Why You Should Not Pay Money to the "New York Times": Dan Drezner Brings an Example to Our Attention
You are not their customer. The opportunity to hack your brain is the product they sell to their sources. Once more around the treadmill we go…
Dan Drezner is annoyed today at:
Dan Drezner: <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/no-one-on-the-right-is-rethinking>: ‘Arather annoying New York Times front-pager by Anton Troianovski. The headline is, “From ‘Terrible People’ to ‘Smart People’: The Trump-Led Right Rethinks Iran.”… “For decades, the idea that Iran’s regime represented the worst of the world’s worst stood as a pillar of Republican foreign policy. But… a different perspective has been taking hold in parts of the American right: Iran as a pragmatic country that the United States can, and must, learn to live with…. Led by President Trump, who called Iran’s leaders “strong people, smart people” last week, but it goes well beyond him…. JD Vance…. Conservatives.… Even some longtime hawks…. It is too soon to say whether the change will last…. But… the right-wing pivot away from traditional Republican hawkishness on Iran is driven by factors that go beyond Mr. Trump’s desire to disentangle himself… a generational shift in the party away from uncompromising support for Iran’s archenemy, Israel, and even some grudging admiration for the Iranian regime”…
But, as Dan says, that is not true.
Dan guarantees that should Trump reverse course yet again and start again threatening to destroy Iran as a civilization, JD Vance and the rest will again pivot and follow him. How does Dan know this? Because, he says, he has been paying attention:
Over the past calendar year… the Trump administration sounded increasingly hawkish about the use of military force. And guess what? Almost all of MAGA supported Trump’s half-assed neoconservative adventures!…. They are happy to parrot whatever Trump says…
Consider this: Anton Troianovski knows as well as Dan and I do that what he writes is not true.
Dan offers an alternative two-sentences that Troianovski would have written had he been in the business of working for his readers—had they been his customers: For decades, Republicans have been extremely hawkish on Iran. As President Trump has tried to sell a cease-fire that accomplished almost none of the stated aims of Operation Epic Fury, however, he has sounded more optimistic about the autocratic, theocratic regime. And in the familiar Trump-era scramble to stay aligned with a mercurial president, most of the GOP is following the president’s tune…
That does the job.
Well, why didn’t Troianovski write that?
He would have done so, were he to regard his readers as his customers: people to be served by providing them with important and valuable true ideas that help them to understand and “navigate our crazy, complex, chaotic world of international relations”.
Well, my take is this: As a Replacement-Value New York Times Reporter, Anton Troianovski Works Primarily for His Sources.
They are the people to whom he works hard to deliver value. Why? Because they are the ones without whom he has nothing to say. He has no independent data sources, no analytical chops, no subject-matter expertise, and no alternative way to draw on the real-ASI that is the collective human mind. Thus if his sources do not talk to him, he does not have a job, for boiling-down press releases that anyone can read does not cut it.
But for his sources to talk to him more than by simply parroting their press releases, he has to “pay” them somehow. But how? What coin does he have that they value?
The only coin he has to offer them is to provide them with the opportunity to hack his readers’ brains.
Hence his bargain with his sources is this: in return for them giving him nuggets, he will present the case they want presented as true, or as something that might be true. He will do so even though both they and he know that it is not. And he will not push back, and say, as Daniel Drezner does, that is not credible, and I know that is just not credible because I have been paying attention. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, in the stenographer role he has chosen to play subject-matter expertise or, indeed, the compulsion to occasionally blurt out things like “But 2+2=4!” are hindrances to his ability to do what he sees as a job.
Even though you are paying the New York Times, from Anton Troianovski’s point of view, you are not the customer. He is not selling anything to you. Rather, the opportunity of his sources to hack your brain for their purposes is the customer.
This is not a new insight. I recall back in 2006 complaining about how Mike Allen and Tom Ricks were, then similarly working for their sources: It is not the fact that journalists report “both sides” that is the problem. It’s that having done so they refuse to then take what both sides say, compare them with other evidence, and come to a conclusion. It is refusing to call a spade a spade.
I have a memory of Mike Allen pushing back against Matt Yglesias for making similar points to the ones I make here. IIRC, Mike Allen claimed that his job was to drop enough breadcrumbs in his stories that clever/informed/sophisticated readers who wanted to work hard could push through the kabuki to the facts. And for the other readers? Well, I think the excuse was that they were reading for spectacle and entertainment rather than information, and so: no harm, no foul. The problem is that the Mike Allen’s (and Tom Ricks’s) sources back then deeply cared about getting the ability to hack readers’ brains and plant their particular self-exculpatory narratives about their respective roles in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Iraq War clusterf*** and human and moral disaster.
The mechanisms of this access journalism are largely the same as they were two decades ago. Sources know how much reporters depend on them, and reward loyal coverage and punish critical inquiry. Conversely, a Bob Woodward to whom the more you said to him the more worshipful of you he got played the other side of the game. Cf. the extraordinary difference between the portrayal of the Greenspan-Clinton dialectic in Woodward’s The Agenda and of the same events in Maestro. And Mark Feldstein had, I think, the best line: “the dirty little secret of the Washington press corps: a kind of unspoken conspiracy in which reporters conceal not only their sources’ identities but more importantly the underlying motives for the leaks.”
There was going to be an alternative journalistic model: explainer journalism. In it, reporters would be subject-matter experts and honest brokers. But that never became more than a niche market. It is still around, but still a niche.