Is ‘Trump Whisperer’ Maggie Haberman Changing the New York Times?

Vanity Fair profiles the New York Times' most prominent White House correspondent.

October 8, 2017 5:00 am

Maggie Haberman is The New York Times most prominent White House correspondent, and she recently said that President Donald Trump, who frequently says the publication is “failing,” would not talk to her as much as he does if she wasn’t at the Times, reports Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair ranked Haberman No. 32 on their 2017 New Establishment list this week, and writes that Haberman is the “queen of political journalism at a time when Trump’s reality-television administration has supercharged the news business.”

Haberman has 640,000 followers on Twitter and is ranking up next to formidable predecessors, like Maureen Dowd, who once said of Haberman, “I tried to mentor her but quickly realized it should be the other way around.”

Vanity Fair interviewed 20 colleagues, associates, and Times insiders for a new profile on Haberman and her impact on The New York Times. 

The Times is a traditional institution despite the new age media world, and “stardom” within the paper is a “delicate matter,” writes Vanity Fair. But Vanity Fair found that many colleagues and Times insiders spoke highly of Haberman and her work.

One colleague told Vanity Fair said that the mainstream political press has become much more “tabloid-y,” “of-the-moment” and “made for Twitter.” He told the magazine that Haberman’s success is very much part of that “tabloid, Twitter-fied sensibility bleeding into the Times, entering the Times’s metabolism.”

Jill Abramson joined the Time’s Trump team at the beginning of the year and is also a fellow New York tabloid and Politico alum, said that Haberman and Glenn Thrush have “made the Times competitive in a Politico style of reporting that everybody who plays the inside game loves. The Times would not be as competitive without them.”

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