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.
Another part is just straight up computer illiteracy. You can bet Kahn wouldn’t know an algorithm if it bit him in the ass.
What that translates to is an unfamiliarity with how social media works - or rather a distorted familiarity.
It’s the exact same reason it took federal courts a decade to decide Microsoft was a monopoly, and we still have this problem in any legal situation. Judges and newspaper editors know sweet fuck all about how the modern world communicates. Or rather, what they know is an extreme distortion.