New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd is on a roll. Last week she criticized the paper’s op-ed page for its whitewash of an op-ed about a Palestinian hunger strike to protest supposedly arbitrary arrests by Israel. The paper failed to mention why contributor Marwan Barghouti was in prison: He was convicted of five counts of murder and membership in a terrorist organization.
Her latest weekly column for the Sunday Review weighed how effectively the paper had burst its “hermetic bubble” in the first 100 days of the Trump administration: “New Voices, but Will They Be Heard?” The text box: “Some readers reject a broader range of views in The Times.” And some Times reporters as well: She chided staff intolerance to new conservative opinion voices, including from reporter Declan Walsh, who tweeted out criticism of the paper’s new conservative voice Bret Stephens.
In the days following Donald Trump’s White House victory, The New York Times’s executive editor and its publisher signed an unusual joint letter to readers, promising in the wake of a startling election to report “without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.”
An admirable goal, considering the hermetic bubble that The Times and other news media are often accused of living in, one that blocked the sightline to a swelling despair in Middle America.
Now, as the 100-day mark of the Trump administration approaches, it’s time to ask: Is The Times following through on its promise to put an outstretched hand toward Red America? And, just as crucially, are readers ready for it?
Spayd’s list of the paper’s improvements seems overstated:
Without much effort you can spot signs that it’s trying. There’s a new roundup of opinions from the left and the right. A podcast, The Daily, often features voices from the heartland. There are affecting narratives like one from writer Jack Healy on an Ohio farmer who lost two children to heroin. These stories put a beating heart in the people who voted for Trump. They also force many readers to consider views different from their own.
But Spayd did provide an unflattering look inside the newsroom, where staffers can really let down their liberal hair.
At this particular moment in history, that doesn’t always go down easy. A day of reckoning along that path came earlier this month, when editorial page editor James Bennet did his part to broaden reader horizons by naming conservative Bret Stephens to the prestigious -- and mostly liberal -- roster of Times columnists.
Stephens’s coronation produced a fiery revolt among readers and left-leaning critics. They rummaged through his columns for proof that he is a climate change denier, a bigot or maybe a misogynist. More complaints came into the public editor’s office than at any time since the election, with many readers threatening to cancel their subscriptions. (I’m told relatively few actually have.) Inside the building, some of Stephens’s future colleagues posted his “greatest hits” on a bulletin board. And a handful of newsroom staffers, most notably columnist Max Fisher and Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh, have challenged Stephens on Twitter.
Indeed, Walsh and Stephens had this spat on Twitter last week:
Walsh: Not cool: new NYT columnist @BretStephensNYT once wrote about the "disease of the Arab mind".
Stephens parried: “...The column is about the tragic ubiquity of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Which, I'm sure you'll agree, isn't cool.”
Walsh responded: “That's a fair point. Ascribing a pathological condition to an entire race of people is not.”
If you want a truly tasteless columnist, there's always Paul Krugman.
Spayd pinpointed the problem:
It’s hard to tease apart objections to Stephens’s work from objections to hiring any conservative at all, especially since every right-leaning Times columnist from William Safire to Bill Kristol hit a buzz saw walking in the door....
The paper’s readership is certainly hypersensitive to any display of humanity toward the Republican enemy.
Dean Baquet, the executive editor, said he remembered another backlash after a sympathetic piece on Trump aide Kellyanne Conway asked whether she was getting the same sexist treatment that Hillary Clinton did. She was, it concluded -- apparently not the answer many readers were looking for. “There’s no question a lot of our readers do not want us to provide stories that show we’re open,” Baquet said. “But what they want is not journalistic.”
