New York Times reporter Ben Smith interviewed his big boss, Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, and the Times ran the interview, along with an introduction, yesterday. The new story was titled “The Times Took 19 Days to Report an Accusation Against Biden. Here’s Why.” You have to read it to believe it or, maybe, to disbelieve it.
The story is about the incredibly disparate treatment the Times gave to sexual assault charges against soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and soon-to-be the Democratic nominee for President Joe Biden.
Here’s one highlight:
Smith: I’ve been looking at The Times’s coverage of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. I want to focus particularly on the Julie Swetnick allegations. She was the one who was represented by Michael Avenatti and who suggested that Kavanaugh had been involved in frat house rapes, and then appeared to walk back elements of her allegations. The Times wrote that story the same day she made the allegation, noting that “none of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated.”
Why was Kavanaugh treated differently?
Baquet: Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I don’t mean in the public way of Tara Reade’s. If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case. So I thought in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment.
Here’s the one that was the most stunning:
I want to ask about some edits that were made after publication, the deletion of the second half of the sentence: “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.” Why did you do that?
Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper, I think that the [Biden] campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And that’s not what the sentence was intended to say.
Did you get that? The Biden campaign “thought the phrasing was awkward.”
READER COMMENTS
AMT
Apr 14 2020 at 7:00pm
“Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way.” Unlike Biden!? ROFL.
Chris
Apr 15 2020 at 1:11am
Kavanaugh was currently in the spotlight for already reported sexual assault and was currently front page news because he was actively controversial beyond the rape allegations. There is a difference. The Kavanaugh story was also extremely time sensitive compared to the Biden story due to the confirmation hearing.
all that being said, I have no idea how Democrats ended up with Biden, the handsy used car salesmen of the party. Even Obama didn’t endorse him until there was no other options in the primary.
Bill
Apr 16 2020 at 8:23am
No excuses for the paper. No one knew anything about Ford’s background; and reporting on that was minimized by the NYT. Everybody involved in both these stories – Read, Ford, Kavanaugh, Biden, are, or became, public figures. This editor is steering the NYT? He seeks final approval from the Biden campaign? They showed no such scruples with Kavanaugh. “We removed that because it suggested Judge K had actually committed the assault alleged by Ford, the Kavanaugh representative said, and that would be unfortunate.” Never, never, never.
The paper took Ford at her word, and went after Judge Kavanaugh. They sent a gaggle of reporters out to try to confirm Ford’s account. No such reporting on Tara Read, and shaped the news to elide over the discrepancies. They went after potentially corroborating non-witnesses. They printed as much as they could about Kavanaugh, not so much Ford. Read? Her allegations? Again, not so much.
Mark Z
Apr 14 2020 at 9:35pm
“If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case.“
This is a laughable excuse from a newspaper editor. Nobody had heard of Christina Blasey Ford either until newspapers started printing stories about her. You’re a newspaper. You make the news. And you’re saying a story wasn’t newsworthy because it wasn’t already widely known as news?
This interview definitely doesn’t exactly help refute the notion that the NYT is effectively a Democratic Party apparatus.
Phil H
Apr 14 2020 at 11:21pm
Not quite as gutsy as you might think. This is what centre-lefties are like! Self-criticism is a fundamental part of the make up.
Thaomas
Apr 15 2020 at 7:33am
Isn’t it normal practice to cross check the version of events with the accused?
Mark Z
Apr 15 2020 at 10:28pm
Yes, and it should be. The point is that it shouldn’t only be normal to do so when the accused is a Democrat.
Michael Sandifer
Apr 15 2020 at 9:27am
This is not surprising at all. The mainstream media, as it’s called, is hyper-concerned about access to people who are expected to be newsworthy, or at least might be, for an extended period of time.
This is not about any political bias, but about what they think is good for business. To the degree media sources have political bias, it mostly reflects the intended audience. Otherwise, obviously, media sources would suffer financially, if they’d survive at all.
In this sense, right-wing criticisms of the mainstream media have always been mistaken, when not disingenuous. The idea that the media controls narratives can only be very partially correct, at best.
True, MSNBC has adopted favoritism toward the Democratic Party leadership as a business model, but it is easy to notice that many of their opinion hosts are actually right-of-center former Republicans like Joe Scarborough and Nicole Wallace. This is a business model, not a reflection of genuine political passion.
I think the same is true of Fox, but it’s an even more extreme case. Fox tries to actively deceive its audience and often pushes ridiculous narratives too far, as it did with the playing down of the coronavirus threat. They mostly go along with Trump’s preferred narrative, even when some of them must know it’s tremendously risky for the political causes their opinion hosts claim to champion. That’s because, they have no real political causes. It’s all about business at Fox, just as it is at MSNBC. The primary difference is that the Fox audience is older, less intelligent, and less informed, and are easy pickings for the crooks who run the conservative media, and the White House.
Just compare the advertising on Fox and other right-wing media sources. It’s full of gold and other “investment” scams, scam treatments for erectile dysfunction and low testosterone, and for battling cognitive decline.
And, of course, the most popular President in the history of the Republican Party, at least given modern polling, is himself a tremendous crook who founded a scam real estate institute and stole from his own charitable foundation.
Paul137
Apr 16 2020 at 1:41am
“The primary difference is that the Fox audience is older, less intelligent, and less informed, and are easy pickings for the crooks who run the conservative media, and the White House.”
What a smug twit you must be in person, Michael.
In a recent interview with Peter Robinson, The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel said, “They put the country through torture for three years on the basis of their own hatred of a candidate, not on the basis of any facts.”
The “they” Strassel was referring to were the mainslime media: the WaPo, the NYT, CNN, MSNBC, …
Anyone conversant with the facts — as distinguished from the hyperventilation indulged in by bozos like Chuck Todd, Joy Reid, Paul Krugman, and Joe Scarborough (“right of center” –what a hoot!) — knew all along that “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and then “Ukraine! Ukraine! Ukraine!” were mendacious fantasies — but easy sales to the droolers who watch Rachel Maddow.
Mark Z
Apr 16 2020 at 10:44am
Political bias and tailoring your product to your customer are not mutually exclusive. It’s well established that the average journalist is well to the left of the average reader, which I suspect is the case for the NYT. This also doesn’t help the Times’s (or any other media outlet’s) defense. “We weren’t carrying water for Biden because of our biases; we were just recapitulating the biases we expect from our readers.” That’s not a refutation of political bias; it’s an explanation of why the bias exists, and the etiology of the bias doesn’t nothing to vindicate the credibility of the source.
Michael Sandifer
Apr 19 2020 at 1:24am
Mark Z,
Yes, political bias and financial interests are not mutually exclusive, but it’s not as if journalism is the only field in which liberals predominate. Liberals predominate among the more highly educated, generally, which is one reason many conservatives attack higher education.
There is no liberal or conservative physics, yet most physicists, even if they graduate from technical insitutes, as opposed to universities, identify as liberal. That goes for most fields.
James S
Apr 16 2020 at 2:37am
Dean Baquet has presided over the near-complete decline of the Times as a credible news source. His bizarre hiring practices, bringing blatant racists and people who can’t do basic arithmetic to his “Editorial Board,” are a natural consequence of his concentration on identity politics to the exclusion of actual talent. The fake history of the “1619 Project” fits in nicely with the paper’s devotion to stories like the “Trump Collusion with Russia” fable and the “Augusta Golf Club” non-story.
A casual glance at the Comment section attached to Smith’s interview article shows a surprising departure from the left-wing cheerleading normally found there. Although a handful of writers accuse Tara Reade of being a Putin stooge, the vast majority take Baquet to task for his non-defense, which simply doesn’t ring true on any level. Of course the attack on Kavanaugh was more “urgent”! The Times has spent the last several years trying to pull rabbits out of hats for the Democrats. Here’s a suggestion for Mr. Baquet. Try being honest about the paper’s blatant bias. You’ll actually get more respect.
Michael
Apr 16 2020 at 7:15am
The Kavanaugh ans Biden cases are dissimilar in many ways that aren’t limited to the political leanings of the accused.
Baquet’s answer to the first question is nonsense. To the extent there is any attempt at logic there, he seems to be drawing a comparison between Kavanaugh and Reade, instead of Biden and Kavanaugh or Ford and Reade. To the extent that there is a legitimate point there, it is (maybe) there was an immediacy around the process Kavanaugh was in (Ford’s allegations came to light in the midst of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing). A Presidential election is a bigger deal than a SCOTUS confiormation hearing, but a Presidential campaign occurs over a period of months rather than days to weeks.
I get where Baquet is coming from on the second question. Even some of the women who complained about Biden’s actions towards them being “uncomfortable” explicitly disavowed labeling those actions as sexual misconduct. That is a significant point that gets lost in the original sentence.
I don’t think this is a left/right thing.
The Times has a history of these kind of revisions. The most recent thing that comes to mind is the headline of a Michelle Goldberg op-ed that was changed from “Jared Kushner is going to get us all killed” to something more neutral.
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