In the view of some, the Times is still not meeting the moment

I wrote this back in January:

We called them “story arc” sessions — yes, a term that I totally stole from network television. Rather than reviewing the latest stories in the works, reporters would consider the longer term: Where is this beat headed, broadly? A year from now, what coverage will we look back on that best explained the world to our readers?

Those story arcs were our pole stars. …

I don’t have the sense that any of the major news organizations use a similar process to guide their political coverage. We read daily stories, some alarming, most normalizing, but rarely directly addressing the question: What’s going on here?

Here’s a major story arc: The United States, gradually and then, last year, suddenly, abandoned large parts of its constitutional governance in favor of one-man rule — one marked by a man devoted to self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement. The lower federal courts continue to honor the Constitution as well as they can, but the Supreme Court has been an enabler, and the Congress compliant, in the new governance. Our long-time allies, the world’s democracies, are aghast, left trying to navigate a world turned upside down.  

I’m reminded of this by an article by Perry Bacon published last week in the New Republic in which he criticized what he saw as the New York Times’s skewed approach to political coverage:

The Times’ news coverage (meaning outside of the opinion section) avoids consistently describing the Trump-era Republican Party as antidemocratic, Islamophobic, racist, and plutocratic. The paper seems interested in portraying conservatives and liberals as equally problematic, or at least implying that there are major excesses on the left as well as the right. The paper’s coverage of higher education and transgender rights in particular leans into the idea that the left has gone too far, as opposed to centering the right’s authoritarian conduct on those issues (e.g., bans on gender-affirming medical care and the study of ideas like critical race theory). The overall product is a factually accurate portrayal of American politics that misses the big story: The Republican Party is a far-right entity at war with democracy; the Democrats are a normal party in a liberal democracy.

Bacon urges liberals to move beyond a dependence on the Times’s world view:

What I am calling for is for liberals to expand their news diet. If the Times is implicitly and at times explicitly pushing an incrementalist, centrist, MAGA-tolerant agenda at a time when America needs a fundamental shift in the direction that [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani and [U.S. Rep. Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez are urging, liberals largely relying on that paper to shape their worldview are misguided.

Bacon’s critique of the Times is not new. The paper produces some extraordinary journalism, but it does not consistently center its coverage around the ongoing damage to our constitutional foundations.

Times Editor Joe Kahn said as much in a May 2024 interview with Semafor:

“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?”

If it wasn’t clear then, it should be abundantly clear to Times editors now: The threat to American democracy is real. But the New York Times is still not in the democracy-support business.

American Crisis (Margaret Sullivan): A biting critique of the New York Times that may change what you read

Media Nation (Dan Kennedy): A perceptive analysis of why The New York Times struggles with the rise of MAGA authoritarianism