COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 21/08/2019
Jon Allsop
IT’S BEEN A DIFFICULT FEW WEEKS for The New York Times. A little over a month ago, the paper, along with many of its rivals, was called out for its euphemistic descriptions of Trump’s racist tweets. Three weeks later, after a gunman in El Paso killed 22 people in an anti-Latino massacre, the Times became a lightning rod for criticism; it had topped its story about the president’s post-shooting speech with a headline—“Trump urges unity vs. racism”—that was sorely lacking in context and skepticism. Last Monday, Dean Baquet, the Times executive editor, convened a town-hall meeting for staff and addressed the headline, which, he conceded, had been “a fucking mess.” A simultaneous scandal around Jonathan Weisman, a deputy Washington editor, and his tweets about Democratic politicians of color, exacerbated tensions within—and external scrutiny of—the newsroom. Last Tuesday, the Times demoted Weisman. On Thursday, Slate’s Ashley Feinberg published a transcript of the town hall, further prolonging a critical Times-centric news cycle.