The New York Times obituary for Seymour Topping, who died Nov. 8 at age 98, accurately summarized the 1969-1986 reign at the newspaper by this No. 2 man with legendary editor A.M. Rosenthal. We're told the team "above all prized high standards of reporting and editing, which demanded fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, political agendas, innuendo and unattributed pejorative quotations."
That was not just a farewell to "Top" but to a fading ideal in American journalism that's steadily supplanted by opinionated and entertaining coverage that wins eyeballs, ears, clicks, digital subscribers -- and profits. Public trust in the news media is eroded to an alarming degree while social media inflame everything, reporters' tweets expose their biases and Donald Trump's attacks accompany media hostility.
This growing trust deficit shapes all aspects of our business, the religion beat included.
A lengthy Times piece Nov. 13 about why 2020 polls were so misleading said Republicans were wary about participating because Trump "frequently told his supporters not to trust the media."
That’s an easy answer. But is suspicion entirely the president's doing? Wholly apart from Trump smears ("the enemy of the American People!"), did mainstream media treatment of the Trump movement, Republicans and political, cultural and religious conservatives sew distrust? What's ahead if Trump succeeds in controlling the GOP and his 73 million voters through 2024?
Vest-pocket history: Starting in 1988 with Rush Limbaugh's outspoken show, conservative talk radio pretty much saved the AM industry. Fox News Channel and MSNBC arrived in 1996, with Fox partially imitating Limbaugh while MSNBC veered ever more leftward, eventually followed by pioneer CNN (founded in 1980). The Times, financially pressed dailies and broadcast networks were tempted toward a more cautious slant.
But with the Trump Era, traditional restraints all but vanished. This advocacy journalism approach — known as “Kellerism,” here at GetReligion — became the norm on coverage of moral and cultural topics in American life.
That brings us to last January's Pew Research Center report "U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided." Media personnel should delve into these data on how 12,043 respondents view 30 varied news outlets.
The Times, so influential among the cultural elite, educators, policy-makers and journalists, exemplifies the concrete news "silos" into which Americans now sequester themselves. In this survey, 31% of the Democrats plus Independents who lean Democratic obtained political news from the paper, compared with only 9% of Republicans and Republican leaners.
Importantly, 53% of the Democrats "trust" Times political coverage, and 66% for Democrats who identify as liberal. Among Republicans and Republican leaners only 15% trust the paper, with 10% for self-identified conservatives. Flipped around, 22% of these Americans over-all "distrust" Times coverage but a dangerous 42% of Republicans (compared with their 29% distrust in a pre-Trump 2014 survey).
This large population sample held almost identical opinions about the trustworthiness of the Times and narrowly partisan MSNBC.
One new-era landmark was the Times's "1619 Project," started last year to preach the centrality of slavery in U.S. history. Major historians objected and the Times granted in-house columnist Bret Stephens a full-page to assail the effort.
Two other seminal moments involved the exile of well-respected journalists. Liz Spayd, former managing editor of the rival Washington Post, briefly served as "public editor" of the Times, and James Bennet, a former Times foreign correspondent and editor in chief of The Atlantic, briefly ran the Times opinion section and was a rumored candidate for the paper's top job.
Spayd was sacked in 2017 as the Times abolished her post of critiquing the paper's work and assessing reader complaints (established in 2005 after a severe fraudulent reporting scandal). During 2016, Spayd had warned about the paper's advocacy reporting on the Trump campaign and religiously-disputed issues. Gory details are found in this tmatt post here at GetReligion.
Bennet was hired to seek a wider diversity of opinion voices but could not survive after a staff revolt over a sub-editor's publication of Sen. Tom Cotton's op-ed favoring use of federal troops to quell urban rioting. That led to the departure of an opinion editor, Bari Weiss, whose incendiary resignation letter (text here) depicted the paper as a narrowly partisan swamp that enforces a liberal "new orthodoxy" (GetReligion podcast post here).
Now we have a massive must-read in the Nov. 9 New York magazine by Reeves Wiedeman, based on interviews with dozens of Times employees, most of whom understandably sought anonymity. The headline proclaimed: “Times Change — In the Trump years, the New York Times became less dispassionate and more crusading, sparking a raw debate over the paper’s future.”
This investigation is a quite remarkable achievement, considering how secretive and self-protective news companies, like other businesses, can be. The woke scenario here: The nation's longtime "paper of record" has "become the paper of the resistance, whether or not it wanted the distinction."
Though Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger are assailed by conservative outsiders, by this account they are "institutionalists" seeking to preserve the old standards. Their antagonists are young hires and tech staffers who are "insurrectionists" and "identity politics" and "diversity" proponents, some coming from "advocacy journalism" shops.
Another key: Income now depends on digital subscribers more than advertisers, so the third power is expectations from an increasingly left-wing readership living in blue zip codes across America.
The impact? In her letter, Weiss remarked that Twitter is now the paper's “ultimate editor.”
Can the Times and all the rest reverse any of this in the 2020s? Will journalists even want to, especially when covering hot topics linked to religion and culture?
Disclosures. Yes, The Guy worked for decades at Time magazine, where the Times was a major competitor. Yes, Time was never strictly "objective," although our opinion element was judicious by 2020 standards. The Guy has read the Times daily as a necessity since his sophomore year in college except during summers working in the mountains and a U.S. Army hitch. He once spent an hour discussing challenges in religion coverage one-on-one with the aforementioned Rosenthal (a GetReligion reader in the final years of his life).