I stopped by Joe Kahn’s modest office in The New York Times newsroom Thursday to ask him what some of his readers want to know: Why doesn’t the executive editor see it as his job to help Joe Biden win?
The Times sets the tone for American journalism, and Kahn sets the tone for the Times. So it’s worth listening closely to his view on this topic. He told me the paper is a “pillar” of democracy but not a tool of power. He believes he is ignoring pressure to “become an instrument of the Biden campaign” and “turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”
Kahn has been in the job for two years. He is quiet, comfortable in his skin, and often described as cerebral, which is true both in the usual sense and of a defining physical feature, his large head. His job draws criticism from all quarters, and I put both left- and right-wing critiques to him, but his defining management challenge is with the left. The Times, he said, went “too far” in the summer of 2020, and Kahn sees his role as walking back from “the excesses” of that period.
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