This all overstates the influence of the Times on US voters, but coupled with the breathless Clinton crime headline, the "pre-exoneration" of the Trump crime family conspiracy to commit treason did not help.
Good, and informative, answers but softball questions.
And the headline is misleading.
Why a newspaper does things is interesting, but less crucial than what they do. I have the impression -but would like to know more- that newspapers have suffered due to increased competition from blogs and social media, which have had the knock-on effect of dumbing down public discourse and reducing attention spans.
I think the New York Times, and the press in general, could do better in "owning up" to such problems, and in explaining more clearly their approach to dealing with it. For starters, if we all paid $1 more a year in subscription fees, could the annoying Facebook buttons be dropped from bottom of every comment like this?
Any insight we as audience can gain on the workings of responsible journalism is positive. And, as a teacher of a college course in News Literacy, I will use this Colbert-Baquet clip for that much illumination.
I must often point out to students that in most cases headlines are written by a specialist, not the article's writer. They can misread the article whose headline they are writing (or just need to meet a deadline in two minutes). Coffee helps, too.
I don't look to Colbert for tough interrogations. If questions are soft, he has brought the guests on more for entertainment than for news. But he still gets a lot out of them. This was helpful for the general public to understand the inner workings of journalists, even if modest.