Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson wasn’t at the Harvard Book Store on Thursday to talk about journalism, let alone to be made to answer for the decision-making at an institution she left in 2014. She was present only as interlocutor for Lawrence Ingrassia, another former Times editor, at the Cambridge reading of his nonfiction book about cancer, “A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery.” But she was once Washington bureau chief, managing editor and executive editor at the most powerful news organization in the world and wrote the book “Merchants of Truth” in 2019 to chart where the news business is going – and it was too good an opportunity to pass up hearing her thoughts on what is happening at the nation’s top papers: coverage of perhaps the most crucial election in U.S. history (and some other topics) with the lumbering indifference of an aging golfer seven scotches in at the clubhouse.
The seemingly Trump-tilting coverage has been so pervasive and blatant that it’s become a forensic pursuit among media critics and academics as well as the target of plenty of incisive social media mockery using hashtags such as #BrokenTimes (“The polls favor Kamala Harris – why that’s bad for Kamala Harris,” that sort of thing). What does Abramson make of it? While Ingrassia signed copies of “A Fatal Inheritance,” the current Harvard lecturer was kind enough to take a few minutes to explore, starting with the note that she felt coverage after Tuesday’s debate, at least, was clear that Harris “had handled herself very skillfully,” unlike Trump. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity and to make me seem smarter and more organized than I am.
What do you make of the #BrokenTimes, sanewashing memes and accusations?
The problem with journalism – and it isn’t just the Times, where there are 20 things it’s doing really well in its political coverage – is that Trump just defies all of the norms that professional journalists have learned about trying to report the facts and be fair. I’m watching my words here, because I don’t want to judge harshly: Covering Donald Trump is hard. It just is. Because he lies constantly.
But do you feel the criticisms are fair?
In some of the stories, yes. I do. They have triggered anger. But the atomized nature of the audience means The New York Times is no longer speaking to the whole country. It has an affluent, well-educated readership that is concentrated on the two coasts and in places like Cambridge, Chicago, Austin, Texas, maybe Seattle. The audience is not full of Trump supporters. It’s full of people who will never vote for Donald Trump.
Jeff Jarvis had a piece in his BuzzMachine blog including a theory that the Times and other media are trying to prove independence from their “own readers and liberals” and that “pissing them off might be [a] way of saying: You don’t own us.”
I don’t believe that to be true, but I was puzzling over the same thing with a Times story about the North Carolina governor’s contest, a kind of flat just-the-facts story about the two campaigns – but one candidate is bonkers and racist. You’re telling readers about the two and in a sense making them equivalent. Journalistic style and being factual doesn’t really give the reporter license to say “He’s bizarre.” The story does say he’s out of the mainstream, he’s on the far right, they make that clear. But it doesn’t really come across. I’m mentioning that race because it’s a bit of a parallel with Trump-Harris.
Well, exactly. The Times and other media have had since at least 2015 to figure this out, and the concern is that –
Because we’ve never had a presidential candidate like Donald Trump.
– that Trumpism as a mode of political communication has spread, and the Times can’t cope with it. There’s a whole cadre of politicians doing the same things.
What would your solution be? Don’t cover the crazy things that fly out of Trump’s mouth? Cover them, but every third paragraph say in a somewhat opinionated, shrill tone, “he is a liar and a psychopath”? I don’t know what the solution is.
One of the critiques is that the Times crusades: about Hillary Clinton’s emails, Biden’s age. The Times chooses some topics and goes at it pretty hard for a while. Is there some newsroom concept that makes sense of this approach?
Your criticism is the coverage is disproportionate and that it’s tougher on Democrats.
That’s a good way to say it.
I don’t see it as clearly as the critiques I’ve been reading. And I read the times very closely – every single day, the whole report. I even still read it in print after I’ve read most of the stories online. If they’re guilty of anything, it’s of trying to conform with the standards and rules of fair journalism as it’s been taught and drilled into reporters for my entire lifetime.
My fear is that this is a playbook that politicians will run for decades.
I really hope not. I hope we’re reaching the end. It would be really nice. From our lips to god’s ears, right?
A stronger
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