Media Nation

By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Tag: Maggie Haberman

The progressive left takes to social media to battle with The New York Times

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On May 20, 2024

In Media

Maggie Haberman at the University of Louisville in 2023. Public domain photo by uoflphoto3.

Ask ordinary people whether they think The New York Times leans left, and nine out of 10 will tell you yes. The Times’ first public editor, Daniel Okrent, wrote a famous piece years ago with the headline “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” His lead: “Of course it is.” The website Media Bias/Fact Check rates the Times as having a “slight to moderate liberal bias,” although it also assesses its factual accuracy as “high,” the second-highest rating. My own view is that the Times’ news judgment is shaped in part by its embrace of cultural liberalism, but that its day-to-day political coverage is timid and marred by both-sides-ism at a moment when the Republican Party has devolved into authoritarianism.

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Now let me tell you about Threads. The Meta-owned would-be replacement for Twitter/X is my main stop these days for short-form, text-based social media. And it is filled with progressives who deride the Times as blinded by pro-corporate bias and fealty to Donald Trump. My feed is bombarded with progressives (that is, people I would regard as being somewhere left of liberal) who proudly announce that they’re canceling their subscriptions because of some perceived breach of left-leaning orthodoxy. They were particularly apoplectic over a recent interview that executive editor Joe Kahn gave to Semafor in which Kahn said, among other things:

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.

I will grant you that Kahn’s performance was suboptimal (democracy is kind of important) but liberal critics of the Times lost their minds over it. It happened again this week when it was revealed that reporter Maggie Haberman, a longtime target of the left, had coordinated with Michael Cohen back when he was Trump’s goon so that she could make sure she’d get a quote in time for her deadline. As a result, Haberman came under brutal assault on Threads — and apparently on Twitter, too, as described by CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy:

The message Cohen sent Haberman said Trump had approved him responding to the Stormy Daniels allegations back in 2018. “Please start writing and I will call you soon,” Cohen wrote. Some on the left have twisted that message to assert it is proof that Haberman takes orders from the Trump campaign. Which as Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey pointed out is “patently insane.” As Jeffery explained, “Guys, texting with sources is how you get the inside dope and ‘start writing’ isn’t an order from Trump HQ, it’s like, start your process and I’ll maybe feed you something.”

In response to all this, I posted, “Threads is driving me back to the NYT.” And though I got some likes, I also got this response: “Hope that’s sarcasm.” It was not. I’ll go so far as to say that we know more about Trump because of Maggie Haberman than perhaps any other journalist, and that the Times is still a great paper, though deeply flawed. And no, I’m not canceling my subscription. I wouldn’t even consider it.

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Did Maggie Haberman withhold news in order to sell books? It’s complicated.

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On October 12, 2022

In Media

https://youtu.be/pDZen5jyU_0

Longtime “Beat the Press” watchers and listeners know that one of our obsessions over the years has been news reporters who withhold juicy details in order to save them for the books they’re writing. It’s something that our host, Emily Rooney, has brought up a number of times, with Bob Woodward a frequent target of her pique. And there’s no question that it’s a problem.

The latest journalist to come under criticism for this practice is Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, whose new book about Donald Trump, “Confidence Man,” has some previously unheard revelations — chief among them Trump’s insistence that he wasn’t going to step down from the presidency after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “I’m just not going to leave,” Trump supposedly told an unnamed aide, which drew a rant from Susie Banikarim on the “Beat the Press” podcast a few weeks ago. “Now that is information I think the American public probably needed to know,” she said. “It is an important piece of the puzzle, and I just I think it’s depressing when journalists do this. It feels so cynical.”

I agree — with some caveats. I want to draw your attention to this excellent analysis by Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, who defends Haberman and argues that much of the outrage being directed against her by the likes of “Never Trump” conservative Steve Schmidt and others is grounded in the mistaken notion that if only this factoid or that aside had been exposed in real time, the entire Trump presidency would have come crashing down.

“For six years running,” Wemple writes, “Trump’s fiercest critics have been pining for the perfect scandal that would harpoon his political viability once and for all — even though promising candidates, such as the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape and his suggestion to inject bleach as a COVID treatment, have fallen short.” To that I would add Trump’s trashing of John McCain’s war heroism and his mocking of a disabled reporter, neither of which stopped him from defeating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College in 2020.

I mean, come on. Does anyone really think that if Haberman had reported Trump’s threat not to leave the White House at the time he issued it (she told Wemple she didn’t have it until later), then congressional Republicans would have stood up as one and demanded Trump’s resignation? After all, their outrage over his stoking of an attempted insurrection not long after that lasted maybe 72 hours before they all fell back in line.

Haberman also told Wemple that she did emerge from her book-writing cocoon several times to report stories that she and her editors at the Times believed were too important to sit on, including Trump’s habit of flushing documents down the toilet and concerns that Mike Pence’s chief of staff raised to the Secret Service that the vice president might be in danger during his visit to Capitol Hill to count the vote as a result of Trump’s violent rhetoric. She dropped that one just before a meeting of the Jan. 6 commission. So she gets it.

Haberman has been a lightning rod among anti-Trumpers for a long time. Their complaint is that she’s supposedly traded access in return for toning down her reporting. I can’t see it. As far as I can tell, her critics want her to layer on the pejoratives in her reporting, but that’s not her job. Whenever I see her byline, I dive right in, knowing that I’m going to learn something new and possibly important about Trump — who is, after all, an ongoing threat to our democracy. And Haberman gives us a lot to read. As NPR media reporter David Folkenflik noted on the public radio program “On the Media,” Haberman bylined or co-bylined 599 stories in 2016. Her productivity is a source of astonishment.

Speaking of Folkenflik, you should listen to his interview with her, in which he presses her pretty hard on the matter of withholding information for her book. She pushes back just as hard. It’s a feisty and enlightening exchange. Her interview with Trevor Noah, which I’ve embedded above, is also worth your time, though Noah gives her the softball treatment.

The New York Times undermines its own story mocking Trump’s Mexico deal

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On June 9, 2019

In Media

It looks like this front-page New York Times story that has drawn so much attention is almost a complete botch. Headlined “Mexico Agreed to Take Border Actions Months Before Trump Announced Tariff Deal,” the premise is that President Trump got nothing out of his tariff standoff and subsequent agreement with Mexico to increase border security. Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman write:

The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.

The story goes into considerable detail in an attempt to show that there’s nothing new about the U.S.-Mexico agreement, and that Trump is boasting about it solely as  face-saving gesture.

But wait! Inside the paper, under the headline “Mexico Sets Domestic Priorities Aside to Meet Terms of U.S. Trade Deal,” Azam Ahmed reports that Mexico is going to considerable lengths to meet the terms of Trump’s demands in an effort to head off those tariffs. Ahmed writes:

Under an agreement hammered out in marathon negotiations with American officials over the last few days, Mexico agreed to send up to 6,000 National Guard troops to its southern border with Guatemala. It also agreed to allow more asylum applicants to wait in Mexico while their cases are pending in the United States.

Further down in the story, there’s this:

But as Mr. Trump’s hectoring of Mexico on migration has increased, so, too, has the willingness of the López Obrador administration to take measures to calm its northern neighbor.

After initially saying the Remain in Mexico program was a pilot, Mexican officials quickly expanded it to new cities. Now, as part of the deal on Friday, they have agreed to expand it across the entire border.

Hat tip to Daniel Radosh of “The Daily Show,” who tweeted this out on Saturday:

And yes, indeed, one of them has to be incorrect. Given the level of detail in the second story, I’d say it’s the front-page splash that needs correcting.

If nothing else, this ought to quiet those on the left who’ve been accusing Haberman of being in the tank for Trump.

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