He acknowledges that people may have a different view of what the Times is, but he doesn’t blame the marketing. “It’s not because of the ads; it’s because Donald Trump has stirred up very powerful feelings among Americans. It’s made Americans, depending on your point of view, very angry and very mistrustful of institutions. And some may think newsrooms like the New York Times and the Washington Post are supposed to be Donald Trump’s adversaries or the leaders of the adversarial movement to take down Donald Trump.” The loudest proponent of that theory is, of course, Trump—which, oddly, aligns the president with some of the people who are most opposed to him.
This, of course, is just total bullcrap. Baquet is deliberately obfuscating. Those that hate the Times headline do NOT WANT the Times to be any sort of 'resistance'. But we do expect truth. We expect the Times to convey the truth of what is going on. And, in that, they have failed us. That is why we are upset.
So how does the Times negotiate the disconnect? “It is difficult,” Baquet says. “I think the way you do it is you just keep working, you keep trying to break stories, you try to do analysis that explains the moment we’re in, you try to diversify your staff to include different viewpoints. You just try to work very hard.”
If that sounds unsatisfying, it’s because Baquet, the first African-American executive editor of the Times, doesn’t see this moment in American history as particularly aberrant.
So foolish. I get his argument. But there has not been an open racist president of the US before, and not a party that is using racism to destroy our government to cut taxes on the rich. 2019 is a different moment than 1992. Baquet appears to not know much about history. The party realignment in the 1960s - so that Republicans are now the party of billionaires and racists - is what makes this moment difficult. And dangerous.
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