Heads-up: Secret pod will be very late today, but you’ll get a movie club from me, Sarah, and Sonny this weekend. We’re talking about Clear and Present Danger.
Moving on: I need to get something off my chest. There is part of me that hopes Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times is successful.
I don’t really mean that. Okay, I mean like 3 percent of it. Maybe 5 percent. But I’m not proud of it. I recognize that this is a bad thought. If the lawsuit were to succeed it would be terrible for the country. Everyone who is committed to liberal democracy should be standing with the Times. Solidarity.
And yet . . .
Come to the bad place with me. Just for a minute.
1. Democracy Is Just One Issue
In May 2023 Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, sat for an interview with Ben Smith. Smith asked the following question:
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?
Kahn’s response was illuminating:
Joe Kahn: 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. . . .
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. . . . [T]here 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?
All of the bolding is mine. Now let’s lay bare Kahn’s propositions:
He says that the election will probably be free and fair because Trump is not the incumbent president. Which means he recognizes that if Trump had been the sitting president, it might not have been a free and fair election.
He then turns this bedrock issue—the ability to have free and fair elections—into a policy preference, seeing it as just one item in the candidates’ “agendas.”
He says it is not the job of the media to stop voters who might prefer not to have free and fair elections.
He downgrades “democracy” to a lower-order status as one issue among many and, in his view, a secondary issue given its place in polling.
He proposes that the NYT’s only options are covering Trump as they have—with agnosticized false equivalence—or becoming a Democratic version of Pravda.
It’s hard to tell if Joe Kahn is a morally bankrupt prig or a well-meaning fool.