Remember James Bennet, the NYT editorial page editor who got shit-canned in 2020 for publishing a guest essay by Tom Cotton, the twitchy MAGA fascist from Arkansas? Of course you don’t because you have a life. But it was a big deal at the time.
It was at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder, when the Murdoch Cinematic Universe was telling Americans that hordes of (mostly black!) people were pillaging its cities and setting commercial properties aflame. That was mostly a big fat lie; 93% of the protests were peaceful.
But there was video of troublemakers who used some of the protests as cover to commit crimes and charges against some legitimate protesters who resisted over-the-top police crackdowns. That was enough to scare the shit out of the Fox News shut-ins and give sadistic creeps like Cotton casus belli. Cotton’s op-ed urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and unleash state violence on fellow Americans.
Lots of people upon whom that violence was most likely to be visited objected to the publication of Cotton’s screed, and a few of them were NYT staffers who called for Bennet’s firing.
NYT publisher Sulzberger and executive editor Dean Baquet forced Bennet to resign, and now he’s written a “dishy 16,000-word essay” about it to settle all scores. It’s titled “When the New York Times Lost Its Way,” and it was published in The Economist yesterday.
I confess I have not read it because 16,000 words (I have a fucking life too, you know), but these excerpts in Politico are…bewildering:
Bennet paints a picture of a contentious and often acrimonious generational and philosophical civil war within the Times newsroom between 2016 and 2020. While old guard Times journalists continued to privately support traditional journalistic values like fairness, pluralism and political independence, Bennet writes, they gradually capitulated to their younger, more ideologically motivated colleagues, who pushed the paper to elevate liberal viewpoints and shun conservative perspectives.
“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,” Bennet writes. “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.”
Bennet charges that this gradual leftward shift came to infect the paper’s coverage of a range of issues beyond Trump, gradually undermining its credibility and pandering to its most left-leaning readers.
Oh my fucking God! Is this about “woke” again? Because goddamn, the literal fascists are at the gate, women’s status as first-class citizens and access to modern healthcare has been vaporized by a corrupt and unaccountable court, and voters have demonstrated that they don’t give a flying fuck about “woke.” So can we stop beating that long deceased and thoroughly decomposed-to-dust horse yet? Apparently not!
And even if what Bennet alleges is true, did the Times not hire a woman named Pamela Paul (or Paula Pam?) to cover “woke” oppression of conservatives as a full-time beat? Does the paper not employ noted conservatives Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat and David Brooks to admonish liberals for driving Republicans into the arms of the Proud Boys with “woke” nonsense? I’m pretty sure there’s at least one anti-“woke” black man on the payroll who regularly suggests racism isn’t that big of a deal.
Bennet’s claim that Sulzberger and Baquet initially backed his decision to publish Cotton’s essay and then threw him under the bus when the blowback arrived sounds very on brand. This does not:
Yet even before his firing, Bennet writes, he had grown troubled by a shift in the paper’s editorial philosophy: “The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views [gave] way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.”
Huh. I thought the exact fucking opposite happened — that political desks and op-ed rosters at the Times and other national outlets, including the Post, bent over backwards to amplify and validate Trump voters. That’s what the Cletus safaris were all about. That’s why Gary Abernathy has a job at the Post.
Perhaps ego drove Bennet to reframe his professional garroting to give it world-historical significance. If I ever get around to reading the whole piece (unlikely), maybe I’ll find there’s more to it. But it kinda sounds like he got dumped by flinchy careerists, which would also be on brand. The Times, they ain’t a-changing.
Open thread!
