A former editor of the New York Times has slammed the newspaper’s keen coverage of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos as ‘a corrupt circle-jerk.’
Jill Abramson, who worked for the paper for 17 years, said The Times publishes stories quoting the event’s high-profile speakers to gratify their egos and entice them into speaking at its own ‘high dollar’ conferences.
She also noted that its bias in favor of the conference was a recent ploy to get ‘phony stories,’ and that before she left in 2014 editors wanted to ban their reporters from attending.
The World Economic Forum is a lobbying organization that invites the globe’s most wealthy and powerful politicians and business leaders to a yearly conference in Davos, Switzerland.
Former editor at the New York Times, Jill Abramson, said the Times covers Davos to win over speakers and get them to attend NYT conferences
Abramson said in an email to Semafor it was a new trend and that in her day NYT editors wanted to ban their reporters from attending Davos
‘I noticed (after I was gone), much more ‘news’ coverage in the Times of Davos, quoting the attendees and speakers at those endless panels,’ Abramson wrote in an email to Semafor co-founder, Ben Smith, who also worked at the Times.
‘Of course, the coverage was a sweetener to flatter the CEOs by seeing their names in the NYT so that they would then speak at high-dollar NYT conferences and — of course — get phony news stories from the conferences into the paper,’ she added.
The Times is well known for organizing its own prestigious conferences. In November it hosted the DealBook Summit, during which it controversially gave a platform to Sam Bankman-Fried, whose crypto exchange FTX had just catastrophically collapsed.
Just a couple of weeks earlier the paper had published a piece about Bankman-Fried and the FTX chaos that many argued downplayed his misdeeds and failed to properly hold him accountable by portraying him as a reckless kid.
Abramson, who was fired by the New York Times in 2014, has attacked the newspaper before, and famously called it out for its ‘unmistakably anti-Trump’ agenda.
Donald Trump once quoted her making that comment, but she hit back, saying that she praised the Times for ‘its tough coverage’ of the former president.
The Times’ favorable coverage was part of a ploy to ‘get phony stories from the conferences into the paper’
A New York Times story introducing the conference was less skeptical, and introduced Davos as an ‘affluent symbol of a globalizing world’
Abramson’s comments appeared in an installment of Semfor’s own daily coverage of Davos, which was quick to criticize it for elitism and an inability to affect good policy.
Its author Liz Hoffmann suggested that despite their annual meeting, the world leaders had failed to predict the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘It’s midweek, which is right about when the “Davos consensus” starts to congeal, passed among attendees alongside the plates of toothpicked olives and Gruyère cubes,’ wrote Hoffman.
‘But it is almost always wrong. It’s too optimistic ahead of crashes. Despite its global attendance list, it missed the rise of nationalism and economic balkanization. It’s vulnerable to groupthink,’ she wrote.
On Monday Semafor revealed that an anti-Putin activist Bill Browder was being charged $250,000 to attend the conference after paying around $70,000 in the past.
‘Browder’s longstanding role at Davos has been to raise issues many of its attendees would like to ignore,’ the publication suggested.
By comparison a New York Times story introducing the conference on Saturday was less skeptical, and introduced Davos as ‘long the affluent symbol of a globalizing world.’
On Tuesday its Business and Policy DealBook newsletter did however acknowledge that criticism of the conference is reaching new heights.
Former Vice President Al Gore gave a speech about climate change at Davos on Wednesday
Former Vice President Al Gore gave an ‘impassioned’ speech about climate change at Davos on Wednesday. In it he warned the crowd of ‘rain bombs’ and boiling oceans while discussing the issues the planet is facing if drastic changes aren’t made.
Gore, who also voiced support for climate activist Greta Thunberg after her recent arrest for protesting a coal mine in Germany, said the world would soon fall into peril if citizens continue to treat the atmosphere as an ‘open-air sewer.’
