The New York Times Suffers a Cannon’s Broadside

By Luther Ray Abel

Thursday, April 04, 2024

 

There occurs now and then a journalistic accounting that is as marvelous as it is shocking, especially for those of us who’ve become numb to bad journalism and unsubstantiated smear passing as investigative work. Carl Cannon, the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics, has delivered a broadside to the New York Times from out of the fog.

 

In the piece, he details every structural and ethical failure in the Times‘ reporting about his publication. More than that, the article sets the tone for 2024 as RCP, the Times, AP, and 538 prepare to convey election information to the voting public.

 

Carl Cannon writes:

 

Ten days after the 2020 election, Tom Bevan, co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics, received an email from a New York Times reporter who covers the media. The reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, advised Bevan that his newspaper was working on a story about RCP and asked for responses to various questions and accusations. Four days later, Peters’ critique was published under the headline “A Popular Political Site Made a Sharp Right Turn. What Steered It.”

 

The sleight-of-hand was right there in the headline. The New York Times simply declared that RCP “made a sharp right turn,” and suggested it will document how this happened.

 

The Times’ story asserted that during the period of counting absentee and late-arriving mail-in ballots, RCP took three days longer than other news organizations to call Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. It noted disapprovingly that we aggregated stories from other news outlets quoting Trump supporters who questioned the election results. It suggested that the RCP Poll Averages were manipulated to be favorable to Donald Trump. Peters focused on RCP staff layoffs in September 2017, and claimed we’d hired partisan Republicans to replace them. He reported that the RealClear Foundation, a nonprofit that supports our journalism, receives contributions from conservative donors. He also called into question a RealClear Investigations exposé naming the whistleblower whose complaints led to Trump’s first impeachment.

 

You can read the rest here.

 

I confess that I am a fan of the New York Times, especially its Sunday edition. Having grown up in a journalism wasteland (Wisconsin) dominated by Gannett and talk radio, my conception of a newspaper was five pages of the lowest-quality paper in a plastic bag. On Sundays, the comics would arrive along with a fat midsection of ads to pad out the anemic paper.

 

The first real paper I owned I bought at Disney World on a trip with my family at the age of twelve. I’d wake up early and go down to the café and purchase Pop-Tarts and the New York Times — very Home Alone. The paper had substance and scope. There were stories about everything — and for a kid who read the encyclopedia for fun, that was a selling point. No other American newspaper offers the reporting density that the Times manages, and for its many flaws, the Times retains the look and feel of an older, better paper.

 

What I most appreciate about Cannon’s piece is that he demands that the Times be a better version of itself. While conservatives might think the paper a rag, especially its opinion pages, we must admit that the Grey Lady is without competition atop the public’s news hierarchy, just as Harvard is the school. We quote, critique, and reference the Times because it matters more than any other news source in American print media. Our top institutions need to retain the standards worthy of the public’s trust.