Meanwhile, Kahn and Baquet appear to be aligned on some of the most pressing issues capturing the mind-space of Times employees and the paper’s many critics on social media.
TO BE FAIR, IT’S THE NEW YORK TIMES IN 2022, SO I’M NOT EXPECTING MUCH OF ANYTHING: Joe Kahn is now editing the New York Times. Don’t expect a revolution.
Both men are down on “labels as a shortcut to reporting,” as Kahn put it; he’s resistant to the increasingly loud calls to characterize certain public figures in terms such as “racist” unless the paper has “unambiguous evidence” to back that up. He cited, for example, the deep reporting behind a recent three-part series on Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which included the assertion that “Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news*.” (Carlson’s top producer responded that his show “embraces diversity of thought and presents various points of view in an industry where contrarian thought and the search for truth are often ignored.”)
“I don’t know that we should be known as a place that casually or quickly throws around inflammatory labels based on a kind of quick analysis or a quick guess as to how something fits into other people’s belief system,” Kahn said. “We felt like there was a lot of loose discussion about the role that Tucker Carlson as a pundit was playing in the dialogue in American life. But we felt that we had a real opportunity to slow that down and look at it in more detail.”
He also shares Baquet’s strong belief that Times journalists need to de-prioritize Twitter. Part of that is an exhortation to spend less time sending tweets; but a bigger concern is that too many journalist have come to see the Twitter audience as a proxy for the public. Increasingly, he fretted, some Times journalists “don’t even want to engage in certain kinds of stories because they anticipate the reaction that they’ll get from writing on, reporting on, a story that tends to be a lightning-rod type issue on Twitter.”
In accordance with the prophecy:
* Great moments in projection.