Ignorance isn’t bliss – How the NYT let itself get taken over by activists
On the evening of November 8th, 2016, I stayed late at my boss’s place to watch THE™ election. We paced the length of his lengthy living room as Hillary tumbled through the grieving process. Denial, there’s no way that orange haired motherfucker can win. Anger, they’re not counting the votes from Michigan fast enough! Bargaining, we’ll give up Pennsylvania but please God, just let us win Wisconsin! Depression, my Lord, it’s hopeless. Acceptance, well… Hillary’s still working on that last point, but nobody said the grieving process happens fast.
Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party were so eager to drink their own Kool-Aid that they unwittingly trapped themselves in an informational black hole. The liberal magazines and newspapers said Trump was a cosmic joke, so Hillary rented a ballroom in downtown New York and stocked it with enough champagne to keep the party going till sunrise. All those suds, bought for nothing.
Ignorance has consequences.
Recently James Bennet penned a long piece in The Economist. You might not remember the name, but Bennet was the editor the New York Times fired after he had the appalling temerity to publish an op-ed from Republican senator Tom Cotton. A journalist of the old school, Bennet erroneously believed that his job was to present both sides of the story.
Like me, Baquet seemed taken aback by the criticism that Times readers shouldn’t hear what Cotton had to say. Cotton had a lot of influence with the White House, Baquet noted, and he could well be making his argument directly to the president, Donald Trump. Readers should know about it. Cotton was also a possible future contender for the White House himself, Baquet added. And, besides, Cotton was far from alone: lots of Americans agreed with him.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote,
“If you know the enemy and know yourself,
you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,
you will succumb in every battle.”
Wouldn’t you want to know what your “enemy” is thinking? Democrats loathe Trump with a fiery passion. He is the brunt of every joke, the malfeasance behind every catastrophe. Yet many on the left are unwilling to consider why Trump — the truth-challenged golf playing billionaire TV star who couldn’t quote a Bible verse to save 5% on his tax return — is popular in Idaho, Montana and Alabama. Explaining away his appeal by calling tens of millions of Americans “racist” or “deluded” isn’t going to cut it.
The New York Times had an opportunity to do a service for its subscribers. Under better leadership it could have launched a campaign of discovery. To the advantage of its readers, the Times could have figured out and then explained why Trump won. Not only would that have been good journalism, it would have been the groundwork for the Democrats to beat Trump at his own game; forever banishing him to Mar-a-Lago with his gold-plated bathroom fixtures and tacky color schemes. However, as James Bennet explains, the Times has reprioritized its “reporting” such that it’s no longer capable of addressing both sides of an issue.
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 goes on to explain the new role that the Times has created for itself.
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.
There’s nothing wrong with a paper writing whatever they damn well please, however… The Times reports a skewed view of the world while presenting itself as the arbiter of objective truth. In other words, the publication is claiming that you can have your cake and eat it too. Please read our objective reporting, and isn’t it just ticklish how “the truth” also happens to confirm your pre-existing worldview. Bennet continues.
This environment of enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper, was hard even on liberal opinion writers. One left-of-centre columnist told me that he was reluctant to appear in the New York office for fear of being accosted by colleagues. (An internal survey shortly after I left the paper found that barely half the staff, within an enterprise ostensibly devoted to telling the truth, agreed “there is a free exchange of views in this company” and “people are not afraid to say what they really think”.) Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.
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How did we get here?
The election of the orange man didn’t birth our modern age of activism, but it did take the righteous warriors from the shadows and propel them into the mainstream. The chain-smoking Jim Beam journalists, hostile to bosses, politicians, corrupt cops, authority, stingy bartenders, non-smoking sections and dogma, were replaced by the new breed of reporter: the “joiner.”
And they [the new generation of journalists] 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.
As I read Bennet’s article it became clear that most of the people working at the Times were uncomfortable with having their newsroom coopted by intolerant, ideological children. Unfortunately, nobody had the courage to stand up to them.
My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher.
Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: “Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.” It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.
The old-guard at the Times kept waiting for someone to stand up and say, “Time to cut the crap, kiddos. You’re reporters goddammit, not politicians. You’re here to report the news not convert the heathens. Now go out and do your jobs or don’t bother showing up tomorrow!”
By the time that Bennet and his colleagues realized that nobody was going to discipline the adolescents it was already too late. Like ticks in a fat man’s thigh folds, the ideologues were dug in. As a testament to their growing power the children even coerced Bennet into bending the knee for his alleged crimes.
As my first turn to speak came up, I was still struggling with what I should apologise for. I was not going to apologise for denying my colleagues’ humanity or endangering their lives. I had not done those things. I was not going to apologise for publishing the op-ed. Finally, I came up with something that felt true. I told the meeting that I was sorry for the pain that my leadership of Opinion had caused. What a pathetic thing to say.
A total lack of courage, some might even call it groveling. Bennet had been waiting for a strong leader to reign in the mob, yet when his chance came he took the coward’s way out. No great stand, no fiery speech. That was unfortunate because the situation wasn’t hopeless.
Was the activist takeover of the Times inevitable? Well, no… Other newspapers faced similar pressure but didn’t give up on their values.
The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise. It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work.
After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work.
“Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.
Conclusions
Trump puts thousands of doctors out of work!
Although Bennet has his own biases (as we all do), he seems sincere in his desire to put those away as he tries to bring his audience the real story. The value of which must be apparent, as we’ve seen the colossal mistakes people make when their understanding of reality is distorted by group think and confirmation bias.
A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.
Well said. If I owned a newspaper I would hire James Bennet in a second. I think the New York Times did a great disservice in his termination, and it’s the readers who are paying the price.
