Isaac Chotiner/ The New Yorker
In her new book, “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts,” Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the Times, examines how four large American news organizations are surviving the age of the Internet and Donald Trump. Abramson’s accounts of Vice, BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, and the Times are filled with her own reporting and, in the case of the Times, her own experiences. Abramson, who became the paper’s first female executive editor, in 2011, was fired in 2014 for what she describes as a combination of reasons: her “less than stellar” management style, the “unfair double standard applied to many women leaders,” and her resistance to more communication between the business and editorial sides of the newspaper, which an internal “innovation report” had found was necessary to succeed in the digital age.
I spoke by phone with Abramson on Friday afternoon. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether the Times is chasing clicks with biased Trump coverage, Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, and the compromises that news organizations are forced to make to survive in 2019.
“I didn’t think technological change should sweep in moral change,” you write in the book, about your firing. At the beginning of 2019, has it?
Defining “moral” is somewhat difficult.It’s your word. That’s why I chose it.I know. It is my word and has everything to do with not putting somewhat misleading headlines to gain clickbait and scale audience, because that in turn brings advertising. I think that that is a kind of both journalistic and moral change that worries me. I don’t know.
When you said this [about moral change] in the book, you were actually referring to the events around your firing, in 2014. Is your biggest concern now about moral change in the news about how we respond to Trump?
It’s a concern. I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest one. A very big concern that is illustrated in the book is that things are going well right now for places like the New York Times, where digital subscriptions have greatly increased.
You write in the book, “Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative.” You later call the Times’ news pages “unmistakably anti-Trump.” Do you think the Times is running anti-Trump stories for the financial reward?
You know, I think that is not the main reason, but it’s kind of an implicit reward for running so much heavy Trump coverage.
How do you think liberal bias in the Times manifests itself?
It manifests itself in some of the tweets of the reporters, which are very loaded. It manifests itself when those reporters go on MSNBC and CNN and appear on panels with partisans and the questions they are asked are very loaded. People like Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman are very careful in what they say, but sometimes the lead-in questions by the hosts are so loaded with opinion that it creates an appearance of overly loaded and partisan coverage.
Any sections or writers or pieces that jump to mind?
I feel Trump deserves it but that a presentation that was just a little bit toned down sometimes would be just as effective.
O.K., so, to return to technology, what’s your biggest fear about technological change and journalism?
I would say the biggest worry I have is the dominance of social-media platforms as the distributors—and, effectively, publishers—of news. So many readers are only exposed to news stories through their news feed on Facebook or on Instagram or Snapchat.
In talking about your experience of being fired by the Times, and why it happened, you write that you “fought back,” essentially, against the business side. You add, “Perhaps my principles were too rigid; perhaps to save the Times the old strictures needed to be relaxed.” Have they been relaxed?
Saved for perpetuity? I don’t know, but certainly it is flourishing right now, with four million paying subscribers, and I think there are at least fifteen hundred people on the news side of the Times. They were in cutting, cutting mode still when I was there, and even while I was writing the book all the copy editors were cut. Its future looks very solid, which I think is very important because I consider the Times to be really the indispensable news organization globally. It has to survive.
Do you think it only survived because its standards have lowered? You talk about the fired copy editors, etc.
No. I think it has . . . No. Ask me that again. I don’t think that and I didn’t write that. The strictures I am talking about are the ones that have always kept the journalists at a distance from things like conferences and other sponsored events. Because of changes in what people want—they want to know the reporters as personalities, and come to live events or go on trips where they mix with them—the truth is that the Times very badly needed new sources of revenue.
Should you have gone along with some things, or has the Times lost something?
I couldn’t go along with those things, because they just were in conflict with my beliefs as a journalist. But obviously most of my career was spent in the age of newspapers, where there was a more clearly defined wall between the business side and news side.
How big a mistake was it to get rid of the public editor?
I think the public editor was a needed person and a needed institution at the Times, because the newsroom has always been hierarchical, and I imagine it still is.