Last week, NY Times executive editor Joe Kahn said words, many of them stupid, to Ben Smith in a Semafor interview. In the interview, Kahn, as NY Times leadership is wont to do, ignored the powerful role the NYT has in shaping the broader media discourse (boldface mine):

A substantial part of the jobs of top editors like Kahn is to decide what their publications will cover every day. Are we going to do a story on this subject? How much space are we going to devote to it? Should we assign one reporter to it and run one story, or an entire team that will produce lots of stories, stretching out over days and weeks? When the Times decides that Hillary Clinton’s emails are the most important issue in the 2016 campaign, or that the fact that a prosecutor thinks Joe Biden is old warrants multiple front-page stories, it’s a signal that this is something you have to pay attention to. And people do.

It’s particularly maddening that Kahn doesn’t acknowledge that fact, because in other contexts, he and his colleagues are all too happy to tout their agenda-setting power. If you asked him why his paper explored some obscure but consequential policy issue or did an investigation into an overlooked problem, he’d answer that it’s important the public know about those things even if they weren’t aware of them before. In other words, the Times uses its resources and space to say to its audience, “Hey, this is a thing you ought to pay attention to, because it’s important.” When that looks like a noble endeavor, they take credit for it; when it looks like crass sensationalism that debases the political debate, they say they’re just a passive conduit for information the public wants.

And when it’s ant-trans bigotry, they just pretend it never happened.

Just a bunch of smol journalism beans I guess.