During my career, I have worked at the editorial pages of two different daily newspapers. Writing unsigned editorials in the voice of the institution is a tough gig. For one thing, your credibility rests on remaining consistent in your judgment. If it was bad when Democrats did it, it still bad when Republicans do it. For another, any and all errors are understandably seized upon.
My sympathy notwithstanding, I have to ask a pointed question: Why are the staff editorials in The New York Times so bad? This is not an ideological criticism (
I’ve offered those before). I am talking about the basic errors and blatant flip-flopping.
Take the editorial on the raid of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer. After President Trump tweeted his objection to the raid, Times opined, “One might ask, if this is all a big witch hunt and Mr. Trump has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why does he care about the [attorney-client] privilege in the first place? The answer, of course, is that he has a lot to hide.”
Whether or not Cohen (and by extension Trump) is guilty of anything here is irrelevant. The editorial suggests that we ignore any concerns about rights and due process—that is a heck of an argument. Especially since in the last administration, the editorial page explicitly labeled congressional investigations into why four Americans were killed in Benghazi, the IRS’s own admission it improperly targeted conservative organizations, and Planned Parenthood’s demonstrable brokering of fetal body parts “witch hunts.”
It’s also noteworthy that this raid on Cohen, while it may yet prove justified legally and otherwise, is criminal referral about a potential FEC violations, which came from from the Mueller investigation, which is primarily about “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” The Times has been cheering this along quite a bit, on the pretext that Russia is a bad actor America should be afraid of. But when Mitt Romney dramatically raised the spectre of Russia being a threat to the U.S. in way that threatened the re-election of Barack Obama, the Times said Romney’s comments “display either a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics. Either way, they are reckless and unworthy of a major presidential contender.” (And I don’t think I need to even look-up the editorials from the 90s about how special prosecutors veering from their mandates to investigate a president’s unrelated crimes is to be abhorred. I’m sure it’s a goldmine of contradictions between then and now.)
But these kinds of brazen, politically driven double standards have become a regular feature at the Times. Here is the New York Times editorial board from April of 2014, “Terror Watch Lists Run Amok:
Now here’s the Times editorial page, a year later, attacking Republicans for saying the “vastly overbroad” terror watch list where one out of every two people on the list is wrongly included shouldn’t be used to deny Americans fundamental rights without due process:
Here’s another fine example. In 2006, the Times was incensed by President Bush’s ongoing use of recess appointments to staff up his administration:
Now concern about excessive use of recess appointments to avoid congressional confirmation is a perfectly valid concern. Except, of course, when the president is a Democrat. After President Obama had nominees to the National Labor Relations Board and the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau jammed up, the GOP held pro-forma meetings in the Senate to keep it from technically being in recess, expressly so Obama couldn’t make recess appointments. (Note Democratic senate majority leader Harry Reid employed the exact same tactic successfully in the Bush administration.) Obama made his “recess” appointments anyway, and the GOP felt justified in stopping him in part because Obama had previously recess appointed Craig Becker to the NLRB, a union lawyer who had already received a confirmation hearing in the Senate and was rejected in a bipartisan vote for being too radical. A federal appeals court later invalidated Obama’s recess appointments. The Times editorial board responded, with an editorial headlined,
“A Court Upholds Republican Chicanery”:
Well, speaking of courts upholding Republican chicanery, it should be noted that the Supreme Court upheld the decision invalidation Obama’s recess appointments by a vote of 9-0, which makes the Times’s argument look misguided and petty.
But I’ve saved perhaps the most egregious Times flip-flop for last. Here’s a May 29, 2011 editorial on states resisting federal immigration enforcement efforts, an issue that is awfully relevant at the moment:
Sure, that’s one opinion. But eight days later, on June 7, the Times ran this editorial:
OK, so the Times’s editorials don’t appear to be terribly principled. But then there’s the issue that they make lots of egregious errors that run in one direction. Last year, when there was an assassination on a Republican congressional representatives at a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, the Times editorial page tried to excuse the shooter’s political motivations this way:
It was honestly baffling that the Times could suggest this, other than some sort of fantastical obsession with discrediting the right, because Jared Lee Loughner was a severely mentally ill man who thought grammar was a conspiracy and there’s no evidence he ever saw Palin’s map (and even if he did, metaphorically “targeting” Democrats for electoral defeat is not a call to violence). There was quite a kerfuffle at the time over media outlets baselessly suggesting a connection to Palin. And when the times made this error last year, even a number of liberal pundits were rightfully appalled.
Anyway, it’s not as if there are consequences for the Times editorial page when they screw-up. Perhaps the Times’s editorial page’s most celebrated moment in recent years is this:
You’d think that publishing a front page editorial with major mistakes and contradicting the paper’s previous position on due process rights would be an embarrassment. But a little over four months later, the Times was a finalist for a Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. The Pulitzer committee specifically cited their “editorials that focused on the human cost of gun violence to argue powerfully for the nation’s need to address the issue.”
And of course, these are all just editorial examples I can recall from the Times’s pages over the last decade or so. Plenty more examples of hypocrisy and errors abound, but I point the mistakes out, in this case not to humiliate the paper. Maybe it seems disingenuous for a regular critic who openly disagrees with the paper’s political bent to be saying this, I generally think that the liberal paper of record could do a great service to public discourse if they made the strongest—and most accurate —arguments possible in its institutional voice. I hardly expect to agree with the Times’s editorial page—but I do expect them to try a lot harder than they have been.
