Former NYTimes Editor: Fox Took Book Out Of Context

Jill Abramson

Jill Abramson, the former editor of The New York Times, said Thursday that Fox News took her criticism of the newspaper’s Trump coverage in her upcoming book “totally out of context” for a story that appeared this week.

The Fox story, headlined “Former NY Times editor rips Trump coverage as biased,” quotes from Abramson’s book, “Merchants of Truth.” She wrote that although current Times executive editor Dean Baquet publicly said he didn’t want the newspaper to be the opposition party, “his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump.” With a mostly liberal audience, “there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative,” she wrote in the book.

Abramson was executive editor of the Times from 2011 to 2014 before being fired following a dispute with Baquet, one of her deputies. She said in an email interview with The Associated Press that the Fox article’s author, “Media Buzz” host Howard Kurtz, had ignored compliments that she had for the Times and The Washington Post.

“His article is an attempt to Foxify my book, which is full of praise for The Times and The Washington Post and their coverage of Trump,” she wrote in the email.

Kurtz said in a phone interview with the AP that he was “sorry to see Jill back away from her own words” and that his report was accurate.

“I would have written this story the same way if I were working for any news organization,” said Kurtz, a former Washington Post media columnist. “Her sometimes harsh criticism of her former paper’s Trump coverage leaps off the page and is clearly the most newsworthy element in the book because of her standing as a former executive editor.”