Today's print New York Times carries a special section about how President Trump is wrecking the environment. I stopped reading at this sentence: "Mr. Trump's regulatory ambitions extend beyond Republican distaste for what they considered unilateral overreach by his Democratic predecessor; pursuing them in full force, Mr. Trump would shift the debate about the environment sharply in the direction of industry interests, further unraveling what had been, before the Obama administration, a loose bipartisan consensus dating in part to the Nixon administration."
My life is too short to go rummaging through the Times archives for coverage of the environmental policies of the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, but my memory is too long to forget that coverage. Oh, okay, I'll rummage a little bit. Here is a 2003 Times editorial about Gale Norton, who was interior secretary in the George W. Bush administration: "Congressional Democrats and some moderate Republicans are only now realizing that what Ms. Norton is trying to engineer is not just a rebalancing of the scales but a revolution in public policy deeply at odds with a long bipartisan tradition of environmental stewardship and more threatening than anything attempted by James Watt, Ronald Reagan's reactionary interior secretary and Ms. Norton's onetime mentor."
Here is a 1983 Times news article about President Reagan's interior secretary, James Watt:
There also was little doubt that he was carrying out the President's agenda, not just his own, at the Interior Department.
Mr. Watt came to the department with a radical agenda for change - radical in the sense that it marked a sharp departure from Federal land and resource policies of the recent past. Declaring that the pendulum had swung too far toward conservation and away from the development of public resources needed for economic growth and national security, he moved swiftly to transfer some of those public resources to private industry.
In a bold stroke, he proceeded to open virtually the entire Outer Continental Shelf to bidding by oil companies. He offered record tonnages of coal in leasing public lands. He moved, unsuccessfully, to process pending applications for oil and gas drilling in Federal wilderness areas, and also pursued additional economic activity in National Wildlife Refuges. He sought to suspend additional spending for the acquisition of National Park lands, saying that available funds should be used to rehabilitate existing parks.
Mr. Watt did not seek to build a consensus for his far-reaching policies, but instead plunged ahead without apparent concern for the views of environmental groups, some members of Congress, and others who might object. He acted as though he were on a religious crusade to save the nation...
Pretty much in every instance — Reagan, George W. Bush, Trump — the Times has sought to portray the Republican administration as "radical," "a sharp departure," "deeply at odds with a long bipartisan tradition," or, in the words of today's piece, "unraveling...a loose bipartisan consensus." It raises questions about the credibility of the Times criticism.
There's a tension in modern journalism between accuracy and getting readers to click, share, read. The click-share-read impulse depends on outrage. The accurate thing would be to write that Trump, like previous recent Republican presidents, is adjusting the balance back away from regulation. But the "getting readers to click" thing to do would be to write that Trump, in a radical departure from bipartisan precedent, is unleashing a never-before-seen assault on the environment. This doesn't just serve the commercial interest of the publisher, it also serves the career interest of the journalist, because "unprecedented" gets the story onto the front page and into the Pulitzer entry pile, while "like previous Republican presidents" gets a shrug, at best.
Smartertimes itself can understand these temptations: we have the choice to frame this one as "the New York Times is departing from its usual standards and treating Trump worse than it has treated any previous president," or "the New York Times is portraying President Trump as a polluter of the planet, just as it has with other previous recent Republican presidents." Which one would you click on and share?
There's also a problem of the fact that the Times has bought out or laid off or written obituaries for most of the reporters and editors who were around at the paper in 1983 and 2003. Some of the newspaper's readers are even too young to remember the earlier coverage. So when some Times reporter turns in a story claiming that the Trump assault on the environment is somehow new and different and unprecedented, the readers and editors may be naive or uninformed enough to believe it. At the very least, if the Times wants to convince readers that this is actually true, it might want to own up to the fact that it made essentially the same claims, using similar language, in previous Republican administrations.