(Daily Caller) A top editor at the New York Times suggested to Semafor that the White House wants the outlet to act like a communist propaganda arm for President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election.
Those close to President Joe Biden have previously thought that the NYT has been “failing” in its coverage by not being more favorable to the White House, according to Politico. New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn responded in an interview with Semafor to complaints from Biden allies that the outlet does not see its role in the media “as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.”
“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House,” Khan said.
“We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?” he continued.
Same topic. Days apart. With limited exceptions, the @nytimes continues to fail the American people in covering the most important election for American democracy in 150+ years. pic.twitter.com/T2FIbTUmPg
— TJ Ducklo (@TDucklo) April 6, 2024
Pravda is a Russian newspaper that served for nearly a century as a propaganda apparatus for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Xinhua is one of the preeminent state-owned media outlets now serving the Chinese Communist Party.
Politico’s report previously detailed a feud developing between the NYT and the White House over the outlet’s coverage of Biden and his administration. Some aides close to the president reportedly see the upcoming presidential election as “an existential choice for the country” and such a viewpoint has encouraged officials to criticize the NYT’s coverage, Politico reported.
As a result of the tension, some NYT reporters told Politico that they had been cut off from their sources because of a story they had written.
