AUSTIN — Donald Trump just wants the New York Times’ approval, or so the newspaper’s executive editor Dean Baquet thinks.
“I think that Donald Trump is a guy whose family made its fortune in Queens, which in the anthropology and geography in New York is sort of an outer borough and I think he came to Manhattan and he really set his sights on making it on Manhattan,” Baquet said during a discussion, titled “Covering POTUS: A Conversation with the Failing NYT,” at South By Southwest on Sunday.
“I think he really wanted to conquer the elite of New York. The New York Times sort of represents for better or for worse some of the elite New Yorkers. It means he wants our favor but gets hugely angry when he can’t have it. I think that’s why he singles us out in tweets,” he told Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg. “It is also why after his election, he summoned all the networks to Trump Tower and gave a lecture. But when it comes to the New York Times, he came to us, he spoke on the record.”
Trump has infamously dubbed the newspaper the “failing New York Times” in a series of tweets that began as early as November 2015.
On Feb. 6, he fired off this tweet: “The failing @nytimes writes total fiction concerning me. They have gotten it wrong for two years, and now are making up stories & sources!”
And again on Feb. 24, he tweeted, “FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!”
Baquet, who said he’s had “three conversations with Donald Trump in my life,” recalled Trump’s visit to the Times newsroom this past November.
“I think he’s a salesman. He plays to his crowd. He sat there with an editorial board that he knew leaned left and he said things that he thought they might wanna hear. If you look at that transcript and compare it to his actions, they don’t match,” he said.
But despite being widely criticized for how the Times handled Trump’s presidential campaign, Baquet, 60, stood by the paper’s coverage.
“During the campaign, I got more heat from the Clinton campaign and more heat from the Sanders campaign than I did from the Trump campaign. I’m not buying that I singled him out. I’m not buying that I was unfair to his campaign,” he said.
Later in the discussion, Baquet defended his stance again, saying, “I don’t think our coverage of Donald Trump was weak in any way. We wrote the first meaningful story about his treatment of women. We came up with our version of his tax returns. All of the American press, with some very small exceptions, misread how much anger there was in the country and how much desire there was for change.”