Visiting Column #19 -- The Not-So-Sudden Death of the New York Times

You might have seen the words, unless you blinked a few times during the period in which it was the front page top headline in the New York Times, formerly a newspaper of repute.

"Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism"

The story for which it was the caption was, of course, the speech given by President Trump this past weekend on the two mass shootings in Dayton, OH and El Paso, TX, each of which was committed by a person with inflamed and misdirected passions -- Dayton by a leftist Antifa supporter (though his specific motive is unclear at this writing), and El Paso by a racist white supremacist.

The president made about as apolitical a speech on the topic as one could possibly have expected from any president, passionately condemning the actions and their motivating impetus, specifically calling out "white supremacy, bigotry and racism" as needing to be defeated and eliminated.  Those are sentiments I think we can all get behind.

And it would seem that the speech was so suitable to the occasion that the president-hating Times swallowed hard but chose the headline that it did.  The four-and-a-half words accurately portrayed the sentiments of the president as presented to the viewing and listening audience from the White House.

I don't read the Times, so I can't say that I actually saw the headline or the front page when it was issued, but as it turns out, apparently, rational, accurate journalism cannot be tolerated by the intolerant left, particularly when it involves President Trump.

The Democrat candidates for president, sparked by their hero, a 29-year-old former bartender from New York, began to beat their Twitter drums loudly.  "Oh, dear", they drummed, "that headline is too pro-Trump and needs to be removed!"  And, to the surprise of no one, it was.

Now, there are a couple things here that have to be noted.  First, of course, is that the headline was quite accurate.  I heard the speech live, and immediately saw it as being fair, conciliatory, healing, and at the same time clearly condemning the racist dogma that appears to have incited one of the shootings.  The president said what he was supposed to say, that is, what everyone on the left would have complained if he had not said, and had he not said it fast enough for their taste.

There was not only nothing inaccurate about the Times saying that the president called for unity against racism, it was actually the logical headline for what was the principal message he wanted to offer the American people.  Had the left not desperately needed to have gotten their panties in a wad about everything President Trump says or does, because he is succeeding and they're not, the headline would have been perfectly fine.  But they do, at least as far as their panties.

The other thing, though, is far, far worse.

As we know, or should, it is a long-established fact of journalism, taught the first week of Journalism 101, that there is a news reporting part of a paper, and an editorial part of a paper, and they are separated.  The editorial part is found at the end of the first section of the print edition, and it is clearly marked "Editorial" so that we know that what is printed there, the opinions of the paper itself, as well as on the opposite page (the "op-ed" writers, who are not the paper's editors), are opinions and not facts, per se.

When I say that the news and editorial parts of a paper are "separated", I mean "walled off", as in nobody works on both sides.  That purity-by-insulation is done to protect the reporters of the news from accusations of bias in their reporting.  No one need protect the editorial writers; everyone has opinions.  They don't all have editorial pages to voice them, which is why there are blogs.

Why is that separation necessary?  Because if there is a sniff that the reporting of a story is slanted by influence from the editor, the paper's journalistic integrity is forever lost.  We can then no longer assume that what is reported as "fact" is actually what happened.  Once you get to that point, there is no reason having a newspaper.  All you have, reporters and editorialists alike, is slanted to where the reader can no longer trust what is printed.

This is where we are today with the Times.  The facts are plain and well-documented; a bunch of Democrats protested a headline in the reporting section of the paper, and the Times capitulated and changed it to something else.  That decision was made by the editor, meaning the editorial side of the paper, violating the sanctity of the separation of news and opinion.

There will be an edition of the New York Times tomorrow, and the day after.  But it will never be the same.  If we have ever had a shred of confidence in the veracity of the news reported by its team of intrepid reporters, not that I ever did, that confidence is blown to the moon.

If the editorial team can change one word of a news story, let alone the top headline on Page One, there is no longer a single word of any page of the paper that can be relied upon for being accurate and unbiased, a correct accounting of the event being chronicled.  We will always assume that the editors may have changed the content of a basic news story to suit a political narrative.

"Democracy dies in darkness", the equally untrustworthy Washington Post likes to trumpet when trying to defend its Lilliputian integrity.

Journalism dies in bias, I would counter. 

R.I.P., the New York Times, 2019.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton