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Paul Krugman confirms what I’ve long suspected: the rot at the NYT sits not with the reporters and essayists, but with the editors.
And the editors aren’t necessarily handing down explicit orders to bury the truth and massage the fascists’s feet. No. They’re just grinding the reporters down by making it a daily battle •not• to do those things. Sabotage by exhaustion; journalistic death by a thousand cuts.
1/2
❝Patrick [the editor] often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft.
It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.❞
Krugman quit.
While basically agreeing with what @weyoun6 says here — yes, catering to the aristocracy runs deep in the NYT’s blood, absolutely — I find this sort of “they always sucked” reaction a bit too facile.
Something really has shifted at the NYT in the last 10-20 years. I don't think I’m imagining that it used to be a better paper, used to have more teeth. The above used to be marbled in with truly great reporting; now…rarely.
EDIT: If you about to reply because you heard “They used to be perfect!!” anywhere in that previous paragraph, please slow down and read it again.
My unpopular opinion is that the NYT actually did a pretty •good• job of reporting the run-up to the Iraq War, and we remember the Judith Miller megafail precisely because it •stood out• as unusually bad. I knew her reporting was almost certainly wrong when it came out because of other context I got •from reading the NYT•.
Now the whole paper is rife with uranium-tube-style slop every day. The uranium tubes fiasco wouldn’t even stand out if it happened today.
@inthehands that's not my recollection. Butler wasn't unusually bad, and we get the same critique every time the NYT cheerleads a war (which is every war) that somehow *this time* it's a mistake, and how the paper *is failing to do its job* on this issue.
If you want to make a case that the NYT was ever better, then I suggest building that case with data. I think you'll find there was never a time the NYT allegiance to the aristocracy was not on display.
@weyoun6 @inthehands i think it is a mistake to believe that "the NYT allegiance to the aristocracy" is an explanation of the paper's behavior rather than a side-effect. NYT's fundamental commitment is to the status quo - that is, the idea that things are basically OK and just need a bit of fixing around the edges, which dutiful politicians will do after NYT reports on it. Turns out that this committment is functionaliy equivalent to the allegiance you identify, but semantically distinct.
@PaulDavisTheFirst @weyoun6
I think there’s a lot to that.
I do also think “aristocracy” captures something about the flavor of the NYT in particular, even compared to other very similar news outlets.
But, to your point: The New Yorker, for example, is also oozing with aristocracy but is on the whole much less invested in the status quo (relative to the NYT anyway). So…yeah, I think you have a point.