it is time for democrats to break up with the new york times

it's not clear to me they're on the side of liberal democracy

In 2016, the New York Times ran the following front page 10 days before one of the most consequential elections in American history. From it, you would assume that the largest issue in the election was the Democratic candidate’s email scandal. You would assume that Trump, whose words are repeated in a headline, was a straight shooter whose words should be taken at face value.

In fact, these “new” emails were nothing new. They were only re-upped publicly because the FBI director James Comey broke department protocol to erroneously insert himself into a close race. And we of course know that the entire Clinton email scandal basically a marginally important case of bad judgement in technology usage rather than any kind of substantive issue with Hillary Clinton’s official conduct. As Matt Yglesias wrote shortly after the 2016 election, the story of the election was emails, and this was the story because major outlets like the New York Times decided to allocate more coverage to Clinton’s emails than to all of Trump’s scandals or the entire policy stakes of the election.

The New York Times has never publicly reckoned with this error in judgement and never apologized. At best, it was an error in judgement by the New York Times that seriously mislead the public about the stakes of the 2016 election. As Hillary Clinton communicated at the time, the supreme court and abortion rights were at stake. As were issues of public corruption, friendliness to dictators, and health care coverage. Virtually all of Clinton’s serious warnings about a Trump presidency came true—abortion rights were eliminated, Trump cozied up to Putin and Kim Jong Un, the affordable care act was nearly repealed, and Trump used the office of the presidency to enrich himself and his family.

Let’s fast forward eight years. Trump has *been president*. It is publicly known and easy to see that the Democrats’ warnings were not hyperbole but accurate warnings. While in 2016, it was possible for news outlets to cover these warnings with a critical eye, at this point it is overwhelmingly clear that the Democrats warnings have been accurate and will continue to be accurate. Kamala Harris has simply reiterated the same warnings that Hillary Clinton said in 2016. And yet, the New York Times has not adjusted. They still live in a world where Trump is an unknown quantity rather than someone with an extremely clear and concerning track record. It offends the delicate sensibilities of Times journalists to cover Trump too critically because then they will be “partisan.”

As a Democrat and a fierce believer in liberal democracy, I think it is time for us to drop our notion that the New York Times and similar outlets are on our side, or on the side of liberal democracy. They are not. They have failed repeatedly for nearly a decade to cover the stakes in elections clearly. During the Trump years, they covered Trump more critically because he was an incumbent and they believe you need to criticize incumbents regardless of what they do. But since Trump has left office, we have seen them revert to a notion of objectivity which basically means you need to say both sides are bad.

As an illustrative example, let’s look at something that happened this past week: Trump ran a highly racist rally where one of his opening acts called Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. Then, President Biden (who is not running for office) said the comment about calling Puerto Rico a pile of garbage was garbage. Then, the New York Times decided to run *two* headline stories about Biden’s comments as if to say: look, both sides are calling the other side garbage. This probably made the journalists and editors at the Times feel very wise and evenhanded, but it materially distorted the facts of the case: the presidential candidate on one side had run a racist rally where one bad comment among many was calling millions of Americans garbage, and someone *not running for president* on the other side had called those comments garbage. Really, who’s to say what’s worse? Both sides are using the word “garbage”!

The core issue here is the Times has a notion of objectivity that is not very objective. It basically comes down to: we need to run some negative stories on both sides, so go find something on them. So all of Harris’ issues get compressed into an article, so do all of Trump’s. Both sides! This type of reporting has no way to communicate durable, long term trends in both parties. For instance, it is very predictable that if you elect Democrats, they will try to lower healthcare costs. This has been true since the 90’s. On the other hand, Republicans will try to reduce the number of people with health insurance. This has been true since the Obama era. These are the type of durable contrasts between parties that voters need to be informed of and understand to make informed choices.

But since there is no depth to Times reporting, and no longer historical context to articles, their journalists basically take some comments that both candidates made this week and assume those are accurate expressions of party policy positions. In the case of the Democrats, this is true. In the case of Republicans, it is not. Trump makes offhand comments at rallies all the time that under his hypothetical healthcare plan everyone will have better insurance. But you can’t take that at face value because *as president* he tried to throw 20 million people off health insurance. So, you need to figure out a way to do reporting on a notorious liar and yapper—and the way to do that is to focus on what he tried to do during his first term, and who he has empowered for a potential second term. There is little reporting of this, because the Times’ notion of objectivity is too shallow, and its view of its own readers too dim, to go deeper.

I genuinely believe the New York Times will not do this because then their reporting would align too closely with the statements of the Democratic party. Democrats have been the ones consistently and accurately warning of the consequences of Trumpism. And it has been the Republican party and an “objective” media saying: “no you’re exaggerating!” And then the things Democrats warned about actually happen, and it causes *no* course correction at outlets like the Times.

So—we stand in a curious place. Paid Democratic party advertisements currently inform the public better about the stakes of the election than the New York Times. I think we need a robust, independent, and adversarial press. The Democratic party cannot be both a political party *and* the best source of political information in the country. This is not sustainable. But to get there, we need to move away from outlets like the New York Times that have not shown the ability to accurately, consistently, and fairly communicate the stakes of elections. Despite sharing cultural sensibilities familiar to Democrats, the New York Times is not on our side. Their inability to clearly communicate the stakes of elections amounts to a large pro-Trump bias (it doesn’t matter what they think they are doing, that’s reality).

So let’s break up with the NYT and perhaps through this process they will adjust and improve. Or we can support better outlets that have a more robust notion of objectivity. But if this the style of reporting forever in our paper of record, we are in deep trouble.