The New York Times building in New York
The venerable New York Times — the “gray lady” of American journalism that not only determines what’s news but sets the standard for how it should be reported — has been describing the upcoming midterms as if it were a competition between two equally passionate and roughly equivalent sides.
For example, in describing the recent debate between the two candidates vying to represent Michigan in the Senate, Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, the Times offered its readers an analysis of social media feeds —“one curated for a left-wing audience and one for a right-wing audience.”
The Times did this by collecting more than 13,000 posts from X, and then — using a social media analytics company — categorizing the posts according to their apparent political leanings and whether they were “personal attacks and criticism” or concerned a particular issue area.
Then the Times presented it all in a vertical graph, starting with the beginning of the debate at the top and the end at the bottom, with responses to El-Sayed on the left side and responses to Rogers on the right.
What did the Times report that might be useful to its readers? It turned out that “viewers following the event on social media likely came away with two very different impressions, depending on their own political inclinations.”
Well, duh. People choose social media depending on their political inclinations to begin with.
The Times then suggested that the two very different impressions were roughly equal, both in the degree to which they distorted the truth and in how troubling we should find those distortions.
“An algorithm attuned to Democrats … served up commentary depicting the Democratic candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, as a firebrand who delivered quick-witted attacks that left his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, scrambling. A feed curated for Republicans … created an impression of Mr. Rogers as calm and composed onstage as he landed blistering critiques of Dr. El-Sayed.”
When the candidates talked about the Iran war, according to the Times, “left-leaning users” praised “Dr. El-Sayed’s opposition to the conflict” while “right-leaning users” posted “personal criticism of Dr. El-Sayed’s Muslim beliefs.” As the debate shifted to the economy, “left-leaning users” posted about affordability, while the posts of “right-leaning users” were “often laden with personal attacks against Dr. El-Sayed.”
As the debate progressed, the Times reported, these “dueling narratives” became more pronounced. When Dr. El-Sayed again referred to the economy, left-leaning accounts “posted about the high cost of living” while Rogers’s supporters posted that “high gas prices are only temporary.” When Dr. El-Sayed talked about improving healthcare, Rogers’s supporters expressed “skepticism about Dr. El-Sayed’s medical background.” (The Times then noted that although Dr. El-Sayed has a medical degree from Columbia University, he has never practiced medicine.)
So what is the average reader or voter supposed to take away from this so-called analysis?
Note for starters that all the responses analyzed by the Times were on Musk’s “X” — which already leans authoritarian.
Beyond this is circular reasoning. People identified as "left-leaning users” were assumed to be “left-leaning” because their comments showed they were for El-Sayed and against Rogers, and “right-leaning users” were “right-leaning” because they were for Rogers and against El-Sayed.
The worst ad populum fallacy is that both sides deserve equal weight. They engaged in “dueling narratives” and they posted about the same number of comments. Even the graph represented a kind of equivalence.
Rubbish. Doesn’t TheNew York Times have a responsibility to tell readers that Rogers has been a rubber-stamp for Trump, including Trump’s war in Iran; that he voted for the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, and surveillance legislation; that he has a political record of suppressing Black votes in Detroit and across Michigan; and that he has long represented corporate interests over the interests of average working people?
And doesn’t the Times also have a responsibility to tell its readers that El-Sayed takes the opposite position on these — and is pushing for a single-payer healthcare system, breaking up large healthcare monopolies, taxing billionaire wealth and regulating AI and data centers, banning corporate campaign contributions, ending gerrymandering, reforming the Supreme Court, and ending U.S. military aid to Israel?
Two weeks from an election that will determine whether guardrails will be erected against America’s first dictator, and what does TheNew York Times do? Depict it like any other contest between America’s two major political parties — in which they present “dueling narratives” from their “left-leaning” or “right-leaning” perspectives.
This depiction is irresponsible and dangerously fraudulent. Don’t accept it.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.