The New York Times Political Section Cares More about its Brand than Journalism
Leaders at the NYT can delude themselves all they want, but in the end their consistently shoddy reporting proves their ideals
One of the most enduring lessons I learned as a media critic for Paste Magazine is how unserious so many of our Very Serious journalistic institutions are. They claim to relish open debate and virtue signal how open they are to challenging ideas, but every time you actually challenge their ideas, they react with ad hominem and retreat to stale talking points that sound like they were written in a McKinsey conference room. As is typical for a lot of New York Times political “journalism,” they have authored a lot of sloppy and inaccurate articles that quote political activists while painting them as some normal concerned parent (I caught CNN doing something similar for a Bernie Sanders Town Hall in 2019), and their coverage of trans issues has followed this trend.
Yesterday, GLAAD and a litany of New York Times contributors wrote an open letter to the Times, thoughtfully and specifically addressing their critiques of the Times’ coverage on trans issues. It began with an acknowledgement that there is some good work being done, and not everything the Times publishes on transgender issues is reactionary bilge.
Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly. Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front-page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.
They continued, making specific critiques of the NYT’s coverage.
For example, Emily Bazelon’s article “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” uncritically used the term “patient zero” to refer to a trans child seeking gender-affirming care, a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared. Bazelon quoted multiple expert sources who have since expressed regret over their work’s misrepresentation. Another source, Grace Lidinksy-Smith, was identified as an individual person speaking about a personal choice to detransition, rather than the President of GCCAN, an activist organization that pushes junk science and partners with explicitly anti-trans hate groups.
If the New York Times was the thoughtful journalistic organization they fancy themselves to be, they would have at the very least addressed the specific criticisims raised in the letter. But because they are a reactionary organization more concerned about protecting their unearned reputation as sole guardians of The Truth™, they pumped out a defense that did nothing to address the specific concerns and was solely about brand management. Here it is in full.
We recieved the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD and the co-signers of the letter see our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’ journalistic mission are different.
As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
The very news stories criticized in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society — to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we’re proud of it.
So there you have it, GLAAD cites a specific instance where the Times did some really shoddy reporting in misrepresenting an activist as a normal person, and the Times said that they are proud of that reporting. You can’t get a better example of who the New York Times is in a nutshell than that. They don’t really care about doing good political journalism, they care far more about branding their work as good journalism.
Everyone who has ever done media critiques knows that the politics section at the Times is one of the worst mainstream sources to find political news. There is far better political coverage in pretty much every other section at the NYT. The reason why is because the Times political section is an ideological actor, and they hire people who fit their rigid ideology. They believe in the stupid person’s fallacy that if everyone is yelling at you for doing a bad job, that means you’re doing a good job, while the other sections simply just hire people who are good journalists. The Times political and op-ed sections target dullard centrists who have never had an original thought in their lives and reactionary conservatives posing as free-thinking centrists because they believe their goal is to challenge the assumptions of its mostly liberal audience. If they were truly concerned about providing balanced coverage, they would have at least one trans writer on staff instead of an army of Brett Stephens wannabes (and ex-wives) covering this issue.
In theory it’s a good thing to hire writers who challenge conventional thinking. Everyone has ideological blind spots, and it’s good to challenge people on their conventional beliefs, but the Times consistently fails to publish challenges to conventional thinking from the left at the same pace they publish challenges from the center or the right. This is surely due to the fact that the left has become exponentially more powerful since 2016, as we have launched a nationwide campaign to challenge long-held American beliefs, and stewards of The Truth™ like the Times have not taken kindly to having their authority challenged. They believe they are the only ones who should be changing people’s thinking (which when they do it is journalism), but anyone else who does it is “an activist.”
But the NYT is very clearly an activist too. While it is very difficult to gain concrete statistics on the number of transgender people in America due to a litany of cultural constraints around the topic, Pew has found that 5% of young adults say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth. A study by the Williams Institute estimated that 0.5% of the American adult population identifies as transgender. Given the amount of coverage The Times has dedicated to this issue—on average a little less than a staggering 2,000 front page words per month—one would assume those figures would be 100 times higher. The Times is treating this as a national emergency, and given the amount of space they have given to outright bigots, it’s clear that they view this as yet another topic where they believe their role to be trolling their liberal readership before informing them.
I’ve written plenty before about how mainstream political media isn’t journalism, and the Times’ obsession with platforming anti-trans voices is just another example of how they view their role as a branding exercise more than as thoughtful journalists.
Political journalism has never been more widely distrusted, and while some of this dynamic is related to consumers demanding more and more ideological content, most of it is because mainstream political journalists believe their job is to antagonize their readers. This arrogant attitude that they know better creates a kind of coverage that is patronizing, filled with centrist and right-wing blind spots and bereft of real critical thinking. The goal of most mainstream political journalism is not to inform, but to challenge, and whether or not those challenges are substantive is secondary to whether or not they make their readership mad and brand their writers as brave contrarian truth tellers in an age of cancellation.
Part of this dynamic is likely attributed to the cynical business model of online publishing, where a take that makes people mad is about 100x likelier to spread far and wide than one that makes them think, but political actors like the NYT have helped to create these conditions through their arrogance. They firmly believe they are the sole purveyors of The Truth™ (if you don’t believe me, ask any one of the hundreds of journalists who have had their reporting flat-out stolen from them without attribution by the NYT), which allows them to reverse engineer any argument to justify their shoddy coverage. As this dynamic has advanced over time, their coverage has gotten worse while their arrogance has grown. Outlets like the New York Times are ideological actors who believe in trolling their readership before informing them, and we should treat them the way their coverage suggests they should be treated, and not as the Very Serious journalists they so desperately want to brand themselves as without putting in the work to actually earn that reputation.