(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Joe Kahn, the executive editor for the New York Times, admitted in a candid interview that the newspaper unilaterally backed now-President Joe Biden in its coverage leading up to the 2020 election but would take a more neutral approach in 2024, Semafor reported.
Calling the press “another pillar of democracy” whose role is to provide “impartial information to help people vote,” Kahn promised to become more impartial in tone, and claimed that Biden and his campaign team were going to have to figure things out on their own.
“It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening,” he argued of a potential Trump presidency. According to the editor, “it’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.”
He even went so far as to suggest that he did not want the Times to become “an instrument of the Biden campaign,” which virtually describes the newspaper’s function for the better part of the last four years.
When asked what he believes a casual Times reader might think about the current state of affairs, Kahn admitted to media bias surrounding Biden, particularly regarding the nation’s foreign policy under his watch. The bias, he claimed, was an attempt to counter common misconceptions about Biden’s handling of foreign affairs.
The pro-Biden coverage appears to have gone hand-in-hand with anti-Trump coverage. Kahn went as far as to agree that the relentless assault on Trump “went too far,” calling it “overly simplistic” and one of the “excesses of that period.”
Still, he excused himself and his colleagues, suggesting that they fell prey to “a period of peak cultural angst at this organization, with the combination of the intensity of the Trump era, COVID, and then George Floyd,” concluding that “we still did good journalism through that moment.”
The rhetoric marks a dramatic shift from the newsroom’s declarations under former Executive Editor Dean Baquet in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election that it intended to actively cast aside objectivity in order to aggressively fact check him.
That effectively cast off the last vestigies of plausible deniability that the Times might have laid claim to being a serious objective newsroom. It has since pushed several abjectly false stories, for which it has never fully corrected the record or accepted accountability.
It notoriously hit rock bottom when its newsroom revolted and demanded the firing of its editorial page editor for daring to run an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
The paper has clashed with the Biden administration several time recently as the president accused the Grey Lady of not making its coverage of him favorable enough while blaming the media for his poor poll numbers.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
