Erik Wemple Doesn’t Think the New York Times is Biased

The Washington Post columnist seeks to exonerate the Times, but only manages to showcase his own lack of knowledge.

by Evan Urquhart

A superficial understanding of questions and criticisms surrounding the New York Times’ treatment of gender-affirming care for youth pervades Erik Wemple’s defense of the Times’ coverage on the Washington Post opinion page today. The columnnist displayed a deep trust in the authority of mainstream outlets, and an aversion to the possibility that trans journalists might have the expertise and knowledge to criticize such coverage capably.

An early example of the shallowness in Wemple’s work comes when he suggests that the Times is being criticized because it is the Times, and not because its coverage has differed significantly from other major outlets. This is, simply, not true. Criticism from the trans community has focused on two mainstream outlets, the New York Times and the Atlantic, because a large number of questionable choices of both what to cover and how to cover it have been taken, together, as evidence of a larger editorial bias. Other outlets have done better, and criticism has reflected that.

To illuminate this point, Wemple brings up Reuters’ coverage of gender affirming care, claiming it had featured “many of the same concerns as in the controversial Times articles.” While Reuters’ stories are often mildly skewed towards skepticism of the trans side, its reporting is sound and it includes substantive responses to the questions and concerns it raises. In short, Reuters has never had the sorts of reporting issues the New York Times has demonstrated. Wemple links to pieces from Reuters that demonstrate this perfectly: For example, in Reuters’ reporting on the increase in gender dysphoria diagnoses, the story makes it clear, including in one of its graphics, that only a minority of children with that diagnosis are receiving medical interventions such as puberty blockers. By contrast, a New York Times piece on the increase in top surgery among gender dysphoric youth obscures how extremely rare top surgeries for minors are by comparing it to even rarer genital surgeries. This allows readers to form a false impression that top surgery is common, and is the sort of misleading, sloppy work that, when repeated in multiple stories, has led critics to raise concerns about a widespread editorial bias at the paper of record.

screenshot from the New York Times

When, later in the article, the Times piece explains that only a couple hundred teenagers per year are undergoing top surgery, this number is not contextualized to finally help readers understand how rare that makes this procedure. There are about 42 million adolescents in the country. About half of them are female-assigned, which would be 21 million. The lowest estimate of prevalence for trans identity is 0.5 percent, which would suggest at least 10,500 female-assigned youth will ultimately transition. The Times found evidence of a few hundred recieving top surgery in adolencence.

Unlike the Times, Reuters coverage has always been careful about providing context, which is why even with a skew that may tilt slightly towards skepticism of gender affirming care, trans people have always been restrained in their criticism of that outlet. Likewise, Wemple’s own paper, the Washington Post, has run stories that members of the trans community have criticized. But the Post has never demonstrated a consistent bias towards one type of story only, and the criticism has reflected that.

Based on this false belief that the Times has been singled out because of its prominence, Wemple makes an extraordinary claim about the motive of the Times’ critics:

screenshot from the Washington Post

This is mostly based on nothing, but Wemple includes an anecdote, shared by a Times spokesperson, that a WPATH doctor who was unhappy with the coverage said, presumably during a heated discussion, that “she preferred there be no coverage of this at all.” This offhand remark, which was disputed by the woman in question, is the only thing that even remotely supports Wemple’s conclusion that critics of the Times are trying to suppress good journalism. The possibility that careful, high-quality journalism might be exactly what trans people want is not engaged with.

This dismissive attitude continues as Wemple describes his attempts to engage with trans people criticizing the Times. Wemple raises the primary criticism: That the Times has devoted an inordinate number of words to minor criticisms and controversies within a well-established treatment field at a time when these treatments were being singled out for extraordinary and unwarranted legislative attention by Republican lawmakers. Then he dismisses it by saying that the efforts to ban the treatment make this a legitimate news story. Wemple also focuses on the fact that the Times highlighted legitimate researchers, which is non-responsive to the criticism that it chose to surface minority views in the field at a time when mainstream practitioners’ were in danger of their work being criminalized.

In defense of the idea that even though bans go too far there is a legitimate reason to restrict gender affirming care, Wemple again shows his lack of subject matter knowledge by repeating that gender-affirming care has been limited in Sweden and Finland due to “an embrace of caution.”

Assigned has reported that efforts in some countries to restrict access to gender-affirming care have resulted from the same pressure tactics from anti-trans activists that has resulted in outright bans in this country. Finland, however, is something of a different story, and a smoking gun for Wemple’s lack of subject matter knowledge. Youth in Finland never had access to gender-affirming care, which makes it impossible for such access to have been limited recently. The claim that Finland has reduced such care is oft-repeated as a talking point, but does not reflect reality. The link Wemple includes goes to a story with a single sentence claiming Finland restricted youth access to hormone therapy in 2020. It does not include a source. This reporter is not aware of any evidence that gender dysphoric youth in Finland had access to such care prior to 2020.

The later part of Wemple’s piece is taken up with complaining that certain critics he reached out to responded by asking him to listen to podcasts, and other petty complaints. It’s clear that Wemple is not persuaded by the criticisms, since that’s the purpose of the column. However, he also makes no effort to present the critics’ positions fairly or engage in good faith with them. Instead, Wemple uses gripes about sources who he felt didn’t engage with him politely enough as a means of dismissing the substance of the criticisms, complaining, for example, that someone sent him a podcast instead of agreeing to speak at length with him.

It’s clear that Wemple feels trans critics owe both himself and the New York Times more deference. What he doesn’t do is demonstrate that either of them have earned it.