NYT: “Our Readers Who Want Donald Trump To Go Away Suddenly Thought, Bob Mueller Is Not Going To Do It”
A little peek inside the operations at the New York Times, courtesy of a media pressure campaign against the paper, typical of the kind being conducted by the CJR’s best and brightest.
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said recently that, after the Mueller report, the paper has to shift the focus of its coverage from the Trump-Russia affair to the president’s alleged racism.
In the beginning of the Trump administration, the Times geared up to cover the Russia affair, Baquet explained. “Chapter 1 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? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. 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.”
But then came the Mueller report, with special counsel Robert Mueller failing to establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to fix the 2016 election. “The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet continued. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”
After selling readers a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories backed by promises to take down Trump by accusing him of being a Russian spy, we need a second act.
Let’s call him a racist.
What’s striking though is that Baquet effectively admits that the average Times reader wants Trump’s head and that the paper catered to it.
“The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet continued. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’
That’s obviously exactly what the paper does. But also what it denies.
And Baquet’s evaluation of the average intelligence of the Timesian reader is also hilarious. After selling them on the idea that Mueller would destroy Trump, he accurately describes the sucker doing a double take.
Time to pitch racism to him. If Russia won’t take down Trump, maybe accusing him of racism will.
Just think how many journalism prizes the Times can win for falsely accusing Trump of racism after falsely accusing him of working for Russia.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
