The many ways The New York Times and corporate media are broken

I spoke with longtime journalist, media critic, and educator Jeff Jarvis about the origins of the problem, what needs to happen and much more. (audio embedded.)

Geoff Livingston

Last week, Jeff Jarvis, author, journalist, media analyst, and former columnist who’s written about the press for many years—often on his blog The Buzz Machine—and who is on the faculty of the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism, spoke with me on my SiriusXM program.

He’d just published a piece, The Times is Broken, after the Politico story about the Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s anger at Joe Biden for not giving the paper an interview. The backdrop of course is the Times coverage of the 2024 election, which has been criticized by media critics and alarmed many of us because of the “both sides” approach, the obsession with the president’s age, the pass given to Trump and so much more.

This was before the most recent controversy, in which the executive editor Joe Kahn gave an interview earlier this week to Ben Smith of Semafor, in which he said some pretty stunning things, including that the Times should be covering the election based on the issues that are popular in polls. The backlash on social media has been fierce. (I’ll be speaking with Jamison Foser of Finding Gravity about that and much more in our online Zoom decision this weekend for paid subscribers.)

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The Semafor interview only confirmed much of what I discussed with Jeff Jarvis, who brought a lot of media history to the conversation. You can listen to our discussion here. There is also a transcript below, edited for space and clarity.

Michelangelo Signorile: Joining me right now is Jeff Jarvis, a longtime journalist and analyst. He is a professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, the Leonard Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation and director of the Tow Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, has advised many media companies as well and done a lot of public speaking, and he does a lot of commentary on social media. Jeff Jarvis, welcome to the program.

JJ: I am so happy to have this invitation. I've been hoping for it for years now. Been a fan of yours. Thank you for having me.

MS: Oh, and I've been a fan of yours too. And we cross on social media. And yes, it is long overdue that you are here.

We spoke about Howard Stern's interview with President Biden last Friday. And of course, it came on the same week that this story blew up in Politico about the relationship between The New York Times and President Biden, and how The New York Times was angry that the president didn't give him an interview. And then by the end of the week, he goes on Howard Stern. How beautiful was that? And tell me your thoughts on how that played out.

JJ: It was magnificent. Yeah. I'd like to start where you left off in the last segment. I'm a Howard fan, have been for years. I'm mad at myself that I forgot to set my alarm that morning to call in and praise him for that interview. It was, as you said, amazing. It was like no interview we would have seen in the New York Times or any political journalist. It was warm and charming and incisive, and informative. 

And the fact that Howard started, as is his want, having been in therapy for years himself, with Biden’s father was so insightful and so smart to set him at ease to get him to talk about that. And I think we got a better view of Joe Biden's character and soul than I have seen in any media coverage of him, ever. And so for Howard to have done that interview, to sit down for more than an hour, um, yes, there was some news out of it. Yes, sure, “I'll debate Trump.” That's what the news people went with. But the story was much bigger than that. It was about Joe Biden being smart and decent and with it. 

And the other story is “take that, A.G. Sulzberger [publisher of The New York Times].” When Politico said that an unnamed journalist was quoted as saying this, and of course they were going to deny it, but said that Biden won't give interviews to the Times and A.G. Sulzberger thinks of this as his birthright, that he should be able to interview presidents. And the unnamed journalist said that A.G. at least nods approvingly at all of the bad coverage of Biden's age.

 Well, that is just absolutely appalling. And rather than taking this as a moment for self-reflection, which I laugh about, they came out hours later with a statement pillorying Biden again.

And,I just think that the Times has been broken for some time. We've known it. We both commented on it, but the time has come for me to just say it out loud. And I have criticized the Times in recent years because they deserve it. Number one. Number two, because I want them to be better. Because they are the biggest and were the best that we had. “But her emails” to “but his birthday.”

And The Washington Post I'm afraid is going downhill since Marty Baron left and its current editor, Sally Buzbee, is bringing her Associated Press voice-from-nowhere anodyne sensibility to it. The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who's the single most malign influence in the democracy in the English speaking world. 

Most of our newspapers are now owned by hedge funds, most of our chains. And so I think it's time, and I don't say this with any joy or satisfaction. It is time to give up on the large legacy news industry. They are out there cloaking themselves in sacred rhetoric, how they must be saved. They're lobbying Congress and states across the country, which as a journalist I find horribly offensive, that they're seeking favors from those they should be covering—that they’re not doing a good job of covering. The  state of political discussion and public discourse is awful, and they don't take responsibility for it. 

So I think we're at the point where we need to move past them.

MS: That's a big statement and it's big from you. And I want to talk about it for a bit, but I first want to go back to just what you were talking about, the interview with Howard Stern, with regard to how he had really hit on  so much that others have not  gotten to with President Biden in terms of eliciting information and stories. And the way that they respond to it— the New York Times and others in the media—was to say no new ground was broken. I mean, it was like, okay, yeah, maybe you heard the story before about his mother saying she was going to rip the nun's habit off. But it wasn't about that, right? 

That wasn't what was groundbreaking about the interview. They just don't get it.

JJ: They do not get it. It was a window into the man's character. And in a time when the other guy has a distinctly evil character, Biden's character matters. That is the choice that we really have is: who's in charge of the country, who's going to make decisions on our behalf. And that matters more than any little detail. But you're right. Big old media thinks that they judge themselves on what scoop they get when scoops now have the half life of a click.

MS: Right? And and he sat there for over an hour, lucid and sharp and quick. And there was no issue with regard to his not being able to do the interview, or mental decline, while Donald Trump was sleeping in court.

 Now, you said it's time that we not rely on big media. You have been somebody who has worked in it and and certainly taught people about journalism and good journalism for many years and certainly have a lot of respect for a lot of journalists. And you have gotten—I mean, the piece you wrote, you said, I have to finally say it, the Times is broken—but you've also gotten much more pointed on social media as well. I have noticed, and you can tell me if I'm correct about that. I love it because you're just going for it and you're rewriting those headlines that the Times puts out or the spin that they put out in the story, and saying, no, this is the story. Talk a little bit about that.

JJ: Let's be clear here—at the New York Times, at the Washington Post, even at the Wall Street Journal, there are some amazing journalists doing great work. Lydia Polgreen’s column on the Columbia protests.

MS:  Yes, brilliant.

JJ: Yes. Jamelle Bouie is brilliant and they come from the opinion side, and I hate much of the opinion side. But there's great journalism that goes on there. David Fahrenthold, we can go on. Right. But I think they're being betrayed by their institution and it’s especially true on headlines. I don't get the print paper anymore, but there are headlines online that have spins, one word perspectives. It gives lie to the idea that they are independent. And I think what we saw happen at the same time as  [executive editor] Joe Kahn gave a talk at INMA [World Congress of News Media], which is an industry conference, and one of the attendees quoted him bragging about how The Times makes people unhappy all the time. 

And my friend Jay Rosen at New York University wrote about this nine years ago, where he noted something very important, which was that when the primary support of the Times passed from advertising to subscribers. He started to see a change in the attitude of the newsroom, and the newsroom wants to say that they're independent politicians. They're not. Not that they want access to them. They lobby for laws from them.

Not that they're independent from Trump. They want to prove that they're being fair to him. The weird thing is that they want to be independent from their own readers. They want to say, oh, we’re not liberal like our readers, and we're not in their thrall, even though they pay the bills. And we're going to prove that by regularly pissing them off.

And that sounds infantile and rather ridiculous, but I think that's what's happening here. And it yields bad journalism, really terrible journalism and bad impact. I mean, again, we have to go back to “her emails” and what happened with Hillary Clinton. And I think the Times lost that election to Donald Trump and never, never has really taken responsibility for that. And that's what bothers me most, is that there is no self-reflection here.

MS: Right. And we've seen that, of course, in times past, their coverage of the Iraq war. Lots of criticism, but at least in those times, there was a decision to audit themselves and look at what they did and admit they did wrong. Now that we don't even get that.

JJ: No. And there are other things going on, too. I've become a great fan of the late James Carey, who was a Columbia University professor of journalism, and Carey writes about how opinion polls preempt the public conversation they are intended to measure. And I think that that becomes a model for what's happening here by what questions the pollster asks, by what stories the Times and other papers decide to assign, by how they are written and by how they are presented with their headlines. You see their worldview, and to not admit that is ridiculous. And I think in the Post as I mentioned,  I read Marty Baron's memoir recently, that was what really struck.

MS: Executive editor at the Post.

Speaker3: Thank you. Sorry. Yes.

JJ:  He lamented that his readership, his conservative readership, in the 2018 Post was single digits and the very or somewhat liberal was 80%. 

Well, as far as I'm concerned, that would be wonderful. You know who your community are, right? Serve them. 

But instead it’s: resist them. Try to act like we serve everybody. Which is a myth of mass media. And mass media is dying. And, the idea that we can serve everybody all the same. I wrote a book called The Gutenberg Parenthesis, in which I looked back at the history of news and media all the way back to Gutenberg. And what struck me was that before the mechanization and industrialization of print, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the United States was 4000. At the turn of the 1900s, New York had scores of newspapers.

And there were different perspectives and different communities and different voices in the cacophonous democracy. And mass media, mainly from television on, gave us this myth of the shared national experience. Walter Cronkite saying, “And that's the way it is,” when for many, many Americans, it was not the way it was. 

If you were Black or Latino or gay or an immigrant, it was not your America. But there's this belief that lives on in journalism that somehow we have this godlike perspective on the world and that we are different from you, and we're going to give you that perspective as if we're not human. And I'm fed up with that. 

I'm leaving CUNY [City University of New York] at the end of the year. But I'm very proud that at CUNY, I started a degree with my colleague Carrie Brown in engagement journalism, where we don't start with our agenda, we don't start with our story ideas. We start by listening to communities. And I think we've got to shift journalism to that smaller human scale. Again.

MS: What you were saying about New York going back and all of the different publications. I mean, in Europe, that model still works to a degree, no? .

Yes. Because there's national [government-funded] media there. So if you go to the Germany market, which I'm fairly familiar with, you can read, Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the left and the and the Frankfurter Allgemeine and, um, Springer on the right. 

And you can triangulate and you have different voices and perspective. It's also more of a reading culture than we are now. But that's just not the case here, because the country was too big. And so the nature of it was simply that when you were the Chicago Tribune, which I worked for in the beginning of my career, you covered the world to as far as the train would take your papers every day. And you needed to bring the world to all those people because there was no internet. 

Well, that's all obsolete now. It's all gone now, I can click on the Guardian every day. I can click on Die Zeit every day, and I can see the world where it is. And that's a wonderful thing. I can also hear voices. And one of my theories— I'm curious what you think of this—is that what we're undergoing now with the death of mass media in that voices of communities that were always there but not heard now finally have their stage, now finally can be heard because they were ignored by mass media. And that's what old media and old white men all resent because they controlled speech. Right. So my theory is that the Black Lives Matter was the Reformation brought on by the internet, and January 6th was the counter-Reformation. And we're going to see that fought out in ugly terms. And so journalism should be there to help us indeed preserve democracy. But it's not doing that.

MS: And in that sense, there have been those who've said, well, with all of these newsletters now and Substack, and this, this and this, and podcasts, it's not good because people are siloed. But actually, it is getting back to what you're saying: a lot of different forums. And that's what The New York Times doesn't like.

JJ: Exactly, precisely. They want to be the news for all. And, uh, sorry for the plug here, but I wrote another little book about magazines, and I go back to what happened when the steam-powered press came in and we moved past 4000 circulation newspapers. We got tons more content. There was an explosion of more content. 

And Harper's Magazine in 1850 when it started, said, “somebody’s got to find the good stuff.” That was their first mission, to be curatorial. And I want to see that happen now because all these voices are out there. Is there more chaff? Yes, but there's also more wheat among it. And whether it's blogs or newsletters or social media or YouTube or TikTok, may it please stay alive. Communities who were not heard in old white mass media are there. And what we need is new services to find authoritative, artistic, smart, experienced voices because they're there.

MS: It's so important and it's so important for us to have this conversation and talk about it in this way, because I think people don't really understand the moment that we're in, and you bring the history to it. In this conversation alone, you brought that history to it that I think really gives people something to grab onto. I really appreciate that.

JJ: Thank you so much. I think that that I learned a great deal trying to look back. And one thing it does is. it takes away the moral panic and the hubris of the present tense— that what we're going through now, no one's ever gone through before. Well, for God's sakes, there was a civil war in this country, and there was a World War II in the world. And people went through a lot of stuff and they figured it out. And if we can give ourselves half a chance, we'll figure it out, too. But unfortunately, the journalism of today is not helping.

MS: This has been such a great discussion. I'm so glad we had a chance to have this. And I hope you'll come back as we move forward.