Why the New York Times Won't Admit Its Power

It doesn't just give the people what they want. It tells them what to want.

The New York Times remains the most influential news outlet in America, even if there are others with larger audiences. Its choices, its blind spots, and its mistakes shape what millions who never read it understand about the world. 

The Times employs a great number of talented and committed journalists, and does many things very well. But it is also gripped by some highly damaging pathologies, which apply to the elite news media generally but take on particular importance at the Times because of its key role in American journalism. 

When it suits the Times’ leaders, they insist on the centrality of their role and the vital and salutary influence they have. But when criticized, they claim they are not independent actors exercising their own power at all. 

Joe Kahn, the Times’ executive editor, gave an interview to Semafor’s Ben Smith, who began by referencing a post from Dan Pfeiffer noting that the people at the Times “do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” It was something of a softball, teeing up a predictably high-minded response about the importance of journalistic neutrality. But Kahn also said this:

It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. 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?

This was unintentionally revealing in a number of ways. First, the idea that the Times might become “an instrument of the Biden campaign” is something Kahn is clearly keen to avoid, despite the fact that far more often it has become an instrument of the Trump campaign, or the conservative movement more broadly. Second, if he thinks covering immigration and the economy is inherently “favorable to Trump,” that tells you a good deal about the manner in which those issues are covered. 

After all, if you want to cover the issue of immigration, you could give prominent coverage to a crime committed by an immigrant (noting in the 14th paragraph that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born people, of course), or put the latest idiotic border photo-op staged by Republicans on the front page. Or you could do a series of stories about immigrants starting new businesses (which they do at higher rates than native-born Americans), or the ongoing struggles faced by Dreamers, or the public’s continued support for immigration. And not once or twice, but over and over, the way “Chaos at the Border!” is covered. Those are immigration stories too.

The same is true of the economy. Covering it only helps Trump when you decide what aspects to cover and how to talk about them in a particular way, focusing primarily on the negative or framing story after story in the “The news is good. Here’s why that’s bad for Joe Biden” format. But when questioned, media bigwigs talk as though they’re just illuminating the truth, like archeologists brushing away the dirt to reveal what lies underneath. In fact, journalism involves making choices — which questions you’re going to ask, which people you’re going to quote, which parts of the story are worth paying attention to and calling attention to. 

Where news media power lies

Kahn seems to think that polls about what people see as the most important issue should, at least in part, guide the paper’s decisions about what to cover. As a snapshot in time that sounds appropriate; if Americans care deeply about health care access, the Times should make sure to cover the issue of health care access. The problem comes in which way the causal arrow runs. Most of the time, news media don’t cover particular topics because the public thinks they’re important. The public thinks particular topics are important because the media are covering them.¹

This is called “agenda setting,” known by communication scholars as one of the most important effects news media produce. As political scientist Bernard Cohen wrote in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” 

Compared to the kind of effects that people sometimes think the media have, zapping people’s minds with propaganda and manipulating the outcome of all kinds of world events, agenda setting can seem like a pretty dull sort of influence. But it’s incredibly important.  

I guarantee you that if Joe Kahn decided tomorrow that he was going to assign a dozen reporters to, let’s say, the story of Jared Kushner’s shady overseas dealings and the threat they may pose to the integrity of U.S. policy in a second Trump term, then put one story after another about that subject on the front page for a month, you’d see a dramatic increase in the importance people place on that subject.

That’s not only because of the Times’ direct audience, but because the Times sets the agenda for the rest of the news media. TV, print, radio, and online reporters read the Times every day and get cues about what’s important and worthy of covering. If you watched the nightly network news, you’d see that much of the time they’re covering whatever was in the Times that morning. 

A substantial part of the jobs of top editors like Kahn is to decide what their publications will cover every day. Are we going to do a story on this subject? How much space are we going to devote to it? Should we assign one reporter to it and run one story, or an entire team that will produce lots of stories, stretching out over days and weeks? When the Times decides that Hillary Clinton’s emails are the most important issue in the 2016 campaign, or that the fact that a prosecutor thinks Joe Biden is old warrants multiple front-page stories, it’s a signal that this is something you have to pay attention to. And people do.

It’s particularly maddening that Kahn doesn’t acknowledge that fact, because in other contexts, he and his colleagues are all too happy to tout their agenda-setting power. If you asked him why his paper explored some obscure but consequential policy issue or did an investigation into an overlooked problem, he’d answer that it’s important the public know about those things even if they weren’t aware of them before. In other words, the Times uses its resources and space to say to its audience, “Hey, this is a thing you ought to pay attention to, because it’s important.” When that looks like a noble endeavor, they take credit for it; when it looks like crass sensationalism that debases the political debate, they say they’re just a passive conduit for information the public wants. 

The answer to this problem is for journalists, especially elite journalists, to acknowledge their power — which means taking the accompanying responsibility seriously. And when they screw up, they ought to admit it.

1. Yes, when “media” is the subject I conjugate the accompanying verb as plural, because “media” is the plural of “medium.” I know that almost no one else does this, but that’s because everyone else is wrong. I have given up writing “data,” which is the plural of “datum,” as plural, but on this I take the Picard position: