The Newyorktimes v Donald Trump

A great paper has lost the plot in its fight with the bigoted President

Not all Oldie readers may be familiar with the New York Times. It is highminded, self-important, mildly leftist, viscerally anti-trump (the feeling is mutual) and widely attributed with a scrupulous attention to detail.

The paper has also weathered the decline of print better than any other title in the world. With over four million digital subscribers to add to weekday print sales of around 400,000, it churns out huge profits and boasts a newsroom of 1,700 journalists, which is more than ever.

Since 2012, the New York Times’s chief executive has been our own Mark Thompson, formerly Director-general of the BBC. His pay last year was around five million pounds, which he may have deserved.

On the whole, it’s hard not to admire the paper. That said, its pomposity and sanctimony can be wearisome. Its latest idiocy was to sack (officially, he resigned) opinion-page editor James Bennet. His crime was to have published a provocative piece by Senator Tom Cotton, a Trump supporter, calling for the deployment of the military during the civil disturbances that followed the killing of George Floyd. One of Mr Bennet’s deputies was reassigned to the newsroom.

Senator Cotton’s piece admittedly contained some inaccuracies. Mr Bennet was blamed for not picking them up because he hadn’t bothered to read it, which does sound a bit casual. But spotting factual errors is the responsibility of legions of editors, who are expected to check every statement in an article. The New York Times is proud of its painstaking ‘fact-checking’.

If the piece had been about a less controversial subject, Mr Bennet would not have been expected to fall on his sword as a result of the odd mistake, and the paper would not have thought it necessary to apologise. The real offence was to publish a piece by a Trump cheerleader whose views are anathema to many New York Times journalists.

Dozens of them expressed their shock at publication. One objection, which to me sounds rather thin, was that sending the army onto the streets would put black journalists and people of colour in danger. Whether Cotton was right or wrong, surely the point is that his article represents what a prominent member of the United States Senate thinks.

Publisher A G Sulzberger initially defended the decision to publish on the basis that the paper was committed to representing ‘views from across the spectrum’. But the subsequent disowning of Mr Bennet and a public recantation suggest that carrying articles with which it disagrees is not the paper’s priority.

The New York Times, which was once intellectually eclectic, has become increasingly partisan, though it is true that it harbours the odd conservative columnist such as Bret Stephens – who is nonetheless strongly anti-trump.

You may say our newspapers are no different, and I suppose that’s true. It’s hard to think of any robust right-wing writers in the Guardian, or ferociously left-wing ones in the Daily Mail, for which I write a column. The Times is the only British title that makes any attempt to cover the waterfront politically. It has mildly leftish columnists such as David Aaronovitch and Philip Collins, and right-of-centre counterweights in Daniel Finkelstein (not actually very far to the right) and Melanie Phillips (much further).

The New York Times is still worth chiding, because it used not to be ideological. It prided itself on being heterogeneous – even if it hasn’t supported a Republican presidential candidate since Dwight D Eisenhower in 1956. In recent years, though, the paper has become narrower in its outlook, and the advent of the abusive Donald Trump has made it more pugnacious and intolerant. The two parties are locked in unedifying combat.

In a strange way, the once reserved ‘Gray Lady’ is beginning to resemble the blinkered bigot it so despises.

Television reporters invited to ask questions before their print brethren at the daily Number Ten COVID-19 press conferences have not entirely covered themselves with glory. Some of them deliver prolix mini-lectures rather than ask forensic questions.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than at the infamous press conference in the Downing Street rose garden, when Dominic Cummings gave his unconvincing account of his movements between London, Durham and Barnard Castle. When the television magnificoes stepped forward to interrogate the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, they were all so busy ventilating with indignation that they failed to ask the killer question.

My wife, sitting beside me on the sofa in front of the television, knew what it was. So, no doubt, did other people up and down the land. The question they should have asked is whether Mr Cummings’s wife, Mary Wakefield, can drive.

And if she can, why didn’t she just drive her husband and child back to London without the lockdown-busting 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle (supposedly undertaken to test Mr Cummings’s eyesight)? The answer was that she can drive – but no one put the question, and Mr Cummings survived.

Motto: don’t preach. Ask.

‘Once intellectually eclectic, the paper has become increasingly partisan’