“WE DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO COVER THE COUNTRY”

Versão em Português

Translated by Isa Mara Lando

The most serious mistake of the American press in the 2016 elections, which resulted in Donald Trump being elected President, was relying too much on the assessment of political analysts rather than listening to the voters. That is the conclusion reached by Dean Baquet, a journalist who served as executive editor of The New York Times between 2014 and 2022, a turbulent period in American history. Baquet participated on Saturday, September 5th, in the 10th piauí Journalism Festival, held at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo. “It’s very easy to be seduced by experts, and that is a major problem in political coverage,” said Baquet, in a conversation mediated by André Petry, editor-in-chief of piauí magazine, and Natuza Nery, commentator and presenter at GloboNews.

According to Baquet, the Times, as well as the rest of the American press, was unable to perceive the true level of anger and anti-establishment sentiment that prevailed among part of the electorate. “Many readers thought our coverage was too harsh on Hillary Clinton [the Democratic candidate who ran against Trump in 2016]. I don’t think that was the problem. The fact is, we didn’t know how to cover the country.” In retrospect, Baquet believes that the press underestimated the resentment of the white population after eight years of Obama’s administration, as well as a pervasive insecurity about the directions the economy was taking. “The desire for change was widespread, which also helped explain the strengthening of Bernie Sanders,” said the journalist.

Baquet took over the helm of the Times after building an award-winning career as an investigative reporter. Born in New Orleans, he studied literature at Columbia University in New York and later returned to his hometown, where he discovered his passion for the press. Even without ever attending a single journalism class, he began to practice the profession and became a renowned reporter. At age 32 he was hired by the Chicago Tribune and won the Pulitzer Prize for an investigative story on corruption in Chicago’s City Council.

When he took over The New York Times in 2014, Baquet drew on his past experience to lead his team in in-depth investigations. The newspaper, which previously had fewer than ten investigative journalists, came to have forty. The investment bore fruit in the 2016 election campaign – a fact Baquet recalled as he responded to a recurring criticism made at the time, according to which the Times had gone too easy on Trump. “No other American president had ever had his income taxes investigated and revealed to the public,” said the journalist. Furthermore, “If today people know that Trump’s behavior with women is objectionable, it’s thanks to the press.”

Baquet was the first African American to lead the Times, and during his tenure the staff became remarkably more diverse. Of the employees hired in 2018, 43% were nonwhite. “I’m concerned about the possibility of journalism becoming an elite profession,” he said. He also commented on the criticisms the newspaper received for having published, in 2020, an opinion piece in which Republican Senator Tom Cotton defended the use of military force to rein in the Black Lives Matter movement. Baquet clarified that at the Times opinion pieces do not go through the newsroom’s filter; instead, he said, he believes a newspaper should publish all kinds of ideas, “including those that make us uncomfortable.” At the time, the article generated internal disagreements within the newspaper. “You must build a newsroom that reflects the country,” he said. “If the country is in turmoil, how can your newsroom not be?”

That was an especially difficult period, Baquet said. Because of the pandemic, he only communicated with his team through video calls. He recalled one night when, after closing the newspaper’s edition, he went out in a sweatshirt to see up close a Black Lives Matter protest taking place near his building. “I sat down at the Washington Square Park and lit a cigar, aware that I was in the middle of a historic hurricane.”

The New York Times, like many newspapers, suffers pressures for certain stories not to be published. One example is given in the book She Said, in which reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey describe the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the investigation into the sexual abuses committed by producer Harvey Weinstein. The Hollywood producer arrived at the newspaper’s newsroom in Manhattan escorted by his lawyers, to try and prevent the disclosure of the accusations made against him by several actresses and female producers. “In cases like this, my response is: ‘Prove to me that someone will die if the story is published. Otherwise, just give up. My agreement with the readers is to tell them what I’ve discovered,’” said Baquet.

Today, Dean Baquet leads the Local Investigations Fellowship, a program run by of The New York Times designed to give time, money, and guidance to reporters from local press outlets, so that they can carry out major investigations about their own communities. Since 2023, fellows have already produced dozens of reports, some of them yielding concrete results on local public policies. The crisis of local journalism, Baquet said, is one of the factors that made it difficult for the mainstream press to understand what was happening in the United States in 2016.

Baquet did not want to risk a prediction about what will happen at the end of Trump’s current term. Will the president accept passing the baton to his successor? “I stopped trying to predict Trump’s actions a long time ago,” said the journalist. “What I can say is that he will be older, and many Republicans will want him to leave office, because they want his job.”