Your feelings about The New York Times are no mystery to me.
Emails deriding the Times – and its evil twin, The Washington Post – were regular fare with my morning coffee before I retired in March.
The complaints generally went as follows: “How dare you have a story by the New York Times? They hate Trump and produce fake news. How dare you?”
I believe I responded to each complaint. Generally, I asked readers to set aside their visceral hatred for the Times and focus on what in a particular story bothered them. Was there an inaccuracy? An unfair characterization? Did they misspell “Trump?”
This generally ended the exchange. It’s easy to hate on the Times, but it’s hard for most readers to fault individual stories.
Even so, I will not argue the Times is perfect. I have held out stories from the AJC that, in my view, were unfair or went too far. As a reader I have at times felt uneasy with the relentless volume of Trump stories on their front page.
Nevertheless, the Times provides an unmatched source of deeply reported news from the biggest and best newsroom in the world. Not carrying the Times in a newspaper our size would be journalistic malpractice. The AJC’s job is to provide the best daily report possible.
(Aside: I’m reading a book about the adventures of two Northern newspaper reporters during the Civil War. They were captured by Rebel troops and stopped briefly in Atlanta, where the newspaper editor demanded their execution. A bit extreme, but not so different from sentiments conveyed by some anti-Times emailers.)
Even in this coarse, angry and tribal world we are creating for our children, I cling to the idea that things would be better if we at least accepted one another’s humanity.
This is why I want you to watch Showtime’s “The Fourth Estate.” The final episode is tonight.
The four-part documentary traces 16 months in the life of the Times, focusing almost exclusively on the Washington bureau’s coverage of the Trump administration.
Its masterful direction by Oscar-nominated documentary maker Liz Garbus rarely concedes that a camera is present as editors and reporters develop stories right in front of you. You are present for their deliberations over how to characterize Trump’s inaugural speech – incidentally, they found it “dark.” Later, they debate the use of the word “lie” in news copy.
You are in the conference rooms, cubicles and cars as they discuss what their sources are telling them about Michael Flynn, James Comey, Michael Cohen and the other characters who have come to dominate the unfolding drama.
You even see reporters talking to or exchanging emails from sources – or, as the White House would suggest, their made-up sources – as small pieces in the Russia story unfold.
It is hard to escape a few observations. These folks are young, smart and driven. They are exactly what their detractors fear they are – East Coast elites who probably are unaware Wal-Mart has greeters. They can be earnest, focused and tend toward workaholism. One baby-faced reporter confesses to havining no life beyond chasing this, the biggest story of his life.
Saints Woodward and Bernstein hover over their quest for a new “All the President’s Men.” If you want to see bias, you can find it.
They may be locked in an unhealthy Pavlovian cycle as they strive to publish at just the right moment to satisfy Wolf Blitzer’s breaking news habit. It shows a disconcerting number of scenes of newspaper reporters in makeup chairs.
And, finally, I had the astonishing sense that they have more reporters on Trump than the AJC has on the universe.
Unleashing this force on a new administration – with all its undeniable weirdness – inevitably would produce a fire hose of stories to reinforce the sense that the Times is on an anti-Trump crusade.
I wish the documentary had taken a harder look at the concerns of Times haters.
Just as it is worthwhile to humanize newsgathering, it would have been good to probe critics’ concerns.
The series seems modestly aware of the complaints – it shows an awkward moment with a Times reporter covering CPAC, the conservative convention that probably would be happy to execute a reporter or two. A gay, married reporter barely flinches as a Roy Moore supporter in Alabama condemns gay marriage.
To his credit, Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s elegant executive editor, expresses some regrets about the newsroom’s failure to grasp what was happening. “During the election, we tried to cover Donald Trump using rules of the past,” he says. “We didn’t have our fingers on the pulse of the country. And that was bad.”
No kidding.
But to an old newspaper editor, the most compelling scenes were away from work. These folks are so familiar, so human.
When the president calls us all enemies of the people, I could only look around my newsroom to see the moms, dads, daughters and sons with kids, mortgages, dreams and fears. Enemies?
We see Maggie Haberman, a CNN regular who has covered Trump for 20 years, regretting his victory, not because she dislikes him or his policies, but because it meant she would be unable to keep her promise to be a better mom. Her son persistently phones her seeking a mother’s comfort. “It’s your mama,” she answers. She listens. “You can’t die in your nightmares. I promise.”
The series excels at showing how hard today’s reporters work – filing to Twitter, doing Facebook Lives, offering insights on cable TV, and, oh, by the way, writing complex print news stories that immediately will be picked apart by the left and the right.
A heavy sense of fatigue grows with each episode. I know that fatigue; I’ve seen it in our newsroom, which, though smaller, is also a nonstop operation that makes little provision for personal lives. It’s tough being the enemy of the people 24/7.
It closes with Dean Baquet’s acknowledging the attacks take a toll. But he takes the long view. Newspapers have long been scapegoats, he says, recalling attacks during the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras.
“Those guys are gone,” he says. “And the New York Times is still here.”
