This is from May 7th, but I hadn’t seen it.
Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.
He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.
But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party
. . . And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.
Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.
Beyond that what does he think fascists will do to the heads of the heads of newspapers they don’t like???
“Why are you coming for us? We stayed nonpartisan!”
“Yeah, that means you were against us 50% of the time. Now march to the camps.”
It’s much worse than 50%. Non partisan is pro establishment. And the establishment doesn’t give a damn about most Americans most of the time.
A key factor in supporting fascism is a deep lack of foresight.
Or thinking you can “control” the fascist leader. It’s a mistake the German right made, and there’s a similar dynamic of underestimating Trump as well.
Both parties are doing this with each other. Shit is about to go down.
He’s thinking about the benefits to those the administration does like. Goebbels was a brilliant manipulator and slow boiled the frog in Germany until he had normalized what was happening. Trump and Putin both need enormous machines to keep their operation running.