August 19, 2016
Source: Bigstock
This speech, which was widely reprinted and talked about, had an 80 percent approval rating with the American public and even eclipsed the better-remembered one two weeks earlier in which President Nixon coined the term “silent majority.” There was a gauntlet thrown”and the rulers of the op-ed noticed. One of their goals was to prove Agnew wrong by giving free rein to voices that would never otherwise be heard if the newspaper’s pages were limited to staff members.
So here’s the math on this year’s op-ed treatment of Trump.
Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination on May 26.
I have read every article on every op-ed page since May 26. There were lots of articles before that”the Times writers and editors have been fairly obsessed with Trump for all of 2016″but I limited the study to the past 86 days. (I”m a masochist when it comes to research, but halfway through this project I had to read 37 New York Post crime stories just to feel alive again. So 86 days is enough.)
Observation numero uno: I couldn”t find a single unalloyed pro”Donald Trump essay, column, think piece, whatever. There were some that looked at first glance like they might be pro-Trump, but they all ended up being not really. “How Trump Can Save the GOP” turns out to be a piece by former Timesman Sam Tanenhaus telling Republicans that their ideology is “fossilized” and see that’s what you get! Typical is the piece last week by Mark Sanford entitled “I Support You, Donald Trump. Now Release Your Tax Returns.” (He then says in the essay that if Trump does not release the tax returns, he probably won”t support him.) “I am a conservative Republican,” writes Sanford, “who, though I have no stomach for his personal style and his penchant for regularly demeaning others…”
These types of articles remind me of the classic liberal defense of pornography. “I don”t like it myself, but I defend your right to load up your computer with it.” Why don”t we ever get somebody who says, “I love porn! We need more of it! Join the ACLU to make sure we have more and better porn!”?
I much prefer the columnists who just come right out with it. “By now,” fumes Paul Krugman, “it’s obvious to everyone with open eyes that Donald Trump is an ignorant, wildly dishonest, erratic, immature, bullying egomaniac.”
And that’s a column about tax rates.
This is in keeping, by the way, with Krugman’s stated opposition to any kind of journalistic objectivity, even in the news pages. He calls it “false equivalence.” In fact, the phrase “false equivalence” has been snatched out of the internet ether by media types everywhere and hugged tightly to their bosoms like a moral life vest, as a way to carry on without outright saying, “We don”t have to be fair to Trump.”
“Too much of the media can”t break with bothsideism,” says the Kroogster, “the almost pathological determination to portray politicians and their programs as being equally good or equally bad, no matter how ludicrous that pretense becomes.” He is seconded by op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who takes pains to explain the difference between Trump’s lying and Hillary’s lying. One is mere “fibs,” the other is “whoppers.”
One problem in trying to find all the Trump material is that Trump target-shooting bleeds over into almost everything written about in the Times. Articles on Brexit are full of Trump references. You can”t discuss Vladimir Putin without mentioning Trump. Suicidal terrorists in Orlando, Dallas, and Baton Rouge prompt musings about Trumpism. If the government of North Carolina starts to argue about who’s allowed to go into which restroom, it just might be Donald Trump’s fault.
But you really don”t have to do much more than read some of the headlines of these op-ed pieces.
“Donald Trump Is Making America Meaner”
“I Ran the CIA, Now I”m Endorsing Hillary Clinton” (former CIA director Michael Morrell is so popular with the op-ed staff that he was featured not once but twice)
“Trump, the Bad, Bad Businessman”
“Why Trump Is Not Like Other Draft Dodgers”
“How the “Stupid Party” Created Donald Trump”
“What Trump Doesn”t Know About Allies”
“The Best Way to Avoid Future Trumps?”
“The Trump Affront to Latinos”
“The GOP Waits, and Waits, for Donald Trump to Grow Up”
“Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family”
“The Indelible Stain of Donald Trump”
…and my favorite…
“No, He’s Not Hitler…And Yet,” written by a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. Yes, that’s what I said. So much for dispelling the Ivory Tower image of the Times.
In 1969 Gay Talese wrote a book about the Times called The Kingdom and the Power. If he wrote it today, he would have to call it The Fiefdom and the Snark.
Okay, here we go. There are two kinds of articles on the op-ed page. You have your columnists”11 of them. Unfortunately, none of them are members of the Communist Party USA or the John Birch Society”because that would be some interesting “op” stuff. Most of the columnists write twice a week. And then you have your guest articles, which average out to about five a day because they put out extra ones on Sunday.
So I kept a running tally of anti-Trump articles and pro-Trump articles”oh, right, sorry, there aren”t any pro-Trump articles. Pro-Hillary articles, anti-Hillary articles. And I was fairly generous with not counting the Trump diatribes that don”t really belong in the column or article. For example, there’s a regular columnist named Charles M. Blow who can”t stop writing about Trump. I really think he needs an intervention. I counted 17 Trump pieces by him since late May. Three more if you count the “why Hillary is better” columns. Paul Krugman, whose main topic is economics, landed the silver medal with 12, but he was nowhere close to Blow. David Brooks, Gail Collins, and Thomas L. Friedman all tied for the bronze with 11 masterpieces of Trump-bashing.
The final tally here would be 102 anti-Trump, 0 pro-Trump, 22 pro-Hillary, seven anti-Hillary, and six too wishy-washy to tell. (By the way, an anti-Hillary column is nothing like an anti-Trump column. “She’s not quite there on child care” would be an example of how Hillary is criticized.)
But that’s just the columnists”the columnists who were hired to supposedly bring diverse opinions to the Times.
The real heart of the op-ed ideal, as set down by its founders in 1970 (wink, wink), is the guest articles. There were 410 of them. Sixty-seven were about Trump. Nineteen were about Hillary. Seven were devoted equally to both candidates.
We eliminated the Russian judges for doping and came up with the following totals:
Anti-Trump: 70
Pro-Trump: 0
Wishy-washy: 4
Anti-Hillary: 3
Pro-Hillary: 23
Incomprehensible meditations on Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt by English professors at the City University of New York: 1
What does it all mean?
Here’s David Shipley, former op-ed editor of the Times, explaining in 2004 how it works: “If the editorial page…has a forceful, long-held view on a certain topic, we are more inclined to publish an Op-Ed that disagrees with that view. If you open the newspaper and find the editorial page and Op-Ed in lock step agreement or consistently writing on the same subject day after day, then we aren”t doing our job.”
So the editorial page and the op-ed page can never be in agreement.
There are 83 days until the election. If all 11 Times op-ed columnists stopped writing about Trump and concentrated on, say, Kevin Durant going to the Golden State Warriors, and if half of the guest essays between now and Nov. 8 were devoted to each candidate, and if every essay about Trump were positive, you still couldn”t get to a Trump-positive number.
Therefore a Trump endorsement is the only way for the ecosystem of the Times to remain fair and balanced. If they don”t endorse Trump, they will be saying that every claim they”ve made about the op-ed page since 1970 was false. If they don”t endorse Trump, they will be saying that they don”t value the 40-plus percent of the electorate who intend to vote for him”they can”t find a single person in that group to write an op-ed column”and so every claim ever made about their liberal East Coast bias since 1969 is probably true. Failing to endorse Trump would be tantamount to saying, “Yes, Spiro, you nailed it.” And as to Jim’s “judgments of history,” if Donald Trump loses by a landslide in November, then the historians are likely to write, “In a throwback to the 19th century, the press turned partisan and nasty.”
And they didn”t have to do that. As we used to say in Arkansas, You don”t have to get drunk and rowdy to write about a rowdy drunk. They chose the low road.
The only newspaperman who became president was Warren G. Harding, and he got into the game because, as a cub reporter for the Marion Democratic Mirror, he was forced to praise Grover Cleveland and shoot down James Blaine. His response was to start the first nonpartisan newspaper in that part of Ohio, the Marion Star, which did a lot for establishing the principle that newspapers should stop taking sides. If The New York Times is not going to endorse Donald Trump, then they”re saying that they”re reverting to pre-1884 standards of fairness.
After all, those are the rules. That’s how the op-ed works. The Times knows this because, hey, the Times invented it.
