New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it
New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it
This is from May 7th, but I hadn’t seen it.
Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.
He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.
But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party
. . . And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.
Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.
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MOTHERFUCKER - JOURNALISM IS THE FOURTH PILLAR OF DEMOCRACY. ITS YOUR LITERAL ONE JOB - TO DEFEND IT.
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.
Ah, that’s your problem right there. And this is going to be the major issue for generations to come. The algorithms are determining what’s popular and will generate content to maintain engagement. What used to happen is news rooms would find important stories and report on them then the people would read those stories to determine what actually matters in their lives.
I subscribe to my local paper. The mobile app is essentially ‘what the people want’. Meanwhile, the newspaper itself (print or digital) has almost entirely different content and it’s certainly organized differently. When I want to learn about things in my community and the world - the reason I subscribe to a newspaper in the first place - I read the paper, not the app. The app is just like a blog.
It’s incredibly frustrating how far our fourth pillar of democracy has fallen.
That's exactly the problem. Kahn and his crew determine what's a "top issue" the same way the rest of us do, through algorithm-driven engagement. There's a reason all the major outlets placed a "trending" chyron at the top of their homepages years ago, and that's because they're specifically tailoring their coverage to whatever generates traffic on their and other's websites. Each editor is, after all, a human whose understanding of the world is driven by the content that shows up on their phone, their computer screen, and their television. The fact that media is curated through a narrowing window of social media platforms means that the things that pop onto their radar will be algorithm-influenced. Even if they stepped back and only accepted what polls highly, they'd have to either perform their own real-time polling (yeah right) or point to other polls for emphasis, the results of which have been filtered and amplified according to algorithmic engagement. This is only going to get worse as AI starts to influence the algorithm in real time and we become more and more susceptible to hive-mind coverage where the tail wags the dog.
This is part of the reason 21st century media has skewed so heavily toward sensationalism since 9/11, because for some ungodly reason they've decided that their job is to react to the news, rather than create it. Fuck them. Their spineless "neutrality" is a tool Trump & Co. learned how to play like a fiddle from day one, and by refusing to even entertain the possibility of assisting the left, they've obsequiously and unconsciously become the right's most potent weapon. They are the harbingers of fascism in America, and they're still too fucking dense to see what's coming.
Fantastic 👏👏👏
To add to that, all I keep seeing in the news is about Biden's poor performance. Yeah, we knoooow. Can we maybe get some coverage of the report of Trump raping a child or how many mentions he has on Epstein's list? Is there anything else going on in the world we should know about? All the news is doing is grabbing hold of the most sensational topic that every other outlet is
reporting onspeculating about so they don't lose ratings / clicks.The world we live in is not about genuine creativity or challenging perspectives or journalistic responsibility. All we have going forward is what generates ad revenue. What's "engaging". And our dumbass brains only care about dopamine. So anything that challenges us to think outside the box is too difficult for us to engage with. The corporations and special interest groups have won. I wouldn't be too worried about climate change at this point, kids. I doubt you'll be aware of your surrounds enough to realize what's going on around you.
I'm just hoping for a new Age of Enlightenment. Maybe people will realize that having everyone else do the thinking for us isn't such a great idea.
I'm just hoping for a new Age of Enlightenment. Maybe people will realize that having everyone else do the thinking for us isn't such a great idea.
That sounds wonderful. However I'm not expecting it anytime soon.
Another part is just straight up computer illiteracy. You can bet Kahn wouldn't know an algorithm if it bit him in the ass.
What that translates to is an unfamiliarity with how social media works - or rather a distorted familiarity.
It's the exact same reason it took federal courts a decade to decide Microsoft was a monopoly, and we still have this problem in any legal situation. Judges and newspaper editors know sweet fuck all about how the modern world communicates. Or rather, what they know is an extreme distortion.
From the article
University of Illinois professor Nicholas Grossman wrote:
Biden’s age isn’t among voters’ top issues in polls, but the NY Times made it a recurring top story anyway. Voters sure didn’t say they care about the president of Harvard, but the Times made that the number one story for days. When NYT editors care, they don’t defer to polls.It’s incredibly frustrating how far our fourth pillar of democracy has fallen.
You can say that again.