Recently, by chance, the following pair of Twitter posts came across my attention one after the other:
In the first, a retired political scientist complains about a New York Times headline about Donald Trump’s announcement that he had scheduled a debate with Kamala Harris. The tweet’s author thought the headline was misleading and painted Trump in a better light than he deserved. She also tagged DougJBalloon, the Twitter handle for NYT Pitchbot, about which more in a moment.
The other tweet is from Washington Post politics reporter Ashley Parker, complaining that Bloomberg News violated an embargo agreement — that is, a deal with sources not to publish information they provide until a certain date — in breaking the news of the prisoner swap with Russia.
These posts explain a lot of the frustration people have with news media right now. In fact, I would argue, the one post explains the other. People get mad at the newspaper because the newspaper has the kind of trust-destroying incentives Parker is complaining about. But alas, those incentives come in large part from readers themselves, particularly readers who are a lot like the retired professor.
In the last few years, many people have taken up a pastime that grows more popular seemingly by the day. I’m talking about getting mad at the New York Times.1 When they get mad, people often post about it on social media, or write whole essays about how mad they are at the paper, or sometimes even band together with others who are similarly mad and sign onto open letters addressed to the paper. Once or twice, the people signing these letters have been the very people who make the paper itself.
On Twitter (or X, who cares), there are whole accounts — some quite popular — devoted to getting mad at, or at least making fun of, the Times. The dumbest of these is NYT Pitchbot, which posts tired fake headlines dozens of times a day, interspersed with screenshots of real headlines that the account-holder apparently thinks are self-parodies. The mastermind of this inane project is a math professor. No, really.
Another account — run by a lawyer whom you’d think had better things to do — posts punctuation and other stylistic errors in Times articles. Another posts when online headlines change, with the implication that the changes result from some craven desire to cover tracks. The author of that account has evidently never heard of A/B testing.
I saw a few boneheads in late June and early July complain that the Times was overly focused on (accurate!) perceptions that Joe Biden was not up for the task of campaigning for a second term as president. “How come they never focus on Donald Trump’s cognitive and moral failings?? Hmmmmm???” these doofuses would ask. Well, for one thing, the paper spent years doing exactly that, day in and day out. For another, on the day Trump accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency, the Times published a long and detailed editorial about Trump’s unfitness for office.
These critics want the news reported immediately, with perfect accuracy, and they want it to be free. You’ve heard of “fast, good, and cheap: pick two?” The people who get worked up about the newspaper (I don’t think it’s accurate to call them “readers”) demand all three.
In fact, they want one more thing: They want the news to validate, at every moment, their pre-existing beliefs. Any departure from what they “already know” is a betrayal.
Most of the people who get Mad Online at the Times seem to be liberals. (Conservatives hate the paper, too, but for different reasons.) I suspect some liberals would say they’re “not mad, just disappointed” that “their” paper doesn’t always seem to be on their side. That it sometimes publishes bad news for liberals. These people do not understand what a modern newspaper aims to do.
But people on the left get mad at the paper, too. This one guy who hosts a left-wing podcast got super mad last year when the Times published an expose of child labor across U.S. industries. This is the kind of journalism you would expect a left-wing podcast host to cheer. But no, this guy was mad because the Pro-Capital Corporate New York Times never used the word “crime” in its articles. I think his implication was that the Times didn’t want to offend a fellow Evil Corporation by suggeting that anyone there had committed something so gauche as a crime.
The reason the word “crime” didn’t appear in the articles is that what these companies did is not a crime in the U.S. As the articles said, violating child labor laws incurs a fine, a civil penalty, and a fairly light one at that. It is illegal but, technically, not a “crime.” The reporter also never said, “And it’s bad that there are no criminal penalties for breaking child labor laws,” because that is not a reporter’s job. It’s the reader’s job to come to that conclusion.
I think the guy may have actually been mad at the U.S. Criminal Code, but he directed his anger at the paper because, somehow, in his Twitter-destroyed brain, the Times and the Federal Government and corporate interests are all kind of the same thing.2
The Times’ reporting, by the way, prompted a “crackdown” on companies employing migrant children. “The maximum civil monetary penalty is currently just $15,138 per child, [Biden] administration noted in a press release, a figure that's ‘not high enough to be a deterrent,’” as reported in a Reuters article. If you were an activist opposed to child labor, you might find the Times articles useful, as you can bring them into your meetings with legislators — you know, the people who write criminal codes — to get these abhorrent practices defined as crimes.
Or, I guess, you can just get mad and hope your outrage makes the editors of the paper say your magic word. Either way, really.
I am not here merely trying to defend a paper that has published several essays of mine and has thus been good for my career. If everybody got mad in this way at the LA Times or the Frankfurter Allegemeines Zeitung, I would think that was dumb, too. Rather, my aim is to defend the mission of newspapers more generally and to criticize people who are smart enough to know that mission but are willfully misunderstanding it so they can feel the thrill of anger.3
The people who make Twitter accounts criticizing the Times don’t love journalism and think the Times is doing it badly. They love being mad, and the Times allows them to focus their anger, in much the same way as a superhero needs some object to focus his or her power. (Probably. I’m making some inferences and assumptions here about superheroes. If I’m wrong, please just let me be wrong; do not email me about this.)
I am also not saying, “Trust all institutions without question.” Come on, you know better than that. I’m saying, it’s dumb to get mad at the paper when you could get mad at the thing the paper is reporting. It’s also dumb to get mad at the paper when you don’t even know what the paper says.
In the case of the “Trump agrees to debate” story, the headline that made the retired political scientist so mad was an early one. At first, the story simply reported that Trump said he had agreed with Fox News to have a debate at a date and venue different from what he had previously agreed to. “It was unclear early Saturday whether Ms. Harris had agreed to the debate and its terms,” the article read.
“Agrees to” was the wrong verb for the headline, though I can see how a headline writer in a rush might use it, since “said … that he agreed with” is the verb in the first sentence. The Times soon changed the verb in the headline to “proposes” and eventually added much more reporting, adding two other names to the byline. In the print edition, the headline read, “Trump Backs Out of ABC Debate and Proposes One With Harris on Fox.” You can see how the story evolved here.
Stories like this change so often, and sometimes feature not-the-exact-right-word in headlines because an article in a twenty-first-century newspaper is no longer a static thing. We all know this. The retired political scientist knows this. But she pretended not to, so she can get mad and maybe get retweeted by a larger, even more disingenuous account. And it worked! The tweet has been viewed over two million times, and it’s now pinned to the top of her profile. She’s very proud of it.
The fast and evolving nature of news reporting is also why, I assume, Bloomberg broke the embargo deal with the White House and published the story about the prisoner swap — the “scoop” Ashley Parker complained about. There’s a lot of pressure to be first to report something like that; as you know, when big news breaks, people want to know it instantly.
Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief said that breaking the embargo could have endangered the swap. The editor said that, owing to the incident, he disciplined several staff members and fired the reporter.
If you think the embargo represents corporate media cozying up to political power, fine, but know that the alternative is that the public would not have known about the prisoner swap until it was announced by the politically powerful, with media scrambling to figure out what happened after the fact.
The reason stories get published fast and then updated is because readers demand it. If everyone were cool with receiving a single news dump once a day, then the stories would look more like the page-A17-of-the-print-edition Trump debate story. The price of constant, immediate news updates is patience. Humility, too. And the cost of a subscription. Being well-informed demands something of you.
Ultimately, I think people who get mad at the newspaper are making themselves unhappy. I want them to be happy.
Last year, I wrote a post about getting mad at viral essays, an all-too-common practice that I have engaged in but resolved to foreswear. I had intended the post to be about getting mad at the media generally, but I soon realized that getting mad at viral essays and getting mad at the newspaper were completely different phenomena.
I suspect a lot of people actually think this, and it helps explain a big chunk of the reflexive anti-institutionalism you hear people express nowadays. I think this idea is fascinating and stupid enough that it merits an entire post — someday.
This should also probably be a post for another day, but I have often thought that the pleasure of the sort of outrage people engage in today is ultimately moral self-congratulation: “If I’m not righteous, then why I’m so indignant?” The idea that you could be self-deceived about the thing provoking your anger never occurs to people.