The News Crusaders

James Franklin, elder brother of Benjamin Franklin, launched the nation’s first newspaper crusade as the editor of the New England Courant, one of the few American newspapers that existed in 1721. Fast forward to 2024 and we see another crusade, even if it’s not called one: The New York Times’s drive to convince President Biden that he’s no longer up to the job.

The crusading newspaper is a fixture of the nation’s media landscape as old as America and the Stars and Stripes. The campaigns can be wrong on facts, misguided, or even unscrupulous, but they usually embody the voice in the room that few want to hear. They’ve often created sorely needed reforms or change, and the goal is usually strikingly evident.

photo by No Revisions

The nation’s first crusade launched by Franklin shows that media exposés can be wrong and unprincipled. Benjamin’s irascible brother published a string of stories relentlessly attacking Cotton Mather, a renowned preacher in colonial America, and an author of four hundred books and pamphlets, including Sailour Companion, which preached against “smutty talk, masturbation and sodomy” among men at sea.

In Infamous Scribblers, a great book about American journalism’s early days, Eric Burns documents the campaign against Mather, who, in Franklin’s eyes, sinned by advocating inoculation against smallpox, the most serious disease of the age, feared as much as AIDs or Long Covid is now.  

When smallpox struck three of his children, Mather started studying the disease. He soon learned that his slaves had been inoculated against the disease in Africa and they swore by the treatment. He became a believer, started preaching about it, and wrote a speech and manuscript called Wonderful Practice. As it circulated among local physicians, Franklin, who despised Mather for his inordinate influence in the stuffy confines of colonial Boston, saw a copy.  

He promptly assigned reporters to cover Mather and they pounced. “In article after article, issue after issue for more than a year,” Burns writes, “Franklin ordered his minions to mock, chastise and condemn. They accused Mather, fairly, of having no medical training. They accused him, unfairly, of wanting to send the entire population of Boston to its eternal reward well ahead of schedule. Never before, had a disagreement become so public and hostile.”

History, of course, proved Mather right about the efficacy of inoculation and Franklin wrong. Nevertheless, his crusade proved that controversy sells newspapers. His New England Courant added forty new subscribers in its campaign against inoculation,” Burns writes, while other papers that defended the practice held even. “Call it a sign,” Burns says, “controversy would almost always outsell moderation on the American newsstand.”

The trend has continued over the years and now overshadows the Times coverage of President Biden’s “disastrous performance” in his debate against Donald Trump, the former president and convicted felon running against him. So, it’s fair to raise the question of whether the nation’s most influential media organization has launched an undisclosed crusade against President Biden, not only on its editorial pages but in its news columns, too.  

The Times coverage is not as mendacious as Franklin’s, and I believe the paper fulfilled its journalistic duty when it editorialized that Biden should gracefully bow out. In the debate, Biden’s performance indelibly seared into the nation’s psyche an image of the neurologically impaired President. The newspaper owes its audience an educated view on a vital issue of public importance.

“Mr. Biden answered an urgent question on Thursday night,” the Times editorialized. “It was not the answer that he and his supporters were hoping for. But if the risk of a second Trump term is as great as he says it is — and we agree with him that the danger is enormous — then his dedication to this country leaves him and his party only one choice. The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.”

The Times news coverage of the president is another story, though. The newspaper’s voluminous coverage of Biden’s debate performance raises questions about whether it has breached the line between news and opinion in its print and digital pages.

Melanie Sill, a former top news executive at two newspapers and a public radio station, called the Times news coverage of Biden “wildly lopsided.” In a LinkedIn post, Sill, a former editor of The News & Observer of Raleigh and The Sacramento Bee, and others cite story counts that suggest the paper has published nearly two hundred news stories and columns on Biden and his performance in the relatively short time frame since the debate.

“The New York Times is on an old-fashioned newspaper crusade,” Dan Gillmor, a former journalism professor and journalist wrote. “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort -- spanning ‘news’ and commentary -- aimed at getting Biden off the ticket this fall. I'm not against media organizations going on campaigns. I am vehemently offended when they don't fess up to what's going on, and why. The Times should be transparent (it won't be). It should acknowledge what it's doing; explain what the motivation is, beyond the obvious one; and say clearly who's giving the marching orders.”

Not everyone agrees. Scott Schwebke, an investigative reporter at the Orange County Register in Southern California, responded to the concerns aired by Sill, saying he is “struggling to see the issue here. “Biden,” he wrote, “is the biggest, hottest story in the country right now. It makes sense that the most influential paper in the country would marshal the troops.” Fair point, but Sill replied that the issues go beyond the resources the Times has devoted to the story.

“Of course, you'd put a lot of resources on (the story),” she says. “That’s not my point. The scale, tone, and lopsidedness are costing the Times a lot of credibility. It's clear they want him out,” but Sill says the newspaper is “both creating and covering the pressure campaign. This contradicts how NYT execs have described the paper's role in political coverage: ‘neutral,’ ‘objective,’ lacking a political agenda,’ she says. “They could cover the huge story that is Biden's candidacy, and also cover the huge story that is Trump's; they didn't follow (up) on Trump’s debate performance, the anti-immigrant rhetoric in his strategy: or Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles. Even people who hope Biden will withdraw are talking about this. It’s hurting the Times and, I think, hurting journalism when we need better.”

Striking the right line between news and opinion is a problem as old as Mr. Franklin. Usually, modern news organizations develop graphic techniques to signal the difference between a news article and a crusade, the contemporary equivalent being a special logo for an investigative report. Calling a story “news analysis” is a label often employed to suggest a story breaches the traditional boundaries of news.

Both labels are often misused. An analysis tagline should signal a story in which the journalist lines up a series of reported facts to help a reader understand an empirical conclusion. A good investigative report is chock full of facts that expose wrongdoing. Neither should be used as a camouflage for opinion.

Dealing with the Biden controversy is hard. The story is sensitive, controversial, unfolding spontaneously, and easily lends itself to speculation. The online news that media organizations embrace out of necessity makes them more vulnerable to misinformation and distortion. Sill and Gillmor are correct, though. News organizations must adhere to the standards they develop to maintain the credibility of good journalism – now more than ever. If The New York Times wants to launch a crusade, then they should don the cloak of a crusader.   

 —James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.