New York Times Book Review Age of Misinformation
When the land's most venerable newspaper establish itself in President Trump's crosshairs, new considerations ensued – and instinct kicked in. *New York Times* media columnist Jim Rutenberg offers this exclusive, backside-the-scenes expect.
In the morning hours of his first Saturday every bit president-elect, and simply days after saying his public posture would modify because "It's dissimilar now,'' Donald J. Trump logged into his Twitter business relationship and posted a message denigrating The New York Times.
"Wow," he wrote. "The @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the 'Trump phenomena.'" In fact, The Times was at the first of what would be the biggest increase in subscriptions in its history. If anything, the "failing" New York Times was declining at declining.
And and then, The Times did something that bankrupt with more than a century of tradition: information technology hit back. Addressing @realDonaldTrump directly, it wrote on its own Twitter account, "fact: surge in new subscriptions, impress & digital, with trends, stops & starts, four X better than normal."
That response came but after urgent, high-level discussions between the paper'southward top editor, Dean Baquet; its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; his deputy (and son), Arthur Gregg Sulzberger; and several other executives at the paper.
They decided to reply to Trump'due south tweet, knowing that doing so might expect similar a violation of the promise Sulzberger's grandfather, Adolph Ochs, fabricated when he bought the newspaper in 1896: "to requite the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved." A public spat with a president was not role of that mandate.
The senior Mr. Sulzberger cautioned the communications team crafting the message that tense morning: "Don't make it an unnecessary pissing friction match with an incoming president." The statement, he told his executives and editors, should be "unproblematic, true, and not ambitious." Post-obit upwards, Arthur Gregg, who took control of the paper at the offset of this twelvemonth, cautioned confronting being "needlessly adversarial," reminding the group, "The facts speak for themselves."
Those five words – the facts speak for themselves – continue to be the driving principle of The Times's coverage in the Trump era, just as they are for its primary competitors. But, as the decision to answer to the president's pre-inaugural slur showed, The Times's longstanding credo now comes with an addendum: the facts speak for themselves, certain, but in the Trumpian "fake news" era, they need robust amplification and a swift defensive if they are to survive.
With Trump'due south tweet, there was more than on the line than the paper's reputation or its stock price. The president was using The Times as an avatar for the news media in general, and, therefore, as a stand-in for the reality-based reporting that, for all its flaws, has provided then much of the factual foundation of America's political discourse for so long.
'All of a sudden, Our Mission Got Really Articulate'
In comparing notes with bosses and colleagues for this piece, I establish that all of u.s.a. can recall precisely where nosotros were when that first post-election Trump tweet hit. (Okay, mine'due south not all that interesting: I was drinking coffee at home in my living room and nearly spit it out when I saw information technology). His bulletin brought us all to the realization that The Times was going to exist in the presidential crosshairs equally never before – along with CNN, The Washington Post, and a rotating cast of others, including The Wall Street Journal, NBC, ABC, and CBS (but never Fox News).
It was 1 matter to come under assault from a candidate, but entirely another to come under attack from a president, a person with ability to control the flow of executive-branch information and the Justice Department, which oversees leak investigations. In the weeks and months that followed the election, the executive branch'southward attacks confronting mainstream, fact-based reporting increased to levels I'd never seen in my career – and I've been at this more than than 25 years now.
For as cynical lot every bit at that place ever was, idealism rushed in.
Simply a funny thing happened within The Times'due south headquarters and in its bureaus throughout the world: an early sense of trepidation was rapidly replaced with a new sense of mission. At that place was palpable excitement over the chance to testify traditional journalism'due south true worth in the face of an assistants that was conspicuously going to use misdirection, misinformation, and barbs against the press every bit governing tools. For as cynical lot as there ever was, idealism rushed in.
It was not every bit if we had a staff meeting to come up to that conclusion. Baquet didn't demand to requite his reporters a pep talk or warn them well-nigh the treachery of a president who calls them dishonest and their reportage fake. As the media columnist, for instance, nobody had to tell me over inaugural weekend that I needed to scrap my column on the death of investigative journalist Wayne Barrett and instead counterbalance in on Sean Spicer's audience size prevarication and Kellyanne Conway's newly coined "alternative facts."
Nobody needed to tell White Firm correspondent Maggie Haberman to dig aggressively into the hard-to-believe machinations inside the W Fly, just every bit nobody needed to tell Justice Department correspondent Michael Schmidt to break news on the Russian federation investigation. Nor did anybody have to enquire any of us to switch to what has effectively become a seven-day workweek.
The staff simply rallied as reporters are programmed to do during big stories. As Baquet told me during an on-stage interview at the S past Southwest Festival last March, "We're preparing for the story of a generation." Baquet likewise said at the time that Trump'south election had helped remind the press of its role – but every bit it was starting to incertitude its identify following the digital upheaval that gave it new competitors online, drained its advertising budgets, and made its leaders scramble (at times, fumble) for new ways to draw audiences. "Of a sudden, our mission got really clear – our mission is what information technology e'er was, ambitious coverage of government," he said.
While the newsroom reaction was mostly either gallows humor or centre-rolls, every now and then the conversation turned to what was lurking in the backs of all of our minds: somebody'due south going to become injure.
Information technology didn't mean everything was smashing, of grade. The president of the United States was regularly rallying his Twitter mob against us. While the newsroom reaction was more often than not either gallows humor or eye-rolls, every now and then the chat turned to what was lurking in the backs of all of our minds: somebody's going to get hurt. "Enemies of the people" personally infuriated me, and I was able to share that fury in a column (too every bit in a conversation with one of the president'southward top aides, who didn't accept much to offer by manner of caption). But Baquet cautioned the straight-news reporting staff to avert taking the bait, lest they give Trump armament to call them "the opposition."
The Best Defense
Baquet was at South by Southwest largely to help promote The Times'southward new television advertising campaign, "Truth is Hard." The spot beginning ran during the Oscars telecast – a rare and (at more $2 meg for the placement) expensive move for a paper that has generally approached advertising with a pinched nose and tight wallet. With a stark white backdrop and black lettering flashing competing claims on truth, it concluded with the tag line, "The Truth is difficult to detect. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more than important at present than always." In part, the newspaper felt compelled to address the president's smears, if non to defend the very concept of a shared version of reality, at a volume equal to that of his Twitter business relationship.
Only the ad was also devised to goose The Times's unexpected success in selling new subscriptions. It appeared to have helped, given that the newspaper hit record increases in paid readership last year (as of the 3rd quarter of 2017, information technology had 3.five million subscribers, nearly doubling its digital paid readership from the same period a year earlier). Those new subscriptions have, in fact, been vital in combatting fake news by giving The Times the monetary cushion it needed to align what it and other mainline news organizations have establish to be the best defense force confronting "alternative reality": more than reporting.
As tardily as November 2016, we in the newsroom were girding for a big number of buyouts and possible layoffs. But in one of his first large moves of the Trump era, Baquet beefed up his Washington bureau with more investigative reporters. With the White House and its allies e'er ready to promote any false notions information technology believes will forwards its agenda, and to employ any error – no thing how modest – to cast doubt upon a story'south entire premise, Washington Bureau Main Elisabeth Bumiller has added two full-time fact checkers to complement her newly enlarged investigative team. 1 of them, Emily Cochrane, back-reads stories before they are published to grab errors that the writers and their editors may have missed. Unlike magazines, newspapers do not generally employ fact-checkers in this fashion. This represents a significant shift in the editorial process.
"It's always bad to make a mistake in The New York Times – you pay a big price for it," Bumiller told me. "Just in this era, it's actually worse to make a mistake."
Several days before we spoke, Trump had held his and then-called "Fake News Awards," a stunt that fizzled as the Republican Party website on which he posted the "winners" crashed. The journalists and organizations the president cited were primarily guilty of making factual errors and then correcting them.
"That's not fake news. That'southward responsible news," Bumiller said. "It's a problem because Trump is conflating the 2. It'due south politics, and information technology'south playing really well with his base."
Information technology's as well especially ironic, given that the news Mr. Trump regularly praises – from Fox & Friends, The National Enquirer, and the pure conspiracy website InfoWars – almost never acknowledge mistakes without legal threats. The latter, especially, makes up its news from the word "go."
Bumiller's other new hire, Linda Qiu, formerly of PolitiFact, writes manufactures and online posts picking apart false statements and outright lies gaining traction in the national debate. President Trump's various falsehoods – more 5 a day, according to The Washington Mail'due south running tally – have demanded much of her time.
Then and Now
Qiu's work at The Times isn't entirely new, just her position is, and that represents a pregnant shift for the newspaper. I was effectively The Times's main fact-checker in 2004, as the reporter who covered presidential campaign media. It vicious to me to verify or deflate claims made by major politicians in television and radio advertisements, the results of which were contained in "ad boxes" that ran alongside the campaign stories of the day. But that was a secondary role of my beat, which was primarily devoted to stories about campaign communications strategies and the news organizations roofing them. When the campaign cycle concluded, fifty-fifty that minimal fact-checking function would shut down, too.
In those days, nosotros, mainstream reporters, notwithstanding felt equally if we lived in a world in which our fact-checking work, when it did interruption through, set things correct – interim as a radiological beam destroying the cancerous prevarication...
Y'all could contend that the paper should have done it year-round, simply in that location was a question of resource: in the toll-do good analysis, the demand was nowhere nigh as great as it was for investigative reporting at a time of war. But besides, this was before Facebook and Twitter and other platforms provided new ways to push all sorts of imitation narratives into the center ring of American politics.
In those days, nosotros, mainstream reporters, still felt every bit if nosotros lived in a world in which our fact-checking work, when it did break through, set things right – acting every bit a radiological beam destroying the cancerous lie before it could metastasize throughout the body politic.
The best example came with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth advertizing entrada against Senator John Kerry in 2004, the first modern instance of "fake news" swaying an election. The effort was based on the polemical book about Mr. Kerry by the conservative conspiracy theorist and acknowledged author, Jerome Corsi. Every bit my colleague, Kate Zernike, and I reported in a front-page, 4,000-word investigation that August, claims that John Kerry fabricated the heroics for which he won the Argent Star during the Vietnam War were fabricated themselves, contradicted past Navy records and some of his accusers' ain past statements.
Our reporting helped stop their campaign, forced the firing of President Bush'south lead campaign attorney (who had secretly worked for the grouping) and stopped the spread of their lies. Yet, all that said, our reporting took united states several weeks to conduct, giving the Swift Gunkhole group's claims ample fourth dimension to sink in amongst cadre Republican voters and conservative-leaning independents.
The growth of the internet has helped make the fact-checking process much faster. What used to take v telephone calls or a visit to the library's microfiche archives to found as fact now takes a few well-directed keystrokes. But, as we've all learned in the last couple of years, lies spread faster than truth does online and imitation narratives are far easier and cheaper to produce than truthful ones. At present they face no barrier to entry in the public square thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. Had the Swift Boat campaign happened in 2016, our reporting would accept had even less effect. The lies most Kerry's war record would have continued finding an audience on social media, with added, made twists from the Trump-approved InfoWars – where Jerome Corsi serves as Washington bureau main. And it would have received actress promotion and embellishments from the Russian troll regular army that so effectively pushes divisive falsehoods throughout social media.
Of form, where George West. Bush disavowed the Swift Boat group'southward claims, President Trump would have most certainly picked them up with gusto, while labeling as "imitation news" the real reporting that debunked them. Equally the chief spokesman of the move that cynically seeks to portray real reporting as imitation, and defended, honest journalists as biased fabulists, Mr. Trump has advanced its cause in ways its in one case-fringy leaders could have only dreamed about.
How Real Reporting Works
That's where, at The Times, some of the more important, if more subtle, piece of work is taking place. A whole lot of Americans detect plausibility in the president's claims that reporters for The Times or The Washington Post or, for that matter, The Wall Street Journal, only make stuff upward from their desks and so call it an early on dark. The Times's ain research has shown that when some readers see a dateline on an article – Kabul or Baghdad, Moscow or Mumbai – they do not know that it ways the reporter did his or her reporting from in that location. The paper concluded that it needed to do more than to convey that, for instance, when The Times presented data about the Benghazi set on of 2012, information technology was doing so with on-the-ground reporting from journalists who put themselves in harm's way– whereas the hosts of Pull a fast one on & Friends were relying on political talking points delivered to their desks.
Baquet now takes on that disparity directly. As he said in an interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN recently, "Anybody who watches just Fox & Friends is non getting an honorable news report." But he and the residual of The Times's leadership too concluded that the newspaper, and the industry at large, had not done enough to show that person why he or she should instead get with an alternative.
"We spent our whole lives thinking that people assumed that nosotros were honorable; people assumed that we were trying to find out what actually happened," Baquet told me. "I remember we were wrong."
"I thing we've started to do is be more transparent. We're going to allow people know who our reporters are; nosotros're going to let them know where they are; we're going to permit people know what it takes to go a story," he said.
It's why, for instance, when The Times came under social media attack for profiling an "alt-correct" white supremacist in terms that some readers idea were also sympathetic, information technology published a start-person article past the national editor who approved the piece, Marc Lacey, to explain the reporting procedure and editorial reasoning. It'south why The Times has written online features about how Haberman, the White Business firm correspondent, approaches her task. And it's why the paper is starting to innovate more biographical information well-nigh its reporters in their online profiles. The general lack of understanding most how real reporting works and what motivates it – the truth, non some partisan agenda – is precisely what the anti-press oversupply is trying to exploit.
That has been articulate in the recent work of anti-journalism provocateur James O'Keefe. He recently sent secret operatives from his group, Project Veritas, into mainstream newsrooms to capture journalists in compromising moments. The result, he hoped, would requite him an opportunity to smear their integrity and throw all mainstream reporting into doubtfulness. His arroyo betrayed either his own ignorance or his deep pessimism.
In one example, ane of his workers went to a bar with a subconscious camera and sought to entrap The Washington Post'south Adam Entous, whose reporting led to the president's ousting his first national security advisor, Michael Flynn. The operative, posing as a Trump-hater, tried and tried to get Entous to admit to some kind of vendetta: "How exercise we get the president?" the operative asked. "I take no idea," Entous replied, adding, "and, frankly, in that location may not be anything that gets the president." O'Keefe sought to portray that as some sort of confession – main Russia-investigation reporter admits it may not lead to anything regarding the president! – when it was really an example of a responsible reporter sticking to the facts he knew and not getting ahead of them.
In another stunt, Veritas sent a young woman to The Washington Mail service with a yarn that Alabama's Republican candidate for Senate, Roy Moore, had impregnated her when she was fifteen – and when he was a county court judge – and and so talked her into getting an abortion. Veritas'south goal was clearly to play a trick on the newspaper into printing a simulated article that would destroy the credibility of all of its Moore reporting.
The attempt failed miserably: The Post did basic journalism by looking into the background of the accuser and learning, easily, that she was a conservative activist who had alleged her hostility toward the "liberal MSM" online. Better still, The Mail service turned cameras on her and produced its own story about Veritas's failed sting. O'Keefe's underhanded approach helped produce ane of the all-time advertisements I've ever seen for the care real journalists take in establishing the truth.
Subtlety and Strength
Indeed, those misfires and others like it have had the opposite of their intended effect; they bolstered the press. A lot of the evidence is anecdotal, in the form of increased subscriptions and in the success of the Spielberg flick, The Mail service, about the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the face of the Nixon administration'southward attempts to close downward that reporting. There is some statistical prove of unintended consequences as well. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in the fall showed that conviction in the printing among Americans rose from 39 percent to 48 percent in roughly a year.
That number'south non exactly overwhelming, and should not provide cause for self-approbation about journalism'due south standing, and, therefore, about the state of fact-based argue in this land. The president and his anti-printing allies continue to rely on conspiracy theories and half-truths to a startling caste equally they seek to undermine an investigation into Russia'due south efforts to help his campaign and, more importantly, meddle in our domestic politics. And he continues to regularly employ his "fake news" label to true reporting.
"It'south damaging when the president of the United states attacks the press constantly," Baquet told CNN'due south Amanpour. "What makes me nervous is whether the constant attacks chase away from us people who are his supporters, and I think nosotros have something to say to them."
That's one of the reasons why Baquet has instituted a new policy ordering his news reporters not to post partisan political sentiment on Twitter or Facebook – a measure that some critics said would only lead to less transparency by hiding true leanings, only which Baquet deemed necessary to avert appearances that would undercut the newspaper's reporting. Subsequently all, the primary duty of straight-news journalists is to sublimate their own inherent biases to their mission of ferreting out truth and going wherever the reporting leads.
Information technology's also why Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, in taking the reins of The Times, reemphasized his forebear's commitment to pursuing the news "without fear or favor." He followed that up with the decision to dedicate the entire editorial folio to letters from Trump supporters. It wasn't pop with the editorial folio'southward mostly liberal readership, only the paper saw information technology every bit a necessary experiment as it tries to reach a crowd that has been on the receiving cease of a wrong-headed campaign to pigment the paper as its political enemy.
Many members of that crowd live in informational silos. 3 of the four platforms that provide those silos – Google, Facebook, and Twitter – are promising to fix their algorithms so that more people see more diverse takes on the news. I remain skeptical. Every bit long as the platforms' business models are built effectually giving people precisely what they desire when they desire it, they will exist unlikely to change in any truly significant style. The fourth platform – Fox News – is not making any promises to change and certainly won't.
You have to think that, at some betoken, the preponderance of evidence that the press had it right – and seeks to get it correct despite the occasional fault – will go too convincing for the printing-skeptics to ignore.
I practice think the subtle moves that outlets like The Times are making to explain their journalism will help. Most of all, though, the real, ambitious reporting in which The Times and other outlets are continuing to vigorously invest will get the uttermost in breaking down the fake edifices of "culling facts."
Time and fourth dimension again, existent reporting has put the lie to the lies. Take, for example, The Times's recent scoop that Trump had ordered the firing of Robert Mueller, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, only to be stymied by his ain lawyer. The White House had written off before reports that the president was thinking about the move, but this fourth dimension, with deep reporting by Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, none on Trump's staff echoed the president'due south ain "fake news" denial.
You have to think that, at some point, the preponderance of evidence that the press had it correct – and seeks to go it right despite the occasional mistake – volition become likewise convincing for the press-skeptics to ignore. Some, of course, will cling to their conventionalities – or disbelief – beyond all evidence. That's a problem that neither The Times, nor the press in general, can solve.
***
Jim Rutenberg ( @jimrutenberg ) is the media columnist for The New York Times and a author-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. He has served the paper as a primary presidential entrada contributor, a White Firm reporter, an investigative reporter, and a Urban center Hall bureau chief.
Cover photograph: A homo buys the international edition of The New York Times at a kiosk in Paris, November 10, 2016. (Courtesy of Shutterstock)
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Source: https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/the-disinformation-age/how-fake-news-changed-the-new-york-times-and-didnt