It’s 2024 And Pundits Are Still Arguing That Voters Haven’t Been Sufficiently Informed About Donald J. Trump’s Badness

And because of this, they want to cast aside the best parts of journalism

There is a group of pundits who are obsessed with The New York Times and who cannot stop criticizing it in a very knee-jerk, ignorant manner. They’re mad again.

I want to be clear that I’m not a knee-jerk pro-Times partisan. It’s a giant, sui generis media institution, and its output ranges from surprisingly bad to sublime. People should be critical of the Times, especially as the rest of journalism burns down, because it is increasingly the only game in town when it comes to covering certain huge, resource-intensive stories.

But there’s critical and then there’s dumb. And the latest controversy is, well, dumb. Again.

It centers on an exchange that occurred during an interview between Ben Smith, Semafor founder and former Times media columnist, and Times executive editor Joe Kahn: 

Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times, “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?

Joe Kahn: Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.

It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?

This absolutely infuriated left-of-center Times-haters. Especially Dan Froomkin, a former Washington Post staffer who now authors the online media-criticism outlet PRESS WATCH — sorry, I can’t help but capitalize it. Froomkin is one of the mascots of the Times-haters, and he neatly, albeit unintentionally, captures some of their limitations as thinkers and pundits.