Of all the press coverage of the recent presidential race, perhaps none was more egregiously one-sided than that of The New York Times.
The famous “Gray Lady” of newspapers is widely hailed as one of journalism’s best-known standard bearers. But in the race between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the paper gave up all pretensions of journalistic integrity and objectivity as it bent over backwards to not only present the Democrats’ case in the best light but to actually become the Clinton campaign’s surrogate mouthpiece, particularly in the latter stages of the contest.
Even early on, the paper clearly had a different tone and imbalanced coverage that favored Clinton over her primary rival Bernie Sanders, who was drawing far larger crowds than the former Secretary of State. But among the Establishment crowd, Clinton had long been the odds-on favorite not only to win the primaries but to dominate the general election itself, no matter who the Republican nominee turned out to be.
Although the paper has long been an elite liberal voice, favoring Democrats over Republicans for decades in terms of its endorsements and editorials, the journal’s undisguised contempt for Donald Trump stretches back more than 35 years.
To his credit, Trump also has had a longstanding disrespect for the New York broadsheet, blasting the paper’s criticism of his various civic projects and real estate developments around the city.
Famously, early in the race, Trump called out Times reporter Serge Kovaleski for getting wrong the fact that Muslim people in New Jersey celebrated the World Trade Center towers falling on 9/11. In turn, Trump was savaged for supposedly making fun of Kovaleski’s physical handicap.
It can be said that when Trump was gaining on his Republican rivals, the Times did not breathlessly give free news coverage to his speeches, outlandish statements and tweets from the campaign trail, unlike other news outlets.
But as soon as Trump had the GOP nomination in hand, it became open season on The Donald as negative story after negative story piled on to the reality television star’s business career, past deals, unauthorized biographies and New Jersey bankruptcies.
Particularly harsh was a “hit piece” article published on May 15, which claimed that Trump had behaved inappropriately with women in private and attempted to dig up dirt on the mogul at his real estate organization. The article contained no “smoking gun” information and actually fostered a backlash online that actually venerated Trump as a respected employer of women and a manager who delegated projects and positions of great responsibility to them.
As time went on and article after article was published, the “liberal bias” of the New York paper went from a subtle slant to a clear-as-day flashing blue sign. By the time the election finally happened, there wasn’t even a doubt about the explicit support for the Clinton campaign or the Democratic National Committee; online banners interspersed throughout supposedly neutral Times articles on the web read, “Hillary Clinton has a 95% chance of winning the presidency.”
Ironically, many of the same articles had Internet-standard “I am not a robot” checkboxes off to the side with options to sign up for the Times’ political news updates. It was as if the Times wanted its readers to be independent enough to read and think, but not think beyond a very prescribed vision for the country’s future — a vision that seemed to come from beyond the newspaper’s office walls.
Indeed, during the latter stages of the presidential race, WikiLeaks confirmed that there were ties between the Clinton camp and the newspaper, with Clinton campaign communication director Jennifer Palmieri referring to the Times as “our press.” Palmieri had communicated to Times reporter Maggie Haberman about a story the newspaper wanted to do on Clinton, and the communication director stated that any negative coverage could damage “the relationship” the campaign had with the paper.
In another leaked email, Times reporter Mark Leibovich had messaged Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook to get Clinton campaign approvals for quotes he wanted to use in a story, a violation of the Times’ (and most newspapers’) reporting policy.
Even the Times’ own staff noted that under Executive Editor Dean Baquet, the paper appeared to have dropped any attempt at presenting the Republican nominee in any kind of fair light. Media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote in August that Times reporters considered Trump “an abnormal and potentially dangerous candidate” that justified the paper’s distorted views of him.
At many points, the paper’s news articles about the race virtually amounted to yellow journalism. Baquet later said that Rutenberg “nailed” the Times’ policy; that Trump so threatened democracy itself that the struggle for objectivity could be ignored. “I think Trump has ended that struggle,” he declared, and he said it was OK because Trump had “challenged our language [of fairness].”
However, now that the race has played itself out and Clinton has lost, the Times has wound up with egg on its face.
In a “news analysis” written by the above-mentioned Rutenberg published in the wake of the race’s result, the columnist writes, “if the news media failed to present a reality-based political scenario, then it failed in performing its most fundamental function.”
Rutenberg goes on to blame the unpredicted result on “polling,” rather than a failure of the paper to steer more of the electorate to Ms. Clinton. Regarding Election Night, he quotes a Republican strategist, Mike Murphy, who said on MSNBC at the time, “Tonight, data died.”
Simultaneously, Rutenberg does admit that “something [is] fundamentally broken in journalism, which has been unable to keep up with the anti-establishment mood that is turning the world upside down.” He quotes the writer Rod Dreher, who wrote of Trump’s win that many journalists were blinded by their own “bigotry against conservative religion, bigotry against rural folks, and bigotry against working class and poor white people.”
Rutenberg vowed that in the future, “whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.”
With so much of its outstanding reputation for fairness and objectivity in tatters, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. took the extraordinary step of sending a letter to the paper’s subscribers in order to stem a tide of departing readers and advertisers, who are canceling both subscriptions and ad commitments and heading for the exits following the newspaper’s clearly biased coverage.
Sulzberger asked rhetorically, “Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” Sulzberger went on to write that the Times would “striv[e] always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you” and that the paper’s writers would “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor.”
Of course, had the paper not so obviously not only chosen its horse in the race but tried to ride it to victory in service of an Establishment that patently pulls its strings, Sulzberger would not have needed to issue an apology at all.
