Let’s state this right at the outset: The New York Times has produced a remarkable run of indispensable journalism about Donald Trump’s authoritarian designs for a second term. The paper has exposed Trump’s schemes to unleash the Justice Department on political enemies, to gut the bureaucracy and stock it with loyalists, to functionally wreck our intelligence agencies by turning them into armies of back-alley political warfare, to unleash a draconian and deeply sadistic crackdown on immigrants, to hobble international institutions and empower the world’s autocrats and dictators, and much more.

These pieces are executed with great professionalism and revelatory power. Anyone who finds the considerable amount of time it takes to consume this journalism will come away deeply informed about—and profoundly rattled by—the specter of authoritarian rule that haunts our country, should Trump win.

Can all this be true even as it’s also true that the Times often makes editorial decisions that risk obscuring all of this for ordinary readers? Yes, both can be true. And it is mystifying that the executive editor of the Times appears unwilling to take this notion seriously.

Joe Kahn recently sat for an interview with Semafor’s Ben Smith about criticism of the paper. Smith cited a (somewhat misrepresented) claim from Democratic strategist Dan Pfeiffer that the Times doesn’t see its job as “saving democracy,” and asked:

Why don’t you see your jobs as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?

The problem here is obvious: This question reduces criticism of the Times to a blanket demand for consciously hostile treatment of Trump—and consciously favorable treatment of President Biden.

Unsurprisingly, Kahn easily batted this away, because he correctly understood the question in exactly those terms:

One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters.

Democracy, said Kahn, requires the media to inform people about their electoral choices, not to “prevent” people from voting for Trump or to become like “Xinhua News Agency or Pravda”:

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its role as a source of impartial information to help people vote—that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate.… It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.

Kahn’s answer is........

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