Anyone would be rightfully nervous about whether our national media are prepared to cover this year’s midterm elections, which may be the most consequential in U.S. history. Most outlets have corporate owners, and their interests are not yours. Many are owned by right-wing allies of the Trump administration: Newsmax; One America News; Fox News and the rest of the Murdoch empire; Sinclair; Blaze Media; the Daily Caller; The Daily Wire; The Free Press; the Ellisons of CBS and TikTok; Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times; Elon Musk at his social media platform; Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post; and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta.
And then there’s The New York Times, the country’s greatest newspaper in content and number of readers. While other media struggle, it reports an ongoing rise in total subscribers (to 12.3 million last last year, a 26 percent jump in profit from a year earlier) boosted by products such as recipes, games and a product review site. The Times had 625.3 million online visits in December, trailed by CNN at 405.9 million, Fox at 226.4 million and USA Today at 142.6 million, according to the U.K. site Press Gazette.
By deciding which stories to cover and how, the Times’ nearly 2,000 journalists (or as many as 2,800, depending where you look) have the power to set the agenda for international discussion and even trigger FBI investigations, special counsels and Congressional hearings – not to mention wars.
That’s a concern when editors choose to flood their pages with stories triggered by right-wing propagandists and billionaires.
Coverage in the past few years of hot-button topics, ranging from the qualifications of Harvard leader Claudine Gay to trans health care to the beliefs of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and the age and health of president Joe Biden, have left readers on the political left agape, gnashing their teeth or rolling their eyes.
If you ask leaders and journalists at the Times, though, they may shrug and deny a bias, goal or influence.
“We still have a lot of those [stories that] can drive the conversation and help frame the debate,” Times executive editor Joe Kahn acknowledged to Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio in October 2024. But “we’re deeply committed, as you know well, to be a nonpartisan source of information.”
Kahn rejects the idea that the Times goes on “crusades” and insists stories about Biden being old and frail were “nothing of the sort. We were covering what we should be covering” and it was “an important thing to do, whether or not it ended up being helpful to Donald Trump. It was important for the American people to understand that leading media in the country were paying very close attention to the fitness and the health of the person who is the leader of the country, who has access to the nuclear football.” He called this an example of how “facing the reality and the facts often helps make better decisions.”
In Kahn’s assessment five months earlier in Semafor, the paper had “some coverage about [Biden’s] frailty and his age” but frequent readers are “not going to see that much” on the topic.
Yet here’s how the organization Fair summed up a University of Pennsylvania Computational Social Science Lab study in March 2024 looking at top stories on the Times homepage:
In the week after special counsel Robert Hur cited how old Biden was as part of his decision not to indict him for mishandling classified documents, the Times ran at least 26 stories on the topic of Biden’s elderliness – “of which one of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern” [but] just 10 articles on [Trump threats to pull out of Nato] made it to the top of its homepage.
About two weeks after this burst of coverage, CSS Lab noted a second wave of Times stories about how old Biden was – based on “the NYT’s own poll that pointedly asked respondents about the exact issue they had just spent the previous month covering relentlessly … None of this second wave of articles acknowledges the existence of the first wave or the possibility that poll respondents might simply have been parroting the NYT’s own coverage back to them.”
The whipping up of a frenzy over Biden’s age might have felt familiar to one about Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2015. The Times did not try to argue that the way such stories manifest online is accidental, exactly. Kahn told The New Yorker’s Clare Malone in July 2024 that “multiple times a day, we’re debating” what goes at the top of The New York Times’ homepage.
“The depth of the New York Times’ coverage is a big part of what I do, what the leadership team does, what our news desk does,” Kahn said of online stories, and that includes headlines rewritten multiple times and stories tweaked to respond to reader outrage.
Yet he also argued: “What you’re implying is that there’s an old-school kind of hierarchical decision-making that we want to impose, and that’s not really the case at all.”
To sum up, setting and adjusting coverage is a role of the leadership team, but without hierarchical decision-making. Seems at best like a paradox; things are clearer from the perspective of former New York Times assignment editor Billie Sweeney. In a Jan. 1 interview with the Trans News Network describing Times coverage of trans issues as hostile and biased, Sweeney said “directives … came from the very top,” including from Kahn and managing editor Carolyn Ryan. (The Times disagreed.)
Even repeated apologies and mea culpas from the Times about past embarrassments don’t give its historians insight into a current, extended moment of derangement. When Times politics veteran Adam Nagourney came to the Harvard Book Store on Oct, 4, 2024, to talk about his “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn and the Transformation of Journalism,” he said he was “not sure” that he’d question the paper’s coverage of Biden’s age like he would Clinton’s email server because “it kind of got proved right. It was legitimate to raise questions about Biden’s age.” This response largely avoided a question about on how the Times chooses to focus its coverage.
Nagourney did acknowledge that the speed of online news reports can be problematic. “You can’t sit on the story anymore. You have to post it as soon as possible. And because of that, and this is a challenge for all news organizations, stuff can be wrong initially. A headline can be wrong, an emphasis can be wrong,” he said.
That’s the reason for the tweaks and changes to online headlines and copy as you read or reopen a link to a story.
Meanwhile, Nagourney said the front page of the Times’ print edition is a bad gauge for what it deems important. “You’ll talk to editors who are critical to putting out the paper every day and I don’t think they ever think about or look at the front page,” Nagourney said. For people who try to assess what the Times deems important by saying “‘Let’s see what the Times put on the front page today,’ I’m like, ‘Dude, yeah, that’s not how you judge what the Times is doing.’”
He ridiculed retired staffers who discuss the front page in a group on social media as “fighting the fights of 30 years ago” and the idea that the Times puts stories on Page 1 to “sell papers.” Times alum Rick Berke, serving as interlocutor, agreed from his perspective at Stat and The Boston Globe that being on the front page “doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
This is itself shocking news to generations of readers and even journalists who have come to understand – or even just inferred – that the most prominent, publicly visible parts of a newspaper are used to show what’s most important and interesting at that moment. It seems a good time to survey readers to see if they understand that the front pages they scan daily are a meaningless and unimportant assortment of stories and aren’t chosen to sell papers, including at the Times, which claims the largest print circulation of all seven-day newspapers. (That’s 253,000 sold weekdays and 623,000 on Sundays, according to annual reports to shareholders, compared with the Globe’s 66,086 reported in December by Dan Kennedy’s Media Nation.)
At the most powerful paper in the country, then, the editor says coverage can drive debate but is not a crusade. He says editors determine coverage, but not from the top down.
The paper’s historian says readers can’t take the most urgent but shifting online coverage too literally, but nor should they look for importance on the print edition’s front page where that online coverage is converted into a permanent statement about the news of the day, with carefully crafted headlines that cannot be changed.
As we head into an election that will be crucial to determining our country’s future, we’re in a state of quantum news at the nation’s most important publication, one in which all things are true or nothing is, and importance is immeasurable.
Feature image by Jon Tyson via Unsplash.
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