The New York Times makes the election stakes clear
A new look from the maligned paper.
I’ve never seen this from the New York Times before:
The paper is leading its website not with the latest news or a breaking news blog, but with a banner capsule built from a two-month-old story that breaks down in the simplest terms what it means to have Donald Trump as president.
When I say “simplest terms,” I mean: It’s basically a PowerPoint presentation. Here’s a glimpse of the first section:
Jay Rosen has a mantra for covering the election: “Not the odds, but the stakes.”
That’s hard for newsrooms to do, though, because the stakes don’t shift that much from day-to-day in an election. The horserace stuff — the polls, the vibes, the who-is-leading-who-isn’t gossip — does. Journalists (myself included) tend to gravitate to what’s new.
A lot of folks on the online left have charged the New York Times with supporting Trump during this election season. That the Times is using its platform in an unprecedented1 fashion to direct readers specifically to a breakdown of Trump’s agenda in a second term suggests otherwise.
Not that the online left will be appeased here: Yes, the New York Times says Trump will carry out mass deportations, but they don’t say it’s bad!
Or so I imagine.
The Times today carried a column from Ezra Klein suggesting that Trump is an asshole, that aging is making it worse, and that the people and institutions that restrained his worst impulses in his first term won’t be able to do so in a second. It was, to any reasonable reader, an anti-Trump column.
It was not read that way by many of Trump’s critics.
And it’s true. If you only read that paragraph of Klein’s very long essay, it might look bad. But here’s the point he’s building to:
Objectively anti-Trump. But it was considered. Even nuanced.
And the online anti-Trumpers threw a fit.
I have tried to restrain myself this election season from too much criticism of media criticism. Nobody really wants to read it, for one thing.
But also, I came to realize a few weeks ago that what is really happening — at least, I suspect — is not merely media criticism. It is fear being expressed, fear of the terrible times a second Trump term would bring. I share those fears.
So I’m trying to be charitable.
However, I do harbor a second theory about what’s going on: I think Americans are losing their reading comprehension skills. Too many of us — too many of us who spend too much time online — are increasingly able to read only 280 characters at a time. It’s how one paragraph that is building to a conclusion can be read as the conclusion itself, and then lambasted.
It’s just one example. I could give you a few more.
I don’t know what to do about that. But it does make me think that even if Trump loses decisively, we’re in for some rough times. We’ve lost our attention span. We’ve entertained ourselves nearly to death.
As far as I can tell, having been a devoted reader for most of the NYT’s online life.
Sorry Joel, I only made it through the first paragraph before I got distracted. Could you summarize your points in say . . . a tweet?
All joking aside, I think you've hit at least one of the nails on the head. I'd love to suggest we all need to do better at deep reading but any reading would probably do. The loudest freakouts seem so often to be just regurgitations of the latest sound bite from the chaos entrepreneurs of cable news, blogs or podcasts. I live in a mostly right leaning context but I assume it's the same for the left ("bleeding out in parking lots"?)
I try to follow C.S. Lewis' dictum to, "Read everything. Read receptively. Repeat." But there is also a real need to curate good reading in today's world. We're awash with the noise of a thousand voices with no real filters to help us discern the thoughtful from the screed, the introspective from the diatribe, the truth from the half-truth and lie. It's truly becoming a brave new world. Thanks for offering a better way.
I literally just listened this afternoon to an episode of Klein's podcast that I assume, from the excerpt you post here, was essentially him reading his essay, which I don't mind--it was an excellent episode, a thoughtful rumination from an intelligent observer of our national scene about what is wrong with Donald Trump, and why so many of us are so likely to jump to other, more demanding, explanations, rather than the most straightforward one (that he is a shameless narcissist with authoritarian inclinations and without much by way of social or cognitive inhibitions, and as he is getting older, his lack of inhibitions is getting worse). I'm going to be charitable and say that it is fear that drives the inability of too many otherwise right-thinking people to nonetheless see Trump-apologies when there are none, but don't forget the insatiable demand for everyone to get clicks for their hot takes as well.