How the New York Times lost its objectivity and credibility

Anybody with cerebral neurons who reads the New York Times surely sees that it’s not only moved leftward, becoming “progressive” rather than liberal, but has also become less objective, allowing its editorial stand to seep into the news coverage, which is supposed to be objective.

This tendency became blindingly obvious when, on June 30, 2020, Republican Senator Tom Cotton published this op-ed in the paper (click to read):

In the wake of protests, both peaceful and violent, ignited by the death of George Floyd, Cotton called for the use of the military to help quash violent riots (note: not peaceful demonstrations):

The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”

It was not a rare opinion then, and was part of opinion editor James Bennet’s drive to publish editorials from all sides of the political spectrum to stimulate readers’ thought. That is, after all, what op-eds are for. In fact, in February of that same year, Bennet oversaw the publication of an op-ed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban, about what his group wanted to do in Afghanistan. Haqqani is on the FBI’s “most wanted” list, and one could argue that giving him a platform was far more inflammatory than giving one to a junior Senator from Arkansas.

But that’s not how it played out.  The Cotton editorial sparked a huge pushback among NYT staffers, who claimed that the piece in fact put them in danger, a claim I’ve never understood. There was also pushback on social media.  And although both the publisher of the paper, A. G. Sulzberger, and executive editor Dean Baquet had initially approved of the Cotton editorial. But as the public’s and staffers’ outcry grew their spines turned gelatinous.  Bennet (who had been at the NYT before, then left to be editor of the Atlantic, and then returned to the paper to head the op-ed section), refused to apologize, and so he was fired.  This showed the spinelessness of a paper whose mission was, in fact, to stimulate thought by publishing a variety of viewpoints. Besides losing Bennet, the paper also lost Bari Weiss, who was also demonized after tweeting about the division between the “old guard” of liberals and the young “progressive” staffers.

The paper added a long and cowardly apologia for Cotton’s op-ed that you can see atop the piece. It says, among other things,

After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.

They blamed a “rushed and flawed” editing process, but that was not the case. The real reason is that staffers and social media, heavily weighted by the opinions of blacks (after all, they constituted many of the protestors after Floyd’s death), scared the editor and publisher.

After getting his pink slip, Bennet became a writer for The Economist, and now he’s ignited another conflagration by publishing a huge (17,000-word!) piece in his magazine. His mammoth but fascinating piece not only explains and defends his actions, but severely indicts the Times for polluting its news coverage with progressive opinion. His piece is one of several articles in the magazine examining the media, and there’s also a brief summary of it in the issue. You can read Bennet’s piece for free by clicking on the link below, and The Economist‘s short analysis on the screenshot below that.

You can also find Bennet’s piece archived here. It’s a must-read for anyone who’s interested in journalism but also reads the NYT. It will take you maybe two hours, but what else is there to do on a rainy Sunday morning? And the payoff is immense. Never again will you read the NYT the same way. The premier paper in America, the “good gray lady” who publishes “all the news that’s fit to print” is in fact soiled by bias and the injection of opinion into the printable news.

Below is The Economist‘s brief summary of the piece, but gird your loins and read the long version above.

Although Bennet is justifying his own actions, it’s hard to find anything he did wrong, and the way the paper treated him, along with his discussion of the paper’s bias and how it got that way (hiring young and experienced readers from places like HuffPo, for instance), is absolutely believable. Bennet did what he was hired to do.  But the paper remains biased, which is playing out right now in the Times‘s news coverage of the Hamas/Israel war. It’s hard to find an article in the news section that is not implicitly critical of Israel or suggesting that maybe the war should end with Israel withdrawing back into its boundaries and Hamas left un-destroyed. (You can, of course, find the source of this slant by reading the paper’s op-eds.)

But I digress. Here are just a few telling quotes from Bennet’s piece:

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

. . . . . One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down. In the face of this, leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

and perhaps the most telling quote in the piece:

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

This is how bad it got:

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”. And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it. A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

Trigger warnings on conservative articles! And an admission from the publisher that, yes, the paper had a political double standard—and that was okay!

Here’s Bennet’s vision for an ideal paper:

. . . . there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out. The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

, , . followed by his view of where the paper now stands politically:

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it. They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be. To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media. The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role.

. . .  This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too). The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

According to Bennet, the paper’s politics have also invaded, with the publisher’s and editor’s agreement, the “cultural section” and the Sunday Magazine, which are apparently allowed to inject opinion into what seems to be news—without any explicit labeling of the sites as “opinion.”

In the end, as you might have predicted, Cotton’s op-ed “harmed” nobody. The cries that the printed word can cause harm are nearly always bogus unless they involve libel or false advertising. “Causes harm” is the new phrase for “this offends me.” Bennet sums up the fracas in one final paragraph, arguing that the op-ed accomplished exactly what such pieces are designed to do:

After all, we ran the experiment; we published the piece. Was any Times journalist hurt? No. Nobody in the country was. In fact, though it is impossible to know the op-ed’s precise effect, polling showed that support for a military option dropped after the Times published the essay, as the Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has written. If anything, in other words, publishing the piece stimulated debate that made it less likely Cotton’s position would prevail. The liberal, journalistic principle of open debate was vindicated in the very moment the Times was fleeing from it. Maybe if the Times would put more trust again in the intelligence and decency of Americans, more Americans would again trust the Times. Journalism, like democracy, works best when people refuse to surrender to fear.

Here’s Bari Weiss, whose own NYT job was collateral damage from l’affair Cotton, discussing with Megyn Kelly that fracas, Bennet’s article, and the ideological capture of the NYT.  I’m happy that Weiss has made a success with her Free Press site, which is increasingly attracting good writers and articles. This discussion is a good 11-minute chaser after the long piece, and adds Weiss’s own take from working at the paper.

Finally, today’s Sunday Times of London has its own short and generally sympathetic piece on the article. It also gives a few quotes from Bennet that supplement that article.

Click to read the archived article:

A short quote by Bennet in the piece above:

In spite of last week’s cri de coeur, Bennet is reluctant to return to the culture war barricades. “I’m anxious about re-engaging on these questions. I took a pretty severe beating at The New York Times, enough of a beating that I kept thinking, ‘God, I must have done something horribly wrong.’” But he insists: “I thought and still think what I did at the newspaper was right — and I need to have the courage of my own convictions.”

He is not — to many people’s disappointment — planning to write a book about his experience. But he would like to try to help a new generation of journalists recapture the spirit of empathy and open-minded inquiry that he thinks is all too rare these days in many newsrooms.

His first piece of advice is get off social media. “It has been terrible for journalism. It started well as a source of ideas — a digital conversation — but it pretty quickly became a weapon for enforcing orthodoxy. On social media you don’t want to endure the punishment of expressing dissent, or, God help you, a heterodox opinion. But originality — revealing or saying something new — is the whole point of the news business.”

His second recommendation is: “Do your reporting away from your computer. Get out in the real world, talk to people face to face. Only sit at your computer to write your story.”

I’m only half joking when I say that all serious newspeople should be banned from both reading and posting on social media. The lure of the clicks and likes is poison for journalism.

My own view?  I dislike the NYT but read it because it’s still the best source of national and international news around, and because some of its writers are provocatively heterodox (McWhorter, Pamela Paul, etc.). The Washington Post is hopeless, and as far as I can see it’s on the road to extinction.  Associated Press? Biased. Reuters? Biased. The Wall Street Journal has a news section less infected with its own politics (conservative) than does the NYT, but I do read some conservative op-eds to get a view of the other side. But too many of its articles are financially oriented.

 

h/t: Rosemary, Pyers