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“I worry that politics is covered almost like sports at a relentless who's wining and who’s losing kind of way," Abramson says. | Getty NYT's Jill Abramson: Horse-race media trivializes politics

NEW YORK -- New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson says she worries about the trivialization of politics by publications like POLITICO, but offered no defense when asked about the Times' own coverage of the political horse race.

Speaking with The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta at The New Yorker Festival on Saturday, Abramson said the incessant coverage of politics as sport threatened a larger understanding of how politics actually affects people.

“I worry that politics is covered almost like sports at a relentless who's winning and who’s losing kind of way, who’s up, who’s down and the political maneuvering becomes the dominant thread and what is lost is what effect it actually has on people,” Abramson said. “That with the incredible speed at which news cycle unfolds we have come to prize what I call scooplets instead of real scoops and politics. Some campaign manager makes a gaffe somewhere and that becomes the blown up story of the day.”

Noting the paper's promotion of Nate Silver, the highly popular statistician who recently decamped for ESPN, Abramson said that covering the horse race still has its place in political coverage. However, she later said, she hopes the Times never becomes a slave to whatever is trending in the news.

When Auletta noted that the Times itself has been criticized for horse-race political coverage, and asked why other publications couldn’t do the same guilt-free, Abramson replied, “I don’t know.”

“Can I go home now?” she joked. “This is starting to feel a little bit like a root canal.”

In response to a question about a controversial POLITICO article on her leadership style, Abramson said she agrees that such critiques are part of what the Guardian’s Emily Bell described as a “wholly sexist narrative of women in power.” Abramson also cited Sheryl Sandberg and her writings on the correlations between women in power and likability.

Elsewhere in the interview, Abramson pushed back against the Times’ own Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, who recently critiqued the paper for an article about al Qaeda communications monitoring that specifically called out McClatchy newspapers for naming top terrorist leaders who were being monitored by the U.S.

“I think she was wrong,” Abramson said, noting that government officials had told the Times that if they published more details on U.S. intelligence gathering the Times would have “blood on our hands.”

“I think that the story we ran Monday had proper skeptical notes, it wasn’t only carrying (the government’s) arguments,” she said. Abramson said she didn't know if McClatchy was wrong to first publish the names of the al Qaeda leaders who the U.S. was monitoring.

“I don’t know that they were wrong to publish. What I was told was they had obtained information in Yemen and they had not gone to the government for comment. I don’t know whether that’s true or not,” Abramson said. “So I assume it’s possible that they never were pressured or they never got a request from the government.”

Abramson also called the Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden leaks overall a “public service."

“On balance, they are, yes (a public service). In the case of Snowden, the breadth of the eavesdropping that has gone on is something the public should know,” Abramson said. “So yes, in his case and in the case of WikiLeaks … On balance, those were important stories in the public interest.”

In regard to critiques that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who broke the Edward Snowden leaks, is an activist and not a journalist, Abramson said she isn’t “terribly hung up with who calls themselves a journalist.”

“That doesn’t mean (Greenwald) doesn’t express opinions and what not, it’s just he’s a different type of journalist than people reporting national security under the New York Times are,” Abramson said.

The type of reporting surrounding stories like the al Qaeda intercepts or the NSA leaks are becoming harder to write in an environment where the current administration is conducting criminal leak investigations, she added.

“It’s just a fact that the Obama administration has initiated seven criminal leak investigations which is more than double the number of these investigations in all of the previous administrations combined, so that’s a large increase,” she said. “Having been Washington Bureau Chief, having lots of detailed conversations with our reporters who cover national security there is no argument whether these investigations have a chilling effect. It’s made the normal discourse between journalists and government officials very tamped down and uncomfortable.”

Abramson defended the Times from the criticisms of Seymour Hersh, who said the Times spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would,” saying she doesn’t think anyone would say the Times hasn’t been tough on the Obama administration.

But Abramson didn’t completely deny that the Times could be viewed as a paper with a liberal slant.

“I think that it isn’t true in the conventional sense but it’s true in the sense that the Times has a very cosmopolitan outlook and sensibility and that can sometimes come across as a liberal political agenda, which I don’t think it is as much,” Abramson said. “We have an urban outlook.”