Does Joe Kahn Trust the New York Times?

No, the free press shouldn't "help Joe Biden win." But it should make sure voters know what they'd get if Trump does.

New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn’s answers to the strawman question “Why doesn’t the executive editor see it as his job to help Joe Biden win?” have prompted immediate, strong responses from, among others, Dan Pfeiffer (who was quoted, but had his views mischaracterized, in the interview), Greg Sargent, Brian Beutler, Dan Froomkin, Politix, and Mark Jacob. And as Jay Rosen has made clear, the stakes, not the odds, should center election coverage. I hope you read them; all make worthy points. 

If you’ve read anything I’ve written, you know that defeating Trump and MAGA fascism is a central focus of Weekend Reading. But I agree with Kahn that it would be counterproductive and corrosive to our society if outlets that are still respected for their credibility, like the Times, allowed that credibility to be exploited for a particular agenda, regardless of the purpose.

At the same time, I think that Kahn’s responses strikingly confirm the concerns I’ve been raising about media coverage generally for years.¹ To be clear, those concerns have never been about how the media covers Democratic candidates or Biden.²

The Times, and many others in the mainstream media, have done some tremendous reporting on the very well developed plans Trump and his allies have ready if he returns to the White House, not to mention the ongoing escalation of threats to election workers and frivolous challenges to individual voters from the RNC and allied MAGA organizations. 

I don’t want or expect Kahn to “defend democracy” by putting a thumb on the scale for Biden. I’d be satisfied if Kahn simply stood by his own reporters and their reporting. I want to see him edit the Times as if he believed that his own paper’s groundbreaking stories were both true and important. 

For example, if the Times stands by its reporting in its excellent November 2023 Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans³ , where are the follow-up stories about how those plans would play out in 2025 if Trump wins? Think about all the scrutiny of 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls’ health care plans, even when we all knew they would never be enacted as described.

As we know from other excellent Times reporting on Project 2025, Trump’s allies have detailed plans to give him enormous power to carry out his agenda. Where are the polls about how Americans would feel about bringing in the military to round up, place in detention camps, and deport millions of Latinos per year—which would be a multiple of the most infamous ethnic roundups and deportations in more than a century?⁴ (Remember too that 53 percent of Latinos report knowing someone undocumented, and more than half of Latino voters are already concerned they could be caught in the roundup.) 

I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve seen Times (or other prominent mainstream) reporters insist Republican members of Congress answer whether they support those plans, or do follow-on reporting on what it would actually mean to undertake that kind of operation even if it fell short of Trump’s ambitions.⁵ Similarly, stories about eroding Latino support for Democrats are Topic A this election, but none of the stories include whether defecting Latinos are aware of that plan—or, more importantly, whether they believe that plan will be implemented if Trump wins. 

Beliefs Matter Most

Let’s pause for a moment on the importance of what voters believe will happen. A key moment in my political education came in 2004, when the AFL-CIO (where I was political director) was polling union members about what issues concerned them most. Not surprisingly, when given a battery of labor related issues, Social Security was always near the top. But, when we tested it, mail that was critical of George W. Bush for wanting to privatize Social Security didn’t move the needle. What was up? When we probed the point in union halls and in focus groups, it became clear that union members did not believe that anyone would ever try to privatize Social Security. Of course, once re-elected, Bush tried to do just that, and would have succeeded but for the firestorm against it – including from many of the same union members who had discounted the possibility but who were now among the most active in opposition, going to rallies and town hall meetings, lobbying their representatives, and writing letters. 

Sound familiar? Think of all the years of polling (and testing) that showed that abortion wasn’t a voting issue. It’s the same story. Then, even voters who cared a great deal about abortion couldn’t believe that Roe would ever be overturned. But, as with attempting to privatize Social Security, once Roe was overturned, abortion became a political firestorm. Both of these examples have two things in common – the mainstream media’s presumption that being in favor of privatizing Social Security or overturning Roe was just political rhetoric, and the reflex to label those taking Bush or Trump at their word as alarmists or politically motivated scaremongers.  

Furthermore, as this recent Times essay, Why People Fail to Notice Horrors Around Them, makes clear, it’s more important than ever to break through to people the reality of the possible future because “Extreme political movements … often escalate slowly. When threats start small and increase gradually, they end up eliciting a weaker emotional reaction, less resistance and more acceptance than they would otherwise.” The essay concludes with this from Abraham Joshua Heschel: “We must learn how to be surprised, not to adjust ourselves. [We must] to detect and focus on not-so-great, or even terrible, features of our lives and societies that we have come to take for granted.”

Mano a Mano or Constitutional Referendum?

Again, as careful Times readers know well, Trump’s plans for deportation are just one set of policies already developed for his second term. Thus, based on what has already been reported, a second Trump term would be seen by historians as just as nation-changing as the elections of 1860, 1932, and 1980, if not more so. But unlike those elections, Trump has made it much clearer in advance than Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Reagan what will be in store for the American people if he wins. (And, of course, neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt anticipated where events would take them.⁶) 

Thus, the 2024 election is not a contest between two politicians, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a de facto constitutional referendum. I developed this idea at greater length here.

To be very clear: I am not arguing that the media has an obligation in every election to presume every candidate will actually try to do what they have promised. This is a unique moment in American history where a former president, who the media believes could be elected again in six months, has laid out in very great and credible detail plans that would fundamentally change the nature of life and governance in America.

The “Democracy” Dodge

Kahn demurs on the importance of covering “democracy”:

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? 

(It’s clear that the “immigration” reporting Kahn has in mind doesn’t include highlighting the deportation plan his paper reported on. And for what it’s worth, I’m willing to bet that most of the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning pieces have not been written about issues ranked number one by voters on a survey.)

Like many others in the media, Kahn defends not covering MAGA fascism as a central concern of voters because they don’t pick “democracy” as a priority issue in survey issue batteries. But it’s not surprising that they don’t. Especially in America, where no one has lived with any other system, to many voters the abstract term “democracy” has no settled meaning or resonance. But people do care deeply about the freedoms our democracy gives them, and they have a visceral negative reaction if they understand that losing those freedoms is a real possibility. (Or, as Astra Taylor wrote, Democracy May not Exist, but We’ll Miss it when It’s Gone.)

It Doesn’t Have to Be this Way

All of the shortcomings I’ve mentioned are easily correctable. Especially six months out from the election, hold off on the issue batteries that ask whether people think Trump or Biden is better on issue X (which most people likely haven’t formed a strong opinion on before they are asked by a pollster). Instead, use surveys to find out what people believe will happen if either is elected. (And even to get a better idea of what people think “democracy” means.)

As anyone who has listened to focus groups of undecided/low turnout voters knows, most of them don’t have a clue what would happen. Quantitative findings give further evidence of this; in the last Times/Siena survey, 33 percent of registered voters said they had heard Trump say something offensive, but not recently. But that number was 52 percent for 18-29 year olds – the very group that everyone is talking about abandoning Biden/Democrats now.⁷ That probably means they haven’t heard about “dictator for a day,” “poisoning the blood,” etc. (Only a quarter of Gen X or older answered “yes, but not recently” to this question.)

The Times deserves credit for what seems like the greatest investment of the major media outlets in its polling operations, with its connection to the voter file, high quality interviews, deep transparency, and admirable explainers. But so far it seems most of those investments have gone to improving the accuracy of its trial heat estimates, while much more is still needed to better understand what people care and know about.

Both Sides-ing Done Right

To wrap up, I want to highlight a quote of Kahn’s that I haven’t seen discussed as much as others (emphasis added):

So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

For me, the problem both with some Democrats’ criticism of the Times, and with Kahn’s response, is that they take for granted that the principle stakeholders in the election are the candidates/parties, rather than all of us as citizens. This is especially the case now, when literally half of America doesn’t want either of the candidates/parties – but all Americans will be subject to whatever policies the next president implements. 

So, yes – it’s not the news media’s job “to prevent that from happening.” But it is the job of the news media to do as much as it can to make sure that when Americans exercise “their democratic rights,” they do so fully aware of what the news media already knows that future would bring for them.

Therefore the only metric that matters for whether the media deserves to call itself a “pillar of democracy” is not whether the institutional Democratic and Republican parties feel fairly treated. It’s whether or not Americans end up being surprised by what Trump or Biden do if either is reelected. That’s the kind of both-sides reporting I can get behind. 

1. A sampling of those critiques: A De Facto Constitutional Referendum; Civil Society Is AWOL; In Denial: The Threat of MAGA; The Media Needs a Hippocratic Oath

2. I have criticized the media’s emphasis on age not because it is to Biden’s detriment, but because it distracts from the reality that regardless of either his or Trump’s mental capacity, the focus should be on the consequences of electing either one of them. In that vein, I’ve also urged Democrats and progressives not to make ad hominem attacks on Trump.

3. Other important stories on the same topic include Ron Brownstein’s Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’. The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. and the Washington Post’s Trump and allies planning militarized mass deportations, detention camps.

4. Those include the Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, the Palmer Raids in the 1910's, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Project W*tb*ck in the 1950s, among others.

5. Will Trump actually succeed in deporting all 11 million undocumented people in this country? Probably not. Will he try to do so? Almost certainly. Would his attempts to do so spread chaos and fear, undermine the rule of law, and upend thousands if not millions of lives? Absolutely.

6. Lincoln initially did not intend emancipation, and Roosevelt campaigned on fairly conservative economic ideas. 

7. More coming on this subject in an upcoming post.