On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about a leaked transcript from a New York Times staff meeting in which they discuss how to cover the news for the next two years. Partial video and transcript below:
So let’s stick with the [New York] Times for a minute, right? After the shootings in El Paso and Dayton — the Dayton shooting doesn’t exist in the New York Times. They haven’t written a single thing about it because the Dayton shooting was committed by a leftist — whereas the El Paso shooting was committed by kind of a rightist — who was kind of an eco-terrorist, an eco-fascist. So without this environmental craziness on the Left he probably wouldn’t have been as crazy as he was. But let’s grant the New York Times that — as I’ve said repeatedly — white supremacy, or whatever you want to call it, is a disgusting philosophy. So I’ll condemn it, but that’s all the New York Times talks about. Only the El Paso shootings. Article, after article, after article. However, after the El Paso and the Dayton shooting, Donald Trump came out and condemned racism. He condemned the racism on both sides. So let’s play cut number six. This is Trump after the shootings.
TRUMP: The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate. In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.
So The New York Times runs the headline: “Trump Urges Unity Versus Racism.” And the readers of The New York Times, who are now all lefties, because who would read The New York Times except a satirist like me and a leftist, right? Who would read it because all it has is left-wing news? That’s all that’s in there, and a left-wing point of view just dominates the paper. It is not a newspaper anymore, it is a college rag basically selling socialism. But [the readers] got angry and they had to rewrite the headline to “Assailing Hate But Not Guns.” So we had to make sure that Donald Trump was somehow failing. …
So they have this meeting and, at the same time, one of their minor editors and a Deputy Washington Editor Jonathan Weisman is putting out some tweets that they interpreted as racist. They were just kind of dopey tweets saying that, you know, some of these urban candidates in the Midwest don’t actually represent the Midwest. You could understand what he was saying. But Roxane Gay, who is … just horrible. Her description is she’s a New York Times op-ed writer and other things, but her description is that she covers the “intersections of identity and culture.” Tells you everything you need to know about her. So she starts attacking this guy on Twitter. He gets demoted.
So they have to have a crisis meeting. Dean Baguette, or whatever his name is, The New York Times editor, calls a crisis meeting and then the reporters, so-called reporters, are up in arms, right. And this is what — Baquet? I guess it’s Baquet. Dean Baquet says he comes out and he’s apologizing for the fact that they had this headline and this guy was tweeting stuff and oh my gosh we’re not being tough enough. And he says the problem is that the story we just spent two years covering was crap. It was nonsense. And now we’re stuck on how to attack Trump. This is essentially what he says. I’m going to read you the transcript that was acquired by Slate:
BAQUET: We built our newsroom to cover one story.
He’s talking about the Russian collusion story.
BAQUET: And we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup.
Truly well? There was no story! The truth — if they had done it “truly well,” what they would have said is, oh the Democrats arranged this illegal investigation into a political campaign. Then when they lost, they turned it into an investigation into Russian collusion. All of it, all of it, utter nonsense. And so, that would have been covering it well, but instead they pumped up the Democrat point of view. And so that’s what they call it covering it “well.” And of course they got two Pulitzers for it because that’s what the Pulitzers are for. You know, here’s a Pulitzer for promoting the Democrats. All right. So he says we’ve covered it “truly well, now we have to regroup.” Why? Because the story was a hoax, right. [He continues], We have to…
BAQUET: …shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I’d love your help with that…This one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019.
He’s deciding what the news is. This is — the guy is in a newsroom deciding what the news is going to be. He doesn’t know who’s going to be tomorrow — it might be about Hong Kong. But it doesn’t matter, it’s about what it means to be an American in 2019.
BAQUET: It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred. But it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world.
As if, as if they will assign somebody with a different way of looking at the world, right?
BAQUET: We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.
He’s asking a bunch of Millennials — or actually younger than Millennials — he’s asking a bunch of kids, basically, what he’s supposed to put in the paper. What does he think they’re going to say? Is there one Republican among them? Is there one person who voted for Donald Trump? Is there one person who doesn’t share the attitude who has a different point of view? Has the attitude of the other half of the country — forget about it. So still, this is Dean “Baguette” still talking.
BAQUET: Chapter one of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom, but frankly for our readers was, “Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians and was there obstruction of justice?”
No question about whether that’s a valid story or not, just that’s what it was, that was the story — that was really hard story, by the way — and let’s not forget that we set ourselves up to cover that story, and I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story, and I think we covered that story better than anybody else — almost as well as the Brothers Grimm covered Hansel and Gretel — which was also made up…
BAQUET: The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy [expletive], Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons.
He wasn’t guilty. Because the whole thing was exposed as exactly what he said it was, exactly what Donald Trump said it was. [Baquet] says we’ve got to change.
BAQUET: We’ve got to change. I mean, the vision for the coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the…
I mean, it’s so completely reactive. Trump defines their news coverage.