Ex-NYT Editor Calls the Paper’s Coverage of Davos ‘A Corrupt Circle-Jerk’
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File
The New York Times‘s coverage of the World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos, Switzerland “was — and is, a corrupt circle-jerk,” according to ex-executive editor Jill Abramson.
Abramson wrote to Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith to express her view, noting that her predecessor at the Times wanted to ban the Gray Lady’s reporters from attending. Abramson described herself as being allergic to publishing stories about it.
“I noticed (after I was gone), much more ‘news’ coverage in the Times of Davos, quoting the attendees and speakers at those endless panels,” said Abramson. “Of course, the coverage was a sweetener to flatter the CEOs by seeing their names in the NYT so that they would then speak at high-dollar NYT conferences and — of course — get phony news stories from the conferences into the paper.”
Abramson’s views were represented in a larger article about the third day of the 2023 conference in which Semafor‘s Liz Hoffman observes:
It’s midweek, which is right about when the “Davos consensus” starts to congeal, passed among attendees alongside the plates of toothpicked olives and Gruyère cubes.
But it is almost always wrong. It’s too optimistic ahead of crashes. Despite its global attendance list, it missed the rise of nationalism and economic balkanization. It’s vulnerable to groupthink.
A short list of things the Davos crowd missed: the 2008 crash, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, slowing global growth in 2018 and 2019, and the pandemic in 2020.
To their credit, it doesn’t sound like Hoffman or Semafor is after securing Davos attendees as speakers at high-dollar conferences.
The Times‘ primer on the conference ascribed more power to the get-together, asserting in its conclusion that “the world that will be debated in Davos is sobered but not stripped of the idea that the pursuit of human dignity and equal opportunity are the necessary accompaniment to the pursuit of profit,” but its coverage of the event has been contained to just a few stories.
This isn’t the first time Abramson has critiqued her former employer. She was fired by the Times in 2014 after becoming its first female executive editor in 2011. The publisher at the time, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., determined that “she had lost the support of her masthead colleagues and could not win it back.”
In her book Merchants of Truth, Abramson wrote of her successor, Dean Baquet: “his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump. Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.” She attributed the negative coverage to pecuniary interests.
“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative,” argued Abramson. “They drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.”
She has also praised the Times on a number of occasions, however, including for “superb coverage of the corruption enveloping the Trump administration, the best investigative reporting I’ve seen.”
