(2023-12-14) Bennet When The New York Times Lost Its Way

James Bennet: When the New York Times lost its way. Are we truly so precious?” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, asked me one Wednesday evening in June 2020. I was the editorial-page editor of the Times, and we had just published an op-ed by Tom Cotton.

It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions of helping readers understand the world, in order to fix it, and in the Times’s Opinion section, which I oversaw, we were pursuing our role of presenting debate from all sides. We had published pieces arguing against the idea of relying on troops to stop the violence, and one urging abolition of the police altogether

The publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, who was about two years into the job, understood why we’d published the op-ed. He had some criticisms about packaging; he said the editors should add links to other op-eds we’d published with a different view. But he’d emailed me that afternoon, saying: “I get and support the reason for including the piece,” because, he thought, Cotton’s view had the support of the White House as well as a majority of the Senate. As the clamour grew, he asked me to call Baquet, the paper’s most senior editor.

Like me, Baquet seemed taken aback by the criticism that Times readers shouldn’t hear what Cotton had to say.

And, besides, Cotton was far from alone: lots of Americans agreed with him—most of them, according to some polls. “Are we truly so precious?” Baquet asked again, with a note of wonder and frustration.

The answer, it turned out, was yes. Less than three days later, on Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation

There are many reasons for Donald Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas. (Nicely ignoring the Times' Hillary Clinton bullshit.)

As Trump’s nomination and possible re-election loom, that work could not be more urgent.

as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise

The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered.

I think Sulzberger shares this analysis. In interviews and his own writings, including an essay earlier this year for the Columbia Journalism Review, he has defended “independent journalism”, or, as I understand him, fair-minded, truth-seeking journalism that aspires to be open and objective. It’s good to hear the publisher speak up in defence of such values, some of which have fallen out of fashion not just with journalists at the Times and other mainstream publications but at some of the most prestigious schools of journalism.

In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias

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.

the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were. You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

I left after 15 years, in 2006, when I had the chance to become editor of the Atlantic

It was also obvious how much the internet was changing journalism. I was eager to figure out how to use it

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day.

“In truly effective thinking”, Walter Lippmann wrote 100 years ago in “Public Opinion”, “the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted.” Alarmed by the shoddy journalism of his day, Lippmann was calling for journalists to struggle against their ignorance and assumptions in order to help Americans resist the increasingly sophisticated tools of propagandists

His offer, I thought, would give me the chance to do the kind of journalism I loved with more resources and greater effect

Opinion’s work had outsized reach. Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views

It was 2016, a presidential-election year, and I had been gone from the Times for a decade

the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture

Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative. (Conservative or MAGA?)

This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing.

I restructured the department, changing everybody’s role and, using buyouts, changing people as well

we also did more in four years to diversify the line-up of writers by identity, ideology and expertise than the Times had in the previous century; we published more ambitious projects than Opinion had ever attempted. We won two Pulitzer prizes in four years – as many as the department had in the previous 20.

If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom

I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters

But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them

About a year after the 2016 election, the Times newsroom published a profile of a man from Ohio who had attended the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one. It was a terrifying piece.

The profile was in keeping with the Times’s tradition of confronting readers with the confounding reality of the world around them. After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology

Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head,

Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm. After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally.

the very headline of the piece – “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland” – undermined the claim that it was “glowing”.

As the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration approached, the editors who compile letters to the Times, part of my department, had put out a request to readers who supported the president to say what they thought of him now. The results had some nuance.

After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting

I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues

if the Times could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump, why should it be surprised that those voters would not trust it?

Two years later, in 2020, Baquet acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters and understand “the turmoil in the country”.

Speaking four months before we published the Cotton op-ed, he said that to argue that the views of such voters should not appear in the Times was “not journalistic”.

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.

And then, to the shock and horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. In his article for Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger cites the Times’s failure to take Trump’s chances seriously as an example of how “prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate” can allow “conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society.”

More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal. A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become “a selling point”, reported one internal marketing memo

Yet at the same time, the marketers concluded, subscribers wanted to believe that the Times was independent.

Perception is one thing, and actual independence another. Readers could cancel their subscriptions if the Times challenged their worldview by reporting the truth without regard to politics. As a result, the Times’s long-term civic value was coming into conflict with the paper’s short-term shareholder value

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism.

The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping (Russian Interference In The 2016 Election), and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid-19 came from a Chinese lab, that filter masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea. What a moron.

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.

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

Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves.

The impatience within the newsroom with such old ways was intensified by the generational failure of the Times to hire and promote women and non-white people, black people in particular.

you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them.

Among the experienced journalists at the Times, black journalists were least likely, I thought, to exhibit fragility and herd behaviour.

As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile

their work does not take them into shelters, or police precincts, or the homes of people who see the world very differently. It has never exposed them to live fire. Their idea of violence includes vocabulary.

I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Does it, though?

Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics. You choose your politics.

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.

At one point, Baquet, musing about how the Times was changing, observed that one of the newsroom’s cultural critics had become the paper’s best political-opinion columnist. Taking this musing one step further, I then noted that this raised an obvious question: why did the paper still have an Opinion department separate from the newsroom, with its own editor reporting directly to the publisher?

I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. 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.

The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism

But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases.

The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics. Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion.

The internet rewards opinionated work and, as news editors felt increasing pressure to generate page views, they began not just hiring more opinion writers but also running their own versions of opinionated essays by outside voices – historically, the province of Opinion’s op-ed department. Yet because the paper continued to honour the letter of its old principles, none of this work could be labelled “opinion” (it still isn’t).

As the Times tried to compete for more readers online, homogenous opinion was spreading through the newsroom in other ways. News desks were urging reporters to write in the first person and to use more “voice”, but few newsroom editors had experience in handling that kind of journalism, and no one seemed certain where “voice” stopped and “opinion” began.

Competitors like Vox and the HuffPost were blending leftish politics with reporting and writing it up conversationally in the first person. Imitating their approach, along with hiring some of their staff, helped the Times repel them. But it came at a cost.

And yet the Times insists to the public that nothing has changed.

“Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices, we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet,” Sulzberger wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review. “For that reason, we’ve long kept the Opinion department intentionally small – it represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff – and ensured that its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom.”

When I was editorial-page editor, Sulzberger, who declined to be interviewed on the record for this article, worried a great deal about the breakdown in the boundaries between news and opinion.

Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be. The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority. He is sensitive about the idiosyncratic way he reached the pinnacle of American news media, via his family’s control of the paper’s voting stock.

The paradox is that in previous generations the Sulzbergers’ control was the bulwark of the paper’s independence.

In early June 2020 Tom Cotton’s office pitched a piece about Twitter’s curation of its platform. Cotton had tweeted that Trump should call out troops to stop the “anarchy, rioting and looting” if “local law enforcement is overwhelmed”, and Twitter had threatened to censor his account. Jim Dao, the op-ed editor, was more interested in the substance of the tweet and, via Rubenstein, asked Cotton to write an op-ed about that.

In keeping with the basic practice of the op-ed page, which was created to present points of view at odds with Times editorials, Dao owed readers the counter-argument. They also needed to know someone so influential with the president was making this argument, and how he was making it.

Shortly after we published the op-ed that Wednesday afternoon, some reporters tweeted their opposition to Cotton’s argument. But the real action was in the Times’s Slack channels, where reporters and other staff began not just venting but organising. They turned to the union to draw up a workplace complaint about the op-ed. At least one of the reporters who covered news media took a strong position in this internal debate: “Amplifying a message that argues for MORE force only puts our own people in harm’s way, and undermines the paper’s commitment to their safety,”

Rubenstein was assisting me with research for a daily newsletter I was writing, and I asked him when we met on the morning of June 3rd to make sure Cotton was distinguishing clearly between rioters and protesters. He did: “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants,” Cotton wrote.

Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”. That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest. The Times did not publish a correction or any note acknowledging the story had been changed.

Seeking to influence the outcome of a story you cover, particularly without disclosing that to the reader, violates basic principles I was raised on at the Times. I asked the Times if the media reporter’s behaviour was ethical. The spokeswoman, Ms Rhoades Ha, did not answer

She also defended the Times more broadly: “The New York Times believes unequivocally in the principle of independence, as has been demonstrated consistently by our journalism before and since that episode. There are countless examples of the Times standing strong against pressure and protest, whether from governments, companies, politicians, activist groups or even internally. In the case of the Tom Cotton op-ed, the handling of such a sensitive piece, specifically the decision to rush it into publication without key leaders having read it because it was “newsy”, made it unusually vulnerable to attack. Good principles, as the Cotton op-ed demonstrated, cannot be an excuse for bad execution.”

Engaging with them at all was a mistake. That first night after the op-ed was published, when I called Baquet, his sage advice was to say nothing. Give it time, he said. Let this play out. The publisher disagreed. He thought we needed to say something that night explaining why we chose to publish the piece, and so we kept heaping more logs on the fire.

What is worth recalling now from the bedlam of the next two days? I suppose there might be lessons for someone interested in how not to manage a corporate crisis. I began making my own mistakes that Thursday.

As that miserable Thursday wore on, Sulzberger, Baquet and I held a series of Zoom meetings with reporters and editors from the newsroom who wanted to discuss the op-ed. Though a handful of the participants were there to posture, these were generally constructive conversations. A couple of people, including Baquet, even had the guts to speak up in favour of publishing the op-ed.

a pop-culture reporter asked if I had read the op-ed before it was published. I said I had not.

I might have explained that this was standard practice. Dao’s name was on the masthead of the New York Times because he was in charge of the op-ed section. If I insisted on reviewing every piece, I would have been doing his job for him

It was important to me to read pieces in advance that might cause an uproar, and I had asked Dao and his deputy to alert me to any they thought would be particularly sensitive, but they did not think the Cotton piece rose to that level. I had also instituted an “if-you-see-something-say-something” policy in Opinion as a whole. Nobody raised a red flag with me. To be clear – I don’t fault anyone for this; I mention it only as an index of how much easier it was to judge in hindsight, after publication, when a piece was explosive.

By unhappy – but, really, also quite funny – coincidence, a meeting of the entire company had been scheduled over Zoom for the next morning. The plan had been for the newsroom to talk about its coverage of the protests. Now the only subject was going to be the op-ed.

In retrospect, it seems clear that I was done by then. The executive committee gathered that morning to prepare, and for the first time I was not invited to join them. They had solicited questions in advance, and I got a glimpse at the list only as the company-wide meeting was about to start. I did not hear from Sulzberger, but the speechwriter who drafted many of his remarks, Alex Levy, contacted me just before the meeting began to tell me to use whatever question I got first to apologise, and at some point to acknowledge my privilege.

the Times is not good at acknowledging mistakes. Indeed, one of my own, within the Times culture, was to take responsibility for any mistakes my department made, and even some it didn’t. To Sulzberger, the meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed and my departure in disgrace are explained and justified by a failure of editorial “process”.

“It’s not enough just to have the principle and wave it around,” he said. “You also have to execute on it.”

To me, extolling the virtue of independent journalism in the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review is how you wave a principle around. Publishing a piece like Cotton’s is how you execute on it.

What still seems most striking about the Cotton episode is how out of sync the leaders of the paper were with the ascendant, illiberal values within it. Cotton’s essay brought into focus conflicts over the role of journalism that had been growing within the Times for years, and that the leadership has largely ducked away from. Is it journalism’s role to salt wounds or to salve them, to promote debates or settle them, to ask or to answer? Is its proper posture humble or righteous? As journalists trained in what was once the conventional way, with the old set of principles, Sulzberger, Baquet and I reacted similarly to Cotton’s essay: here’s a potentially consequential idea from an influential voice. It may make readers uncomfortable, and they should know about it and evaluate it partly for that very reason.

Times colleagues who were frightened or angry about the piece had the opposite view: that readers should not hear Cotton’s argument. To expose them to it was to risk that they might be persuaded by an elected politician.

As Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, said on the Senate floor about the Times’s panic over the Cotton op-ed, listing some other debatable op-ed choices, “Vladimir Putin? No problem. Iranian propaganda? Sure. But nothing, nothing could have prepared them for 800 words from the junior senator from Arkansas.”

The Times’s staff members are not often troubled by obnoxious views when they are held by foreigners.

Less than four months after I was pushed out, my former department published a shocking op-ed praising China’s military crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong. I would not have published that essay, which, unlike Cotton’s op-ed, actually did celebrate crushing democratic protest. But there was no internal uproar.

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.