The New York Times’ standards paradox
In an internal memo, Times executive editor Joe Kahn chastised his contributors for their apt criticism of his paper’s deluge of anti-trans coverage.
A news outlet as robust and far-reaching as the New York Times will inevitably feature warring perspectives about convoluted subjects that require nuance, expertise and months of reportage to untangle. It would be unbefitting of public service journalism, for example, to only cover the drawbacks of artificial intelligence without enumerating its benefits. When it comes to human rights, however, namely the mere existence of transgender people in American society, the Times should have no moral incentive to fantasize about the problems inherent within such an unproblematic reality.
Since the moral panic surrounding transgender individuals became a primary focus of the far-right, the Times has unofficially deployed reporters and columnists to the beats of gender reassignment and pronoun policing. Authors with credible reputations have spent months interviewing questionable sources and penning features thousands of words long that treat outliers as if they are the norm. Op-ed provocateurs have come to the defense of anti-transgender influencers. And while not every story about transgender people in the Times is critical of some aspect of their presence — the outlet publishes guest essays to counterbalance the onslaught of articles with nonsensical theses — the gross obsessiveness on this topic suggests a heinous ideological bent at the top of the Times hierarchy.
Last week, nearly 1,000 contributors to the paper of record united to slam the publication’s anti-trans coverage in an open letter directed to the New York Times’ associate managing editor for standards Philip B. Corbett. The letter was well-sourced, providing historical context around the Times’ dehumanizing coverage of the LGBTQ population over time, including one column by William F. Buckley that called for people with HIV/AIDS to be forcibly tattooed. It named reporters Emily Bazelon and Katie Baker, who were responsible for writing stories that are directly leading to the removal of rights for transgender people. In the open letter, the authors argue, “The Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.”
Executive editor Joe Kahn responded via internal memo the next day, echoing the Times’ initial rejoinder and standing by longform stories from Bazelon and Baker — as well as more than a handful of others — fomenting the moral panic. He wrote of the contributors who signed the letter, “Participation in such a campaign is against the spirit of our ethics policy.” On Tuesday, dozens of Times reporters, led by Jeremy Peters, sent a letter to the president of the NewsGuild of New York Susan DeCarava, purporting that the criticism of the paper’s trans coverage had helped create “[a] workplace in which any opinion or disagreement about Times coverage can be recast as a matter of ‘workplace conditions.’” Presumably, these reporters were sticking up for their friends who were called out in the open letter. But in doing so, they’d failed to grapple with their rank hypocrisy — several haven’t shied away from political advocacy with the Times imprimatur — or come up with an adequate rebuttal for the research that laid out the Times’ sordid record chronicling the LGBTQ community.
The Times establishment has long held to the myth that it is unbiased, eschewing any notion that its coverage could in any way be framed by the lived experiences of its employees. The Peters letter retorts, “We are journalists, not activists.” But of course, every journalist is an activist and no reporter is unbiased. Bias reveals itself in the issues Times employees choose to devote their time to and the ones they ignore. Activism occurs any time a journalist submits a FOIA request or produces a revelatory nugget of reporting that results in tangible societal change. Signing the letter demanding better treatment of trans individuals in the pages of the Times is activism; so too is adding one’s name to the letter preserving the status quo.
It’s true the country has seen a rise in trans-identifying youth over the past few years, primarily due to the greater acknowledgement, acceptance and understanding of who they are. But that’s not what the Times’ rumination on this subject has sought to decipher. Instead, it has routinely functioned as a reactionary force to the constant stream of propaganda spouted by Republicans. An endless cycle on the negligible amount of young people detransitioning and college athletes causing infinitesimal discomfort by competing in a category that corresponds with their gender identity has given the public an excuse to believe that an increase in transgender individuals is a bad thing. The New York Times has fermented this mode of thought.
Kahn’s persistence that his contributors should not be allowed to publicly criticize his full-time employees, at a newspaper of all places, is ridiculous. Every work setting contains power dynamics. If the job of a journalist is to hold the powerful accountable, then these writers should not be reprimanded when they bring attention to oppressive and outmoded language and reporting tactics splattered in the same ink they use to break free of such conventions.