American Journalism’s Most Successful Politician To Step Down From Running The New York Times

Outgoing New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, whose long-groomed successor, Managing Editor Joseph F. Kahn, was announced to the world on Tuesday, has been elite journalism’s most emblematic editor of the 21st century.

I do not intend that as a compliment.

The New York Times has far less kingmaking power, in both politics and culture, than it used to, but the Paper of Record still sets the tone for the newspaper industry and prestige journalism, and it is still capable of unmatched reportage, such as its valuable work from Ukraine. Decisions made (or not made) there end up getting replicated all over the media ecosystem.

There is much about Dean Baquet’s career to admire, not least his inheriting a shrinking news business on Eighth Ave. in 2014 and then walking out eight years later with an enviable boom in digital subscriptions, business acquisitions, and newsroom hires.

“We were doing buyouts and layoffs,” Baquet recalled at the end of a valedictory New Yorker interview in February. “So I do take credit for helping to transform the New York Times into a place that could survive and thrive, the way it is now….I do think that I helped make the New York Times a great investigative paper. I would argue the best investigative paper, whether it’s the air-strike stories or it’s getting Trump’s taxes….We are more visual. What did I not get done? Frankly, if I look at the list of things I wanted to accomplish back then, I think we did pretty well. I can’t think of anything big we didn’t pull off.”

Baquet has never lacked for self-regard, particularly when loftily defending “the best paper in the country” (as he also referred to the L.A. Times, erroneously, back when he edited that paper 16 years ago) from arrows slung from lower perches on the journalistic totem pole. That institutional haughtiness—most irritating to faster-moving competitors the Grey Lady might vaguely reference in follow-up coverage but almost never hyperlink—has extended to reporters challenging the paper’s marquee work.

When Reason‘s Jim Epstein re-reported and cut to ribbons a 2015 Times Pulitzer-bait series (“The Price of Nice Nails“) about alleged worker abuses at the immigrant-run nail salons so many of the paper’s professional-class female readers like to frequent, it was Baquet’s hand-waving dismissal of Reason as an illegitimate source of reporting that kept any people at the paper from publicly acknowledging their mistakes for more than a week.

“Until now, The Times has not responded to that series because editors believe they defended the nail salon investigation fully [to a previous critique] and because they think the magazine, which generally opposes regulation, is reporting from a biased point of view,” then–Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote. “The editors objected to many elements of Mr. Epstein’s reporting, including his apparent defense of practices that allow undocumented or illegal immigrants to work in salons.”

Biases in any direction (including the Times‘) are ultimately irrelevant to a truth claim. Were the salons’ help-wanted ads in Chinese newspapers translated and portrayed accurately in The New York Times, or not? Sullivan (though not her bosses) eventually conceded: “In places, the two-part investigation went too far in generalizing about an entire industry. Its findings, and the language used to express them, should have been dialed back—in some instances substantially.” Oh.

This minor exchange foreshadows a few consistent themes during Baquet’s 8-year tenure at the top of journalism’s priesthood: the less-than-collegial engagement with criticism, the retreat to invoking noble motives when defending inferior work. (Sullivan praised he paper’s “admirable intentions in speaking for underpaid or abused workers”—many of whom, incidentally, were soon out of a job thanks to a Times-inspired state crackdown.) And instead of operating on clearly articulated journalistic or administrative standards, the paper, and especially Baquet, conducted a kind of constantly recalibrating balancing test where smaller transgressions and untruths collided with larger narrative or historical concerns, subjecting difficult publishing and personnel decisions to the transitory passions of an increasingly activist staff.

In these areas Baquet frequently found himself straddling the generational divide in his own newsroom, as the younger cohort demanded the “moral clarity” of describing malevolent actors (usually Republicans) with maximally negative adjectives, helping in the process to push out a series of quality journalists presumed to have retrograde views and workplace manners.

Anguished and Hamlet-like as he was in those moments—I dare you to read all the way to the end of this August 2019 transcript of an all-staff Times meeting mostly about a single headline—Baquet did pull off the political trick of both yielding to and pushing back somewhat against the mob, which (along with some charisma) allowed him to serve out his term all the way to the mandatory Times editor-retirement age of 65. At a time when social upheaval was producing serial defenestrations at senior cultural institutions, Baquet sticks out for surviving.

“Baquet,” Politico media columnist Jack Shafer observed this week, “was a masterful politician while in office.” Seconded New York‘s Shawn McCreesh: “Baquet is an operator, a politician who likes being liked.”

“Politician” is usually not a journalistic term of endearment, redolent as it is with slipperiness, an eagerness to please, and shifting principle on a dime for purposes of expediency. These tendencies and more contributed to the two main ways