The New York Times’ voluminous coverage of the impeachment hearings detailed many of the pieces that make up the overall strategy, but the vast majority of it boiled down to the predictable formula of covering the whole process like a partisan horserace. A sampling of Times headlines:
- “A ‘Circus’ or an ‘Education’: How Impeachment Is Playing on the Radio” (11/14/19)
- “How Swing State Voters Feel About Impeachment” (11/15/19)
- “Jordan Brings Pugnacious Style to Impeachment Defense of Trump” (11/15/19)
- “A GOP Star Emerges in Impeachment Hearings. Democratic Donors Notice.” (11/18/19)
It sounds alternately like an NFL halftime report and a review of a Broadway show.
Even the five pieces described as “news analyses” that ran during the phase of the public hearings fell short of deserving that label, and none went any deeper than the rest of the coverage. “The Impeachment Witnesses Not Heard” (11/21/19), for instance, rehashed the relevant details of the administration’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation, and analyzed the partisan considerations in GOP stonewalling and the Democrats’ decision not to go to court over it. “But it leaves some frustrated about the missing pieces,” the article said, and, folks, that’s as deep as it gets.
The bigger and more important story is that Trump and the GOP are assaulting the legitimacy of the impeachment inquiry itself —it’s not that they are using one particular tactic or another. Everything—from refusing to turn over documents, to pressuring witnesses not to testify, to intimidating and smearing them when they do—is about a claim to unlimited executive power that is straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
Masha Gessen (New Yorker, 11/14/19) framed an analysis in a single column that the New York Times could not manage to do in a hundred articles:
Republicans are not actually defending the president against accusations of abuse of power; instead, they are mounting an offense against the Democrats, whose very enterprise they consider illegitimate.
Gessen’s point is that the Republicans are playing a whole different game than the Democrats, and the Democrats don’t realize it and will lose as a result:
The impeachment hearings ought to lay down a record of abuses that will make future historians blush, rather than a protocol of the time that the Democrats tried to get Trump on the one obscure smoking gun they had—and failed.
But that Democrats have, true to form, opted to make the whole less than the sum of its parts, is no excuse for the media to do the same.
Why exactly is the New York Times studiously keeping its impeachment coverage so superficial? My hunch is that it has to do with the Times’ longstanding affinity for legitimizing power, and the belief that the stability of US institutions is more important than their integrity. Naming and scrutinizing the assault on democratic norms revealed in the impeachment proceedings would lay bare the fragility of those institutions.
But that this approach to covering the Trump administration is deliberate is quite clear. In the midst of the hearings, former Times copy editor Carlos Cunha (Salon, 11/24/19) exposed what he called the “project of Trump-dignification” at the paper (and I call, following Bess Kalb, “Nazi-normalizing barf journalism”—FAIR.org, 11/1/19), detailing not only how he was fired for a single edit seen as unfair to the Trumpists, but also how the Times’ upper brass has sought to placate Trump (including their refusal to call him a racist).
Mainstream media disdain for Trump is obvious in thousands of details every day, but precisely because of the myth of objective journalism, reporters’ and editors’ views of how Trump is a bad president or a terrible human being have no legitimized expression. Rather than being clearly stated, where they can be debated, they are passive-aggressively inserted in nuggets like the Times’ comment (11/20/19) on the note Trump read to reporters —“scrawled out in large block letters.”
I believe it is that same anti-Trump perspective, filtered through he-said-she-said reporting, that has led the New York Times to follow the Beltway impeachment crowd over the cliff in their pursuit of that “one obscure smoking gun,” rather than explore the full extent of the Trumpist lurch towards authoritarianism, much of which is palpable and documentable but not necessarily “provable” in the way the Ukrainian extortion scheme is. It’s a bitter irony that the Times’ bias against Trump has contributed to the downplaying of the danger he poses to the US.
