New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn has disclosed that at some points in recent months the publication has been publishing a new story about Donald Trump on average every half hour.
But responding to questions about whether Trump had been purposely overwhelming the news agenda, Kahn insisted journalists “have to face that reality” that what the US president does is always newsworthy.
Kahn was appearing on a panel at the third annual Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit discussing whether publishers would “fight or fold” in its skirmishes with the president.
Moderator and The News Agents presenter Jon Sopel asked the guests whether Trump had been creating “attention deficit disorder” with his flurry of activity, noting that the preceding weekend alone had seen him “talking about himself as pope, reopening Alcatraz, tariffs on films, Harvard spending cuts, won’t seek a third term, doesn’t know whether he needs to obey the constitution, the NFL draft will have to happen in Washington DC, illegal immigrants will be given $1,000 to go home, et cetera”.
Alessandra Galloni, the editor-in-chief of Reuters, responded: “I do not think we’re doing too much on Donald Trump. He is remaking the world order. He is remaking the world economic order, the world trade order, the geopolitical order, and so we have to cover it. It is really important.”
Kahn appeared to agree, responding: “The president of the United States – for us, for many media organisations – will always be able to make news. You just have to face that reality.
“Nobody’s going to make the decision to stop covering Donald Trump – deporting people to Libya is the latest initiative, and that’s a story. It’s real, it’s a threat, we’re going to cover it.
“There are days in which I think, on average, we’re doing a Donald Trump story every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day.”
Referring to the exclusion of the Associated Press from the Oval Office and changes to the White House press pool system to remove the privileged position of the news agencies, Sopel asked Galloni what it felt like “to be told you can’t be part of this news information service”.
Galloni responded that Reuters remained part of the pool but that it had now expanded “to about 30 news organisations”, meaning “for example on Air Force One if the numbers don’t work out we’d be on about once every 30 times”.
But she said: “We provide news to every other news organisation in the world, and it is not easy for others to do that. So already we’re beginning to see that some news organisations are saying – ‘Well, we actually don’t have the money to pay to be on Air Force One, let’s let the news agencies do it and we’ll get it anyway’. So we’re going to have to see how that actually shapes up.”
Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, was speaking on the same panel and said it was not true that news coverage was failing to connect with the public amid the loud information environment, noting that “in the first few months of the Trump second term, his approval ratings have only moved in one direction. The information, the news coverage, is still seeping through to many Americans, and that’s why I find myself weirdly bullish in this conversation.”
Kahn agreed, saying “there’s still a lot of good reporting that breaks through even in this environment, and that’s what we need to double and triple down on…
“What I think we need more of are beat reporters who are well-sourced, who are going deeper behind the story, who are doing accountability journalism and all this stuff, and who are breaking stories, breaking news. And those things still break through.”
New York Times ‘in a particularly advantageous position’
Khan referred to a story the NYT broke revealing the Pentagon had set up a briefing for Elon Musk about a potential future war with China.
“Donald Trump read about the planned briefing in The New York Times, and he stopped it from happening. So even in real time, even with this administration, if you break stories that matter, they can still break through. They can even still break through, in some occasions, to the president himself, who can learn things about his own officials, his own administration, from the press.”
He claimed his organisation was also breaking through across partisan lines: “There’s a widespread assumption that our audience skews left. But the truth is we have a lot of evidence that we have large numbers of readers and subscribers in red states, and even in the reddest counties in the United States – and that we can do journalism that reaches them, both in text, in newsletter form, and increasingly in video form, when it’s done in a way that travels well on social media.
“People will react to news and information that’s relevant to them when it’s presented in the form that they want to consume it, when they understand who the journalist is. We’re trying to put our journalists more front and centre… and we’re speaking in more conversational language.”
Kahn said the legal and economic issues facing journalism meant “it is a tougher environment than it was ten years ago” as Trump’s first presidential campaign began, but he felt The New York Times was “in a particularly advantageous position at the moment, to be honest.
“We always talk about the word independence – there are many independent media organisations, but we are genuinely independent. We don’t have a parent company that has extended interests that need M&A approval, that needs broadcast regulatory approval. We don’t have billionaire owners with lots of other interests that Donald Trump might find a way they interfere with.
“We don’t get any revenue from the government – literally no revenue from the government. We don’t get any advertising revenue. We no longer, under Donald Trump, get a dollar of subscription revenue directly from government agencies. We get nothing. So they have no leverage to call on us, and we have family ownership that is determined to pursue the mission of the newsroom.”
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