NY Times to Pull Reporters From Cable News

This is a smart move by the New York Times.

Word is that Times boss Dean Baquet has told his Reporters not to accept invitations to appear on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell’s shows. He also said to say no to CNN’s Don Lemon. Other cable news shows might be on the list as well.

It seems that Baquet is worried how his Reporters might be perceived as they appear on shows that show strong political bias.

It is likely that Fox News shows like Hannity and Tucker Carlson would also be on the list, but it’s not like either one of those shows is going to call the NY Times to begin with.

It will be interesting to see if Brian Stelter’s left leaning Reliable Sources is on the list. At one point Stelter was a Reporter at the Times, but has since turned into a hard left Trump bashing talking head.

Vanity Fair writes that a highly placed source at one of the cable networks said he found the Times’s guidelines to be “inconsistent, incoherent, and poorly conceived.” He also pointed out, “At the moment that Donald Trump became president, and print media was coincidentally in crisis mode from a business perspective, a significant contributor to the success of publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post was the exposure that their great work got on networks like MSNBC and CNN.

FTVLive thinks that Baquet is making the right call. Nothing, be it the President, Congress, the GOP or the Dems have done more to divide this country than cable news.

Keeping real Journalists off of that medium is a good call.