t serve democracy.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a pompous editorial headlined, “The Democrats Are in Denial About 2024.” The editorial wasn’t wrong – much of the party’s leadership is indeed in denial – but the obvious, ignored fact is that the Times is in denial too.

During the 2024 campaign, the Times sane-washed Trump’s mental unfitness, downplayed MAGA fascism, and sometimes treated a political turning point for our country as a source of lighthearted amusement.

Vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s insult of “childless cat ladies” and his lie about immigrants eating house pets got peppy branding by the Times as “combative conservatism.” When Trump bizarrely swayed to music for 39 minutes at a campaign rally, the Times called it an “improvisational departure.” On MSNBC, a top Times editor noted how “entertaining” Trump was.

A headline in September, “Harris Heads to the Border, Trying to Project Toughness Against Trump,” was an ugly example of the Times’ failings. According to them, Kamala Harris wasn’t projecting toughness, she was just trying to. And the Times felt the need to stick Trump in the headline because he’s the star of their show – the “entertainment.”

There are many more counts in my indictment, but we’re short on time. My point is that the Times covered the 2024 campaign with dangerous unseriousness, normalizing a political movement that is trying to plunge our country into a dictatorship.

The Times has built its newsroom on Neutrality Island, clinging to its concept of objectivity so fiercely that its news coverage takes no clear position on democracy vs. fascism. A comparable scenario would be if the Times’ crime coverage decided to be objective on whether it was good or bad when people got mugged on the subway.

This weird distance from the consequences of news events was demonstrated by Publisher A.G. Sulzberger last year when he declared that journalists could be led astray if they worried about being ”on the right side of history.”

Sulzberger’s argument was especially odd considering that the Times’ coverage of the rise of MAGA has been written as if it were chronicling history rather than serving as a warning that could make a difference in present times.

It’s understandable, of course, that the Times would dismiss the goal of being on the right side of history, considering how often it’s been on the wrong side over the years.

Such as in 1903 when they wrote that the invention of an operative flying machine would take the “continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians” over “1 million to 10 million years.” The Wright brothers made their famous flight 69 days later.

Or in 1922, when the Times assured its readers that Adolf Hitler’s “anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded.” Or in the 1930s when Times foreign correspondent Walter Duranty spread Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s propaganda, including downplaying a Soviet-induced famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.

All news outlets make mistakes, and some of the Times’ visits to the wrong side of history have been relatively benign.

Caitlin Clark and Stephen Curry might be amused to know that the Times panned the first known use of a three-point shot in basketball, writing in 1945 that the innovative rule “will be permitted to die a natural death.” The Times thought most of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album was “an unmitigated disaster.” In 2016, a Times critic reviewing Amazon’s “Goliath” criticized the “needlessly complicated structure of the initial episodes,” then later admitted he had mistakenly watched the first two episodes out of order.

But back to the serious stuff. Two of the New York Times’ major mistakes in modern times have had enormous implications.

One was shoddy reporting in 2003 that supported the Bush administration’s false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The U.S. invasion led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the Times later wrote a mea culpa.

The other egregious episode came in 2016, when the Times went way overboard in focusing on Hillary Clinton’s private email server. In the closing days of the campaign, the Times ran 10 front-page stories in six days about Clinton’s emails – an issue that pales in comparison to Trump security lapses since then.

Did the Times give us Trump in 2016? Quite possibly.

Did the Times give us Trump again in 2024? I won’t go that far, but it certainly didn’t do enough to warn the public about the danger of a dictatorship.

The Times has been somewhat better since Trump’s inauguration, closing the barn door after it helped let out the horse. It has recently published strong articles about Team Trump’s lawlessness and lies, saying explicitly that the Republicans show “a disregard for the rules” and “are using false claims to justify their policy changes.” Reporter David Fahrenthold and his colleagues have aggressively debunked bogus information from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

That said, many of the old bad habits remain. Threats to invade other countries are described euphemistically as desires ”to expand America’s footprint.” Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, a professional liar, is called “steely and unflinching.” Trump’s address to Congress is credited with “game show flair.”

When I go off about the Times, people argue that it doesn’t matter – that the voters who gave us Trump don’t read it. But the Times influences how other media handle stories and what they consider important. For that reason, people who never read the Times are influenced by it.

With the Washington Post’s owner destroying his newspaper’s credibility in fealty to Trump, the Times has become even more important, which means its failures are more damaging.

The Times may not care about being on the right side of history, but if it doesn’t get on that side soon, it may become a relic of history itself.

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