(2022-04-19) Doubling Down At The Times

Doubling down at the Times. Dean Baquet’s departure as executive editor of the New York Times has been one of the worst-kept secrets in media. Baquet turned sixty-five in September—“the traditional age when executive editors at the Times step down,” the paper notes in its own coverage—and, ever since, he has been notably open about his impending exit.

In picking Joe Kahn, the Times’ managing editor, to replace Baquet, the newspaper is signaling that it has no plans to rethink its approach. Baquet and A.G. Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher, have consistently dismissed the idea that journalistic norms of objectivity should be tossed out. The view of the Times leadership is that journalism is more threatened by a lack of trust, which only deepens when readers sense that the paper has its thumb on the partisan scale.

For a moment in 2020, following the departure of James Bennet as editorial page editor after the Tom Cotton op-ed blowup, the race for Baquet’s job seemed to get interesting. Bennet was seen as a potential successor to Baquet; his exit appeared to open things up. Staffers pressed internally for a more diverse slate of candidates (Baquet was the Times’ first Black executive editor), and speculation began to grow that Sulzberger, who assumed the Times’ chairmanship in 2021, could go for an unconventional choice, perhaps from outside the organization. Then, six months after Bennet’s departure, Kahn’s candidacy seemed to be hurt when the paper retracted part of its Caliphate podcast and reassigned reporter Rukmini Callimachi after the star character in the series was found to have lied. Kahn had been one of Callimachi’s most vocal internal supporters, and his involvement in the debacle was viewed as a mark against him in the editor’s race.

Ultimately, it was the Times’ financial and editorial successes under Baquet, Kahn, and their colleagues that mitigated the need for a leadership gambit.