This is from May 7th, but I hadn’t seen it.
Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.
He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.
But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party
. . . And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.
Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.
Not sure if that’s a /s but he’s why they’re not going to do anything good at this time when we need it most.
On first read, I got him confused with the Murdochican stooge the Washington Post just hired to bring in all his buddies and screw up that paper.
I thought 2016 would have taught them a lot of lessons, but it doesn’t look like it. Of course, everytime there’s a disastrous political fucksplosion (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and the orange rapist) I think everyone’s going learn something from it. Maybe but goddamn.
Why would they? Did any of it affect them negatively?
You’ll have to define “affect” and “negatively” but I would say there was a brief moment where on-air personalities apologized for sucking and even the NYT published a long piece about “what they could have done better”.
For anyone who pays attention to the “inside baseball” world of news, journalism, media, whatever - yeah they fucked up royal and knew it. Of course, they spent the trump administration forgetting that and normalizing his insanity, and of course here we are in the blender again even after his coup, his fraud, his national security burning self is A GODDAMNED FACT and yet - nothing. Not even a footnote in any story.
I’d define it as “people getting fired and profit being lost”. If neither the people involved nor the overarching corporate entity suffered greater cost that the benefit, then the endeavour was a net gain, regardless of externalities.
Oh I see how you mean - no, they made out like bandits as usual and some wily interwebs commenter sniped them for it.