Unsurprisingly, Kahn easily batted this away, because he correctly understood the question in exactly those terms:
One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters.
Democracy, said Kahn, requires the media to inform people about their electoral choices, not to “prevent” people from voting for Trump or to become like “Xinhua News Agency or Pravda”:
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its role as a source of impartial information to help people vote—that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate.… It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.
Kahn’s answer is stunning in its simplistic rendering of the dilemma raised by Trump’s hostility to democracy and its resolute lack of awareness of what many liberal critics have actually argued about the Times, the media, and the democracy question.
