The New York Times Is Not the Center of the Universe
Way too much attention is paid to influencing the coverage of one elite outlet
Last week was “open letter week”. 2 splashy open letters were sent to the New York Times, publicly, on the same day. An executive at the union that represents Times journalists followed up with its own public letter. The Times responded twice, first to the 2 open letters, and then to the union executive’s open letter, with letters of its own, which were also turned over to the press and publicized. Everyone at the Times was washing its dirty linen in public.
A lot has been written (including by me) about the substance of this dispute, which involves the Times’ coverage of youth gender transition issues. But it seems to me that there’s a broader point about this whole dispute that underlies a lot of really dumb discourse, and that is, way too many people think that their positions on public policy, journalism, or culture issues will prevail if they just get the New York Times to act differently. And that view is, to put it mildly, crazy.
Go on Twitter at any time and you will find people criticizing the Times. Conservatives say it is a liberal rag; liberals counter that in fact it perpetuates conservative norms. Everyone is always doing things like counting up the number of times something appeared on the Times front page as a measure of the Times supposed bias. Many of the big media criticism outlets (especially the late Eric Boehlert’s) are basically dedicated to the Times and what it supposedly is getting wrong.
People blame the Times for the Iraq War (Judith Miller’s bad reporting on WMD’s), and the election of Trump (too much coverage of Hillary’s e-mails and not enough coverage of the Access Hollywood tape). Heck, people even go back and fault the Times’ coverage of Hitler and Stalin before World War II. It’s an obsession.
Here’s the dirty little secret, though: the Times doesn’t have that much power. The Times has about 10 million readers- a million people or so still subscribe to the print edition, between 7 and 8 million people subscribe digitally, and another million or so defeat the paywall in various ways to read Times stories. It should be noted that by historic standards, this is a lot— urban newspapers in the “golden age” of print journalism did not achieve anywhere near these numbers. But still, let’s put this in perspective— there were almost 260 million adults counted in the 2020 census. That means for every one adult in America who reads the Times, there are 25 that don’t.
Here’s a direct comparison: 20 million Americans watch the network nightly news every night. These are the most old school of television news programs, the programs that used to be hosted by Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw. Even in 2023, with all the digital media, a legacy product has twice a broad a reach as the Times.
And here’s the thing— nobody does media bias stories about the nightly network news. Seriously. When’s the last time you saw any sort of analysis of what stories are covered by Norah O’Donnell’s nightly newscast and how much broadcast time she was giving to various hotbutton stories that ideologues get upset about? Heck, did you even know that Norah O’Donnell was the anchor of the CBS Evening News, occupying the chair made famous by Murrow, Cronkite, and Rather?
Well, but you might say, doesn’t the Times have a broader reach because people share Times stories? Well, maybe, but the big player in story sharing is Facebook, not the Times. And algorithms will direct you to any story it thinks you are interested in. How many times have you clicked on something and discovered it was from some click-baity publication you never heard of? If any thing, sharing dilutes the Times’ influence, because people are reading and viewing stuff from outlets which never would have reached them in the past.
One might also argue that the Times has reach because its stories are distributed over wire services to other papers. Again, true enough, but the big wire services are AP, Reuters, and AFP, who send out far more stories to far more outlets for publication than the Times does. How many times have you ever seen media bias takes that analyze the bias in what the Associated Press is sending out over the wires?
Finally, one might argue that other journalists at other publications read the Times. Some surely do. But, again, it’s not like they don’t see anything else in this algorithm driven world.
What’s really going on is that people are conflating their own desire as to what stories they would like to read in the Times with some nefarious influence that the Times has over the world. Take, for instance, the common liberal complaint that the Times swung the 2016 election for Trump by pivoting from the Access Hollywood tape back to the Clinton e-mail story after FBI Director James Comey announced he was reopening his investigation. Working class swing voters in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin don’t read the Times. It wasn’t those e-mail stories in the Times that caused them to shift their votes. But what is true is a lot of partisan Democrats read the Times and a month before the election what they wanted to be doing was reveling in how bad Trump looked in the Access Hollywood tape, not reading about the re-opening of the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation. They didn’t want the paper that they read devoting so much coverage to a story they didn’t like.
And that gets us back to those open letters. Whatever you think of the issue of youth gender transition, the debates over this issue are occurring in red states where conservative voters and politicians are pushing for various restrictions, some of them Draconian, on youth transition. These people are watching Fox News, not reading the Times. (Yes, a couple of them have cited one of the stories from the Times in their public arguments. But I’m sorry, nobody seriously believes that these people were just fine with trans folk until they read a very carefully worded Emily Bazelon piece about youth transition.) The Times’ coverage of trans issues is simply not what is causing this backlash.
But the Times’ coverage of trans issues is extremely upsetting to liberals and lefties who read the Times and want to read their party line about how there are few problems with youth transition and the only issue anyone should be concerned about is bigoted backlash against trans people. So it was relatively easy for GLAAD and Human Rights Campaign and the other sponsoring organizations to corral a bunch of these people and draft up a couple of open letters.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter what the Times publishes. The right wing does not need the Times to push back against trans people whom they don’t like; similarly, the viability of the trans cause among more left institutions is going to depend much more on the sort of data that caused Scandinavian countries and the UK to curtail youth transition (which they did before the New York Times started writing about these issues in a critical way). What the Times publishes is simply not the driver of this issue.
The Times is important to elites because they read it. It is not some larger cultural force.