The New York Times is so, so very sorry that its presidential election coverage was so, so very wrong.
Please have pity on them, Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. begged his paper’s readers the other day. “We aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor…,” Sulzberger said in a letter.
Tell me, how is the paper going to “rededicate” itself to “honesty” if it can’t even admit that it was dishonest during this past election? The Times’ coverage was blatantly slanted against Republican Donald Trump, so much so, in fact, that even its own Public Editor — who is supposed to be the referee of ethics — slammed her employer.
“We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign,” Sulzberger added in the letter.
If the boss truly believes that, he might as well shut the paper down right now because he’s going to lose subscribers faster than Hillary Clinton lost her “expected” electoral votes.
A couple of weeks ago, I took the Times to task for its biased reporting during the election. And I canceled my subscription to the paper — which I had had for decades — and gave people the phone number to call so they could do the same.
The problem wasn’t the Times’ editorial stance on the election. In the paper’s editorial pages, it’s allowed to call Trump a donkey, make funny faces at the Republican candidate, and could even invite all sorts of supposedly learned pundits to do the same in the so-called op-ed pages.
And columnists are free to go to town on the guy.
But what the Times was doing in its news pages was entirely unacceptable by any standard of honest journalism. It had virtually made itself an arm of the Democratic Party. Hard-hitting journalism? Only against Trump.
Objectivity? How could the Times have that when several of its reporters were patting the Clinton camp on the back, secretly feeding the Democrats ideas and offering encouragement? And we wouldn’t have known any of this if WikiLeaks hadn’t hacked Clinton campaign emails.
After my column about the Times ran, others followed my lead and canceled their subscriptions. But what surprised me even more was that a number of people wrote to tell me they’d canceled a long time ago because of the Times’ bias. They asked, what took me so long?
“Pinch” is an appropriate nickname for Sulzberger these days. All newspapers are feeling the pinch. And if the so-called Mainstream Media continues to behave like it did in the last election, not only are their businesses going to be in jeopardy, but so too is the First Amendment — you know, the one that gives the press the independence it so willingly gave up during this year’s election.
Pinch professed shock at what happened. “After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?”
Nah, it wasn’t anything like that.
What the Times missed was the fact that Hillary Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate who had a hard time even getting past challenger Bernie Sanders in the primary. And she did so only with the help of trickery and a bundle of money that she promised to spread around to other Democratic candidates.
The Times screwed up on so many different levels that I don’t have the space to go over all of them here. But one big goof was its long-term coverage of the US economy, which turned out to clearly be the most important issue among voters.
Pinch’s reporters never wanted to look closely at what the economy was really doing because it was ideologically inconvenient. And also difficult to do. So the paper mostly took Washington’s word on the health of the economy and the state of household wealth and the job market, never doing any kind of investigative work on the numbers.
Public Editor Liz Spayd explained that the Times just hours before the election had given Hillary Clinton an 84 percent chance of winning.
“And for many weeks leading up to Election Day, The Times delivered a steady stream of stories. One described Clinton’s powerful and well-organized operation — and Trump’s frazzled counterattack.”
“Another claimed a surge in the Latino vote that could decide the election. Others speculated on the composition and tenor of a Clinton cabinet,” said Spayd, making her election seem like an accomplished fate.
“The picture was of a juggernaut of blue state (Democrat) invincibility that mostly dismissed the likelihood of a Trump White House,” said Spayd.
Spayd’s bottom line, but in my words: The Times effed up. And, to the Times’ credit, it published a lot of complaints from its readers.
But what the Times wrote wasn’t the only problem. In fact, it probably wasn’t even the biggest problem. The editors of the Times also showed their bias by what they decided not to cover.
The instances were numerous, mainly because Hillary and Bill Clinton’s wayward secret lives kept popping up regularly thanks to the hacked emails that were showing up on WikiLeaks.
Why did the Times editors choose to dig deep into Trump’s ancient past and not that of the Clintons?
And some stuff the Times chose to ignore was more current. In one of those hacked emails, Clinton’s spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri called the conservative segment of the Catholic faith “an amazing bastardization of the faith. They (supporters) must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backward gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”
Blockbuster stuff and very damaging to Hillary among Catholics. But the Times only made a passing reference to the Palmieri email in a story with the headline “Leaked Emails About Clinton Hearten Rival.”
But don’t worry. Pinch assured his readers that “our newsroom turned on a dime and did what it has done for nearly two years — cover the 2016 election with agility and creativity.”
Ya know what? The Times can get rid of the creativity — that’s what got it into trouble — and trade it in for some honesty.