Posted on 05/08/2024 7:22:47 PM PDT by TigerClaws
Don’t look now, but journalism might be back.
In a rare uplifting press story, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn seemed to lose patience with incessant demands that he elect Joe Biden instead of reporting news, directing an epic, And Justice For All-style “No, you’re out of order!” tirade against the White House and its lackeys.
When Ben Smith at Semafor asked Kahn about former Obama official Dan Pfeiffer’s complaint that the Times does not “see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power,” Kahn went ballistic.
“I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House,” Kahn snapped. “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?”
Kahn didn’t stop, announcing a formal re-drawing of lines in the sand. He told the White House that fixing the country is their job, reporting is his job, choosing presidents is the job of voters, and stop blaming us if you can’t get re-elected on your own.
“There are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president,” Kahn told Smith. “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.”
Finally, in a sweeping indictment of Trump-era journalism, Kahn pointed a finger at a generation of reporters who appeared to arrive in newsrooms unequipped to deal with unpleasant facts. Sounding offended on behalf of the paper’s reporting reputation, which took a beating with years of misses on stories like Russiagate and factual fiascoes like the “Caliphate” podcast, Kahn reminded Times reporters that the job is about facing and reporting difficult truths, not striving to remake reality into a campus-like safe space, in pursuit of any political “mission”:
Kahn: I’m open to graduates from whatever school who understand what they need to commit to being in an independent news environment. But I don’t think we can assume that they’ve been trained for that, if they’ve been trained for safe spaces. The newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like. Don’t you feel like there was a generation of students who came out of school saying you should only work at places that align completely with your values?
Smith: Don’t you think we all sort of said that to them?
Kahn: I don’t think we said it explicitly. I think there was a period [where] we implied it. And I think that the early days of Trump in particular, were, “join us for the mission.”
Kahn’s outburst inspired quiet cheers by current and former working reporters around the world (one European journalist texted “F*** yeah!” last night). Naturally, the high priests of “moral clarity” media felt differently, staging a nuclear conniption fit in response to Kahn’s remarks:
The Biden administration brought Kahn’s outburst on itself, through a stream of leaks and nudges designed to publicly shame the paper that long ago went too far. The specific conflict probably started five years ago, but relations started steaming downhill with breakneck speed this past January. That was when officials from Biden’s re-election campaign invited representatives of the nation’s leading press outlets to an off-the-record retreat in Wilmington to receive, no kidding, campaign coverage instructions. From a January 7th article in Semafor:
Biden’s re-election campaign has begun organizing a series of off-the-record trips for top political reporters… Using it as an opportunity to tell them what they’re getting wrong… Officials have invoked a coverage spreadsheet laying out areas where the team believes their reporting has fallen short… In particular, campaign officials have chafed at…coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to… incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail… With the exception of its recent meeting with the Times, the campaign meetings had been “substantive” and “productive,”
Those participants, bound not to write about their seminar by off-the-record conditions they themselves agreed to, then had to watch as someone leaked to Semafor that they’d sat like lapdogs while campaign aides rolled out a “coverage spreadsheet” showing where they’d failed to sufficiently amplify administration messaging on Donald Trump. (Apparently the off-the-record deals didn’t cut both ways.) Even worse, or better, depending on your perspective, Semafor’s “source familiar” went out of his or her way to say everyone but the Times got a gold star for obedience.
Consider all the brutal embarrassments to media in just that 200-word report. Someone told Semafor “top political reporters” for the Washington Post and New York Times as well as “ABC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg” all submitted to the indignity of not just one “briefing” from the president’s campaign aides on “what they’re getting wrong,” but a series of them.
Don’t count on it.
It may merely mean the Left is ready to dump Biden and bring in the better vote getter as his replacement.
No idea what they’ll do with Kamala.
Except double the View and other shows’ gushing praise and have the nightly news features “It’s about time to take another look at our historic Kamala Harris.” NYT will say “Serious, Thoughtful. Highly Skilled and Intelligent. An insider’s look at life working for Kamala Harris.”
Or “So soon after Biden left the stage in DC we now suffered the loss of Kamala Harris in a tragic accident. Americans are sturdy and resilient but now have to cope with a double loss.”
LOL, that train has sailed. They lost ALL credibility and they are irredeemable.
If that happenswe get President MikeJohnson
Kamala Harris, the word salad politician. Nobody knows what in the world she is saying.
Sounds pretty authentic ...not saying he was red pilled - but some part of him has opened to reality.
I would say this is 1% of the time that they to something right. The other 99% they are just shilling for the Democrats.
It’s a head fake. The NY Times is deep state property. This is laying out the case for the big switch coming up after the convention. Big Mike or Gavin of the lizard people.
"At the same time news broke about the Harris tragedy, Hillary Clinton revealed that she formed a campaign committee for a possible 2024 run."
Bookmark.
Yo, NYT...we’re still not coming back.
LOL
Perfect.
Journalism died a long long time ago.
Today, a “journalist” is an AI hyena with a human proxy.
Every spring of an election year, mainstream media pretends to be more conservative in hopes of reeling Rs in to hear their election propaganda later on.
You can’t bring back the dead. Regardless of how hard the NYT tries, it will never be believed, even when it tells the truth.
You just had to remind us.🤔
Still true.
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