By Perry Bacon Jr., Illustration: Washington Post Illustration/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, April 20, 2022
Two of America’s most important news outlets, CNN and the New York Times, are signaling that they will continue and even increase some of the both sides-ism, false equivalence and centrist bias that has long impaired coverage of U.S. politics and therefore our democracy itself. I hope they reconsider.
In recent interviews, outgoing New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and his replacement, Times managing editor Joe Kahn, have emphasized that the paper must be “independent.” Baquet, in a memo he wrote before his departure, urged Times staffers not to use Twitter too much. CNN executives are suggesting that the network must return to largely covering “hard news.” Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav, who oversees CNN, has announced that the network should not be involved in “advocacy.” Incoming CNN chief executive Chris Licht, in a tweet on Monday, announced that he would no longer be using Twitter.
Being independent, not doing advocacy, covering hard news and not being overly obsessed with Twitter all sound like generic, noncontroversial notions. But in the context of U.S. news and politics today, these comments have unstated but important meanings. Twitter has become code for “the cultural left” or “highly-educated liberals.” Baquet and Licht want to make clear that their news outlets are not captured by those mind-sets.
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