Excellent Reads

AG is clearly one of those at fault in the article, but I’m not convinced that that is the voice the author is coming at it from.

It’s so long that I’m not going to read it all in depth. Maybe that means I am going to miss something but I just now made a pretty lengthy concerted effort to skim and try to see if your reading makes sense, and I’m still having trouble. So like, check this out:

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.

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.

The whole framing of the article is that the “untruth” AG needs to be setting straight is overly sensitive political correctness from progressives, and analyzing everything he’s doing through that lens. Whether we have to be neutral and present progressives and “conservatives” on the same footing, or whether we should take a side and say the progressives are wrong. Right? Have I read that part right in your opinion?

I think once you’ve framed AG’s dilemma in those terms, you already fucked up. That is not AG’s dilemma. His dilemma is that part of the US political spectrum is explicitly fascist now, and his decision as far as I can tell is that we need to go further than the Times’s editorial voice being on the side of the neoliberals as it always was, and now needs to be the fascists or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, whether or not that’s the reality.

Here’s an extremely instructive example:

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.

That was the right thing to do. Trump was starting to call for the use of troops, and on May 31st the mayor of Washington, DC, had requested that the National Guard be deployed in her city. After police gassed protesters before Trump posed for a photo in Lafayette Square on June 1st, the editorial board, which I led, weighed in against that use of force and Trump’s “incendiary behaviour”, and the op-ed team had pieces planned for June 3rd arguing he did not have a sound basis to call out federal forces and would be wrong to do so. 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.

The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.

This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s. 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.

Right? I still won’t say I’m 100% sure on 100% of the thesis of the article, but is that not Bennet arguing that AG needs to enforce better the pro-fascist standard of truth?

No, we only agree that the NYT sucks, but disagree on basically everything else. We are coming from exact opposite directions. Yes, we both are attacking the NYT, but, like I already explained, the article attacks them for the opposite reason. For example:

Until that miserable Saturday morning I thought I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in a struggle to revive them. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

That is absurd bullshit. Like I said, the NYT's principles and history are that of collaborating with American elite interests since its founding.

The article talks about "objectivity" over and over, and how the NYT used to strive for it, but that's simply not true. The author's concept of objectivity is what Gramsci calls cultural hegemony, in which the worldview of the ruling class becomes accepted as consensus reality. Like I said, the NYT and its ilk once had cultural hegemony, but it's now been pierced. Another example:

There have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions. The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

Fuck that noise. This author is praising them for being "brave" on questioning trans people, but many activists groups have documented what this actually is: The NYT has an anti-trans editorial stance.

Again, like I said in my first comment, the author doesn't understand the role of power in journalism: He thinks that the job of the journalist is to present all sides objectively, without any understanding that some people are in power and others are oppressed. Like the famous saying goes, the job of the journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. The NYT's entire history, with some very notable exceptions, I grant you, is the opposite of that. Its apparent fall from grace now isn't because it has lots it objectivity, but its hegemony over American information.