Excellent Reads

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Are you tired of clickbait and the current state of journalism? This community is meant to remind you that excellent journalism still happens. While not sticking to a specific topic, the focus will be on high-quality articles and discussion around their topics.

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109

When the New York Times lost its way: America’s media should do more to equip readers to think for themselves (www.economist.com)

submitted 4 months ago by awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/longreads@sh.itjust.works

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This was a really interesting read about the growing polarisation in media and the US.

Like me, Baquet seemed taken aback by the criticism that Times readers shouldn’t hear what Cotton had to say. Cotton had a lot of influence with the White House, Baquet noted, and he could well be making his argument directly to the president, Donald Trump. Readers should know about it. Cotton was also a possible future contender for the White House himself, Baquet added. And, besides, Cotton was far from alone: lots of Americans agreed with him—most of them, according to some polls. “Are we truly so precious?” Baquet asked again, with a note of wonder and frustration.

The answer, it turned out, was yes. Less than three days later, on Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation. I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.

Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/JxGro

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[–] awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Think you've put it pretty well there! I do think Bennet wants #2 though. He draws a clear line between op-eds and factual news, and was pretty clear that the latter should be evidence-based.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yeah, agreed. I oversimplified a little, in that in the supposed ideal, you have a news section which is "objective" and an editorial section which is "both sides" and they work in very different ways, and to me that's a pretty good system when it's working well. I think AG is distorting both sides of it to serve his agenda, in somewhat different ways of course.