Uh Oh! Conservative Brits Take EIC Roles at Two Major US News Orgs
The Washington Post and the Daily Beast have featured responsible, factual coverage of trans issues. That’s now threatened as two editors who helmed culture war focused papers have been put in charge.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
A shakeup at two major news outlets in the US would bodes poorly for Americans interested in factual, responsible coverage of issues relating to the trans community in the mainstream press. Two British men associated with anti-trans culture war publications will take top jobs in US media, according to news reports.
In a hurried announcement memo that went out to Washington Post staff on June 2, publisher William Lewis announced that Robert Winnett of the conservative Daily Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph newspaper would take over leadership of the Washington Post’s core newsroom after the election, following the abrupt resignation of Suzy Buzbee, the previous editor-in-chief. Then, on June 4, Daily Beast CEO Ben Sherwood announced the replacement of editor-in-chief Tracy Connor with Hugh Dougherty, formerly of the New York Post.
Anti-trans bias is ubiquitous throughout print journalism in the UK, so the installation of two British editors would be of note regardless of which publications they’d previously helmed. However, in a news environment flooded with false, malicious, and misleading stories demonizing transgender people in the UK, the Telegraph may be second only to the Daily Mail in its obsessive focus on pushing an anti-trans culture war. Already, on Wednesday morning, the Telegraph has published 10 articles and opinion columns, all negative, relating to the trans community this week.
screenshot from a search for the word “transgender” on the Telegraph’s website
The New York Post, a right-leaning tabloid, is little better, though its obsession with trans issues has cooled somewhat from a peak last year). For example, a recent NY Post story uncritically featured a claim by the unsupportive family of a trans boy (who is misgendered throughout the NY Post’s story) who was removed by child welfare services in Montana. The story centers around the notion that Montana CPS never sought “a warrant” before their removal of the boy. Unmentioned in the story, which centers around this lack of warrant, is that warrants are not used in child protection cases, court orders are. In the story in question, the child was in an emergency room awaiting treatment for depression and suicidal thoughts when the state sought temporary legal custody to transfer him to the earliest available psychiatric bed over his parents’ objections. Child protection cases use court orders, rather than warrants, which would invalidate the core premise of the story in the NY Post.
These sorts of extremely misleading stories have largely been confined to the right-wing press in the United States, except in the case of the New York Times, the one mainstream US newspaper that has repeatedly found creative ways to distort news stories and mislead readers in news reporting relating to gender-affirming care. However, with the installation of Winnett and Dougherty, two outlets whose reporting has remained consistent and objective (though not universally friendly) on trans issues are being helmed by editors connected to two of the worst purveyors of transphobic moral panic in the UK and the US. There’s no sugarcoating it, this does not look good for trans people, or for anyone who believes that journalism should first and foremost be about informing the audience and presenting the truth.
Analogizing to the situation at the New York Times, it has long been surmised that the anti-trans bent the paper took starting roughly in 2022 has been driven by the desire of publisher A. G. Sulzburger, who pressed the NYT to court more readers with right-wing views. Targeting the trans community for these efforts has a certain logic to it because the trans community is quite small and most members of the public are neutral and don’t rank trans issues very high. Pivoting towards a right-wing bias on trans issues is therefore relatively safe to do, at least compared to skewing coverage on issues where more Americans understand the basic outlines of the debate and will be aware of the paper taking a sudden hard right turn.
This logic, which takes advantage of the marginalization of the trans community to turn it into a scapegoat for a paper hoping to cultivate readership among the culture-war obsessed GOP, would seem to be equally sound for a conservative-courting Washington Post publisher, or for the CEO of the left-leaning Daily Beast. While at least one media watcher has predicted that fears of a strong right shift at the Washington Post are overblown, a more subtle shift that leans on attacking the trans community to signal a change in direction to right-wing readers, is compatible with an outlet seeking to court conservative readers by diluting the quality of the news by tainting it with an ideological skew, but only in areas where the most of public won’t notice or complain too much.
Bad news, trans folks. We’re directly in the center of that bullseye, and it looks like another couple triggers may have just pulled.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media and an incoming member of the 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism fellowship class at MIT.