Updated October 12, 2024 at 05:00 AM ET
We’ve been talking with people I consider to be the real influencers.
I don’t mean social media influencers, who pick up news stories and amplify them to their different audiences. Such influencers are important; they’re having a big moment in this election. Such people used to be called “opinion leaders,” and smart political candidates would do their best to line them up in every community: pastors, business executives, local newspaper publishers, civic leaders, philanthropists, university professors — anyone voters might know and trust, who would help to inform and shape their opinions.
In 2024, opinion leaders also include people voters feel they know from Instagram or TikTok or a podcast or YouTube. They are today’s influencers.
But behind them somewhere are news organizations that actually gather information — who make the news stories that the influencers repeat, analyze, add to, question, or attack, depending on their politics. I wanted to talk with a few of the people who run those news organizations.
The first conversation was with Joseph Khan, executive editor of The New York Times. It’s appropriate for the Times to come first because it’s probably the most influential news organization in America — and because it has drawn passionate criticism and controversy. Republicans have long cast the Times as liberal, but this year the fiercest critics are on the left.
And some criticism has come from inside the house.
So we went into the Times’ house, or rather its headquarters building in Manhattan, where I sat with Kahn in one of the paper’s podcast studios. This is a long conversation, and we’ve put most of it here — edited lightly for length and clarity — because we think people who follow the media closely will find it of interest. You can also listen by pressing "Play" above.
I'd like to begin by asking how you see yourself and this newspaper in relation to the election. Are you an observer of events? Are you a participant in the events? Are you an influencer? What is the right word?
Yeah, inevitably, the media itself becomes an issue. We're deeply committed, as you know well, to be a nonpartisan source of information. But we're in such a polarized environment that that space to be truly nonpartisan is extremely narrow and contested.
You would accept that a New York Times headline and the accompanying story can drive conversation, can change conversation, potentially change an election at some point.
I think a really well-reported story that people need to pay attention to, and I'm lucky that we still have a lot of those can drive the conversation and help frame the debate. I think we did that in this election cycle very much with the focus on what a second Trump term would look like. The sort of scrutiny of Project 2025 as it emerged actually originated with some really deep New York Times reporting.
Reporting going back to last year, if I’m not mistaken.
Going back to last year. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage really digging deeply, talking to people and allies around former President Trump about what his agenda might look like were he to come back into office. Looking at the judicial system, looking at his immigration policies, looking at his desire to remake the economic system, certainly looking at his relationship with traditional American allies and his view of foreign policy. And then going deep on each of those issues and framing them as sort of the substance agenda of a second Trump term that I think actually did help shape the conversation around those issues.
You said that you felt the space is narrowing for the kind of journalism you want to do. What do you mean by that?
In people's minds, there's very little neutral middle ground. In our mind, it is the ground that we are determined to occupy. And what I mean by neutral middle ground doesn't mean both-sides journalism, because I know that's what some people will think of.
That's a critique on the left that you're trying falsely to treat both sides equally, even though they're not the same.
It's not about implying that both sides have absolutely equal policies on all the issues. It's about providing well-rounded coverage of each of the two political parties and their leading candidates that scrutinize them in a 360 [degree] way, and provide curious readers with all the information they need to know on a wide variety of issues that they care about.
It doesn't mean that there's a one-for-one comparison with the other side. [Looking at] that Project 2025 program, but also looking deeply at Trump's really deeply held now passion for tariffs. Right? What they would do to the American economy, why he believes so deeply in them, why he believes that foreign competition is at the root of America's economic troubles.
I'm thinking of one particular story that we could pluck out of the river of Times coverage, and it had to do with housing in America. It was a fairly recent story, and I paraphrase here, but the story used the word "plan." Harris has a plan for housing. Trump has a plan for housing. And Trump's plan is he's going to deport illegal immigrants and make more room for everybody else. And I thought to myself, that's not actually a plan, that's a slogan. And I'm just trying to describe it accurately. Is that an example where maybe you were trying a little too hard to be fair to each side?
Well, I think what we've tried to do with respect to housing is: Housing is an absolutely major problem. The shortage of affordable housing in the United States is a huge problem, and it's on the minds of a lot of voters. And we basically took it to both campaigns and said, what would you do about this? Concretely, not just talk about it rhetorically, but what are your plans?
And the Harris campaign responded, and we looked at their proposals and what they would do to move the needle on that subject. And we asked the same thing of the Trump people. You're absolutely right. Their response was: We will deport immigrants who are occupying too much housing and free that housing up for American citizens. And I think we frontally pointed out in that piece that there's extremely little evidence that illegal immigrants who would be deported are occupying a significant chunk of housing and would make any difference at all in the affordable housing crisis.
So you would argue: Let's take this plan so-called seriously and look at it and let people decide if they think it makes any sense or not.
Yes, I would. I'd put that in the category, not of twisting his words, but actually having forcing them to respond to a kind of a substantive problem in society and see what they do about it.
There is, as you know very well, a long-standing conservative or Republican critique of The New York Times. But the special passion in criticism of the Times in this election cycle seems to me to be on the left. You're nodding. Why do you think that is?
It's a good question, and I struggle with it often because the left has really high expectations of The New York Times, I think some of them, honestly, distorted.
There's a desire to see one of the leading, journalistic institutions in American life be a full-throated supporter of the view that many on the left have, which is that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our society, and that all of The New York Times coverage should be uniform in emphasizing that point day in and day out. And then we would be playing the role that some on the left see as our proper role.
We don't see that as our proper role, which is not to say that we don't have really aggressive coverage about the threats that Donald Trump and some of the people around him would pose to norms in American society, to the rule of law. He's an election denialist and has a variety of plans in place that would weaken some of the institutions of democracy in American life. We've made that very clear. What we've also made clear is that he has the potential to win the 2024 election, either in the popular vote or in the Electoral College, that a lot of people around the country hear things from Donald Trump that they like, and that makes them very strong supporters of him, that his favorability ratings have actually risen from the time that he ended his presidency, and that he speaks for some of the frustrations and grievances in American life. And we feel we need to reflect those as well, because we need to provide a full, fair and complete picture of the country and its voters. And we're not ourselves voters. What we are is an information source for voters who want good, accurate, fair information about our country.
What did you think about when many people on the left or Democrats turned on this paper's coverage of President Biden's age, particularly after his terrible debate performance in June?
We had extensive scrutiny of The New York Times for covering Biden's age. We were criticized heavily for doing too much coverage about Biden's age and frailty prior to the June debate, and then immediately after the June debate. And then there was a series of criticisms from the other side, which was that we covered up Biden's age and frailty.
That was fairly vociferous. That came from the right and to some extent, from the center. So that was a case where we got it pretty aggressively from both sides. A lot of pushback from the Biden campaign, a lot of commentary from the left. And then you may remember the Hur report that came out earlier this year—
Sure. Can’t prosecute him because he’s a well-meaning—
[Robert Hur, a special prosecutor, declined to prosecute the president over his handling of classified documents, partly because a jury would have perceived him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”]
—That line and the scrutiny that we had around Biden and his handling of that, including a press conference that night, became a major source of concern on the left that The New York Times was single mindedly trying to undermine him and his viability for re-election and trying to help Donald Trump get re-elected. Of course, we were doing nothing of the sort. We were covering what we should be covering.
My first follow up on that has to do with that theory about The New York Times, that you were trying to help Trump get elected. Do you believe that your coverage of Biden's age was helpful to Trump in the end?
I believe our coverage of Biden's—I mean, I'll answer your question, but I believe that our coverage of Biden's age was an important thing to do, whether or not it ended up being helpful to Donald Trump. It was important for the American people to understand that leading media in the country were paying very close attention to the fitness and the health of the person who is the leader of the country, who has access to the nuclear football.
I think you're saying very carefully, with all the caveats, that while it was not your intent in the coverage, it might have been good for Democrats and bad for Republicans that you focused on this, if you had any influence at all.
Yeah. That's not the way we were seeking to apply our influence. But at the end of the day, for any political party, including the Democrats in this case, facing the reality and the facts often helps make better decisions about your choices, your candidate. Obviously, they still had time to make a change. You could argue that if there was delayed coverage and Biden had another slip, that it would have been too late to make that kind of a change and that it potentially could have been more helpful to the other side. Those thoughts were not the tactical thoughts going through our head. We were covering the news as it emerged.
Some people will know that newspapers from time to time will go on what will be called a crusade. They really believe in an issue and they really pound it. Did you see yourself as crusading on Biden's age?
No, I don't think we saw ourselves as crusading. And I'd make a distinction here, too, between the newsroom of The New York Times [and our] very robust opinion page.
Which openly called for Biden to step aside.
Which openly called for Biden—but they made those decisions independently. That group of people reports directly to the publisher, not to me. I don't control what they say in terms of the institutional opinion of The New York Times or what an individual columnist will say.
But did you say as an editor: This is big, this is now, we really need to be all over this story?
You could not have read that Hur report and seen the aftermath of that, or watched the June debate and not as an editor, you know, have felt that we had an urgent obligation to dig in deeply and figure out what was happening.
We've been talking about outside criticism of the Times. There's also been an amount of reporting about criticism within the Times. How would you describe the cultural divide within this news organization?
You know, I believe actually very deeply that my colleagues share in our sense of mission in this place. And there's very little debate about that, really—the role journalistically that we have to play on the polarizing issues of our time, both here in the United States and around the world, whether it's the Israel-Gaza conflict, whether it's the American election.
These are difficult issues for people personally. But I really do believe that our staff puts the journalism first and believes in the mission of independent journalism, and cares about that, and believes that we have to serve a readership which isn't necessarily just a projection of our own views, but is a larger group of people with a wide variety of views, with curiosity and openness to a variety of perspectives. Of course, there's debate about those individual issues, and there have been times in history where our staff, just like society in general, is motivated or really concerned. I would say that period during the pandemic, at the tail end of the Trump presidency, around the time of the murder of George Floyd, was a particularly charged moment in American life.
Which convulsed this organization.
Which convulsed America. And this organization wasn't exempted from that. But before that, during that and after that, we continue to have a deep commitment to the culture of independent journalism. And I'm really proud of the work that the staff has done and the recommitment to those values.
Have you had to spend time over the past two or three years informing or reminding this staff that has grown in recent years of what the values are as you see them?
Yes, it's one of the most important roles that I can play as editor, that A.G. Sulzberger can play as publisher, is to make sure that we're communicating effectively about our values and norms as an institution. They're what make us special, I think, as a news organization, and you can't take them for granted. Increasingly, we're hiring journalists from many, many different walks of life and skill sets, including many from the audio world, but also many who were trained as coders or designers are coming in with different perspectives, different skill sets. To expect that everybody has already sort of understood our full value system and that they can just go to work and these things will take care of themselves isn't true. We have to continually reinforce them, build that culture, explain to people why we consider it important. Continue to show them how that resonates with readers and how it makes a difference. So, any company has to be responsible for building its own culture.
There was some months ago an internal debate about a Times investigation of sexual abuse on Oct. 7 outside of Gaza, in Israel. And some of that internal criticism was reported outside the company. And I believe you confirmed that you had ordered a leak investigation. Why go to that extent?
Well, the investigation that we ordered was about an extraordinary and unacceptable breach of our journalistic protocol, which was the provision or sharing of information related to a story that was in the process of development, an investigative story that was still being edited.
This was an audio version of the—
This was an audio version of the story that you're referring to. And what was really concerning was just sort of the breach of confidence within the staff. There's a lot of trust that's necessary in the process of doing a sensitive story and being able to share candid comments and pass a document around and say: What do you think of this? And have editors put questions into the text and say: Do you think you've got this yet? You know, maybe you should go back and get more. That's the journalistic process. In this case, that confidence was broken and we felt we needed to look into that breach.
Was it weird, having relied on so many leaks over the years, to be chasing down a leak?
Yeah. You know, I think that it's absolutely true that The New York Times reports on leaks in the outside world. I don't think that's the same thing as saying we don't care about the integrity of our journalistic process and that people should feel free to overhear things about what somebody is working on and go ahead and broadcast that publicly. So I don't think that's at all inconsistent with saying that we report on leaks elsewhere to say that we need some integrity to our journalistic process.
Did you find who was responsible?
We reached some conclusions, but we didn't. You know, we, we, uhhh—
The conclusions haven't leaked, I guess.
The conclusions themselves haven't leaked. And I think we reached an understanding with many of the teams involved that there were some things that we needed to tighten up with respect to that, but we didn't have more to say about that afterwards.
Was somebody disciplined?
We didn't talk about the specific steps that we took afterward. But I do think we had a shared understanding that that kind of thing can't and shouldn't happen again.
Your publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, wrote an op-ed that he submitted to The Washington Post some days ago in which he talked about this organization's thinking about the immediate future and the possibility of a second Trump term. And he disclosed that you've spent several months studying authoritarian countries and the way that the press has been undermined there to prepare for what possibilities there might be here. What is the research that you've done?
Well, we've certainly covered this issue as a news story around the world. And as you said, the publisher devoted a team of people in a significant effort to looking at the ways in which the rule of law, protections for the press, could be worn away by either authoritarian leaders or by populist leaders who rally their supporters against independent media.
And the question was, how do we survive in that environment?
And one of the answers to that is, the publisher made the decision to make it very clear that part of the solution to that is building a strong coalition of people in this country who are determined to maintain freedoms of press as they are in the Constitution. And we shouldn't pretend that they're only vulnerable in a place like Hungary or Turkey, that they are also vulnerable here, unless there's a strong constituency of people who are determined to protect them. That obviously includes but can't be limited to the media itself. It has to include the vast majority of Americans who benefit from having a vigorous and free press. So, building popular support for that is critical.
Given how unpopular the media are, when you ask about them as a blob, “the media,” how are you getting that message across?
You know, I hope we get it across to our readers and our subscribers every day in terms of the role that we play in their lives. You know, I think some of the polling that you see about the unpopularity of the media in general is not quite the same thing as saying that the readers or the, you know, viewers of their preferred media.
People often like their own source.
The generalized antipathy is not the same thing as saying your own source is also unpopular. And I think that people need to understand that their own source is at least as vulnerable as every other source that they don't like, if the system or rule of law that protects the free press in this country were to be weakened.
I bet you get this critique. I have gotten it. People will write—people who are opposed to Donald Trump—and they will say: “Why are you covering the election the way that you are? You should be covering it the way that I say, because if Trump wins, you'll be in jail.”
Yeah, we do hear that. And, you know, I should acknowledge that covering Donald Trump is a challenge. It's a challenge every single day. There are some moments in which we think we need to present Donald Trump in a full, unfiltered way so that people can hear the kinds of things that he's saying in his rallies and saying on Truth Social, his social media site, and not try to put them in kind of fact-checked or, you know, overly contextualized context because people should hear the raw Donald Trump. And then there's criticism on the other side that you're giving him a platform, that you're just allowing him to say whatever he's going to say, steal the agenda. So which way is right? Actually, we struggle with that ourselves, too. I think people do need to hear to some extent the unfiltered Donald Trump, but they also need to have us, you know, provide that kind of factual correction. And we need to be conscious about not just providing Donald Trump with an open mic. That's a real dilemma. I don't think there's any magic formula to doing it. It's just a bunch of journalists talking to each other, looking at the facts every day, trying to decide the best way of conveying all the aspects of the Trump campaign. And, you know, do we always get it right? I don't know if we always get it right. I know that we're always trying our best to serve the broadest possible readership with the best journalism about him that we can.
Would you argue that you ought to cover the election in a straightforward way as you see it, even if it does mean you might end up in jail some time?
Well, I mean, we have devoted a lot of resources to covering what you would broadly refer to as kind of the fragility and the legal system and the fragility of our democracy. I don't consider that to be a partisan issue. I think that is something that we will come at directly. We've put it front and center in our election coverage, both the election integrity issue and where the candidates stand on that. And it's very clear that there's a sharp difference between the candidates on that issue, the ability of the legal system to withstand the kind of retribution that Donald Trump is promising. You know, the resilience in the judicial system, the issue of independence of the Department of Justice and the FBI, which he would like to erode. We've devoted a lot of resources to that. We had a very excellent piece looking at retribution and how it played out through the judicial system in Trump's first term and what he would do differently this time that makes that issue utterly clear. So, I don't think we're standing by while these threats exist. I don't think that's the same thing as saying that we don't also cover all the other issues on voters’ minds. I think we have to do both, and we are doing both.
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