OPINION:
All across the fruited plain editors and publishers have come to terms — some with more grace than others — with the plain fact that their newspapers did something wrong in its coverage of the presidential campaign mercifully just past. That much is all to the good. You can’t fix something until you realize it’s broken.
Unfortunately, the industry consensus so far is that the media just didn’t give the body politic enough media medicine, and what the body politic needs is more of the same toxic elixir.
In a “letter” to their readers, the publisher and executive editor of The New York Times didn’t quite apologize for misleading readers, by assuring them that Hillary Clinton would win a stunning victory, but Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, and Dean Baquet, the executive editor, concede that something went wrong, and the newspaper would “rededicate” itself to doing better. The Times did nothing wrong, of course, and will try not to do it again.
Messrs. Sulzberger and Baquet promised to “reflect” on their coverage of the 2016 campaign while “rededicating” themselves to reporting the news fairly and objectively, something they insist the paper has done scrupulously this year, failing only in that it “underestimated” the Donald’s chances of winning. It was really the Donald’s fault.
Michael Goodwin, a columnist for the New York Post and formerly with The New York Times, says the newspaper “demonized [Mr.] Trump from start to finish, it failed to recognize he was on to something. Because the paper decided that [Mr.] Trump’s supporters were a rabble of rednecks and homophobes it didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the lives of the Americans who elected the new president.”
Indeed, Liz Spayd, the newspaper’s “public editor,” or ombudsman, compared stories that her paper ran about President-elect Trump and Hillary Clinton and concluded that her newspaper made Hillary look functional and organized, and the Trump campaign look “discombobulated.”
Whatever sins the newspaper did, they were done deliberately. In a dispatch on Page One in August, just as the campaign was about to enter the stretch to November, Jim Rutenberg wrote that “If you’re a journalist and you believe that Donald Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
He prescribed throwing out the canon and traditions of how the news is covered and joining the crusade to defeat the Donald. It’s not just The New York Times; the mainstream media, so called, joined that crusade and it has cost everyone the last shreds of its collective credibility.
Railing against “them lyin’ newspapers” is a long-honored staple of American journalism. Some rant more eloquently than others. One candidate on the frontier told of his pride in a newly born son and his ambitions for him. “If it turns out that he has above average intelligence,” he said, “his mother and I hope to make a minister of the Gospel of him. If he has just average intelligence, that’s all right, we’ll just send him to law school and make him a lawyer. But if it turns out he doesn’t have the sense of a drowned goose we’ll thank God for him, anyway, and send him downtown to edit the morning newspaper.”
If chastened editors and publishers are looking for the sawdust trail to the revival meeting, where they can rededicate themselves to the first principles of honest journalism, they must remember that repentance comes before rededication. It’s in the book.
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