Show Your Work: Defending the NYT, TikTok Showdown, Pundit Stumped

Welcome to another edition of “Show Your Work” — where I give you a preview of what I’m working on, that might, in the near- or long-term, become part of the broader Fourth Watch newsletter, a TheHill column, or something else (or… not). It’s a behind-the-scenes look into the process, what I’m thinking through, in its unfinished form.

Free subscribers get a peek, paid subscribers get the full thing. Here we go:

• In defense of the New York Times: As someone who has often been critical of the New York Times in the 4+ years since Fourth Watch has launched (and throughout my book “Uncovered”) I found myself in a strange position last week, while reading an interview executive editor Joe Kahn did with Semafor’s Ben Smith — feeling the strong need to defend the New York Times from unfair coverage.

Ben kicks off what is an interesting Q&A with a question that’s framed in a totally absurd way, asking Kahn to respond to criticism from Dan Pfeiffer, former Obama flack-turned-podcaster, who said that the New York Times doesn’t “see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power,” with Ben pressing: “Why don’t you see your job as: ‘We’ve got to stop Trump?’”

Now, I’ve interviewed Ben a few times, and I think he’s more thoughtful than most in the industry. But if I was in Kahn’s position here, I’d dismiss this line of questioning directly — “I’m not going to allow some partisan actor to tell me what a journalist’s job is.” Every journalist, including the interviewee here, should know it’s a ridiculous critique of the New York Times. At least they would have in 2016, before, you know, Trump shocked them all and actually won.

Kahn gave a pretty good answer — honestly, he gave many throughout. He pointed out the ask was “essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate” and they would risk turning “ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.” He’s quite obviously right — the implication is laughable. But it’s 2024, and the media has gone insane. So instead, many “journalists” hated this answer.