The New York Times plans to shift its coverage of President Trump from whether he colluded with Russia to race, the paper’s executive editor Dean Baquet said during a recent staff meeting, according to a transcript of the meeting posted by Slate.com.
“And I mean race in terms of not only African Americans and their relationship with Donald Trump, but Latinos and immigration,” he said, according to the transcript of the meeting, which reportedly took place on Monday.
Baquet said the paper now has to “regroup” and shift its resources and emphasis from the Russia story to the race story.
“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I’d love your help with that,” he said.
“In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world. We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story,” he said.
Baquet described in the decision to shift from the Russia story — which he called “Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump” — to race and how the paper was caught a “bit a little tiny flat-footed” after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony.
Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.
The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?
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