It’s too late for the New York Times

Bennet’s crime had been to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), arguing that recent unrest following the death of George Floyd meant the National Guard needed to be deployed to the streets of cities to restore order. Headlined “Send in the troops,” Cotton’s piece noted that police had become overwhelmed by the increasingly senseless violence. “In these circumstances,” Cotton said, “the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military ‘or any other means’ in ‘cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.’”

It didn’t matter that, as Cotton pointed out, a Morning Consult poll had found that 58% of voters supported deploying the National Guard. It also didn’t matter that even the most ardent civil libertarian was served by reading Cotton’s argument, if only because it reminded him why he couldn’t stand Cotton. Leftists on social media raged against the New York Times for having the audacity to publish an elected senator, and many of the calls were coming from inside the house. The New York Times was attacked on X by its own staffers who shrieked that the Cotton op-ed had somehow put their lives in danger.

The piece was published on a Wednesday. By Friday, the New York Times had attached a 300-word note that read like a radiation warning and decreed that Cotton’s essay never should have been published. By Sunday, Bennet was gone.

It was a lightning-fast defenestration in a summer when everything seemed to be moving at warp speed. And for conservatives, it was more evidence of a trend they’d long chronicled: The legacy media were shedding any hint of the free speech ethos they had once espoused. There was only one way forward now, and it was woke illiberalism. Anyone who failed to adhere to the au courant blend of identity politics and anti-Trump hysteria needed to be not persuaded but ostracized.

Now Bennet himself has more or less admitted they were right. In a long essay published at the Economist, he assailed the New York Times for having lost its way by surrendering to the illiberal forces in the newsroom. The problem, as he sees it, began after the 2008 recession, which swung an existential hammer at the journalism industry. The New York Times survived in part by updating itself for the online age, bringing in a new generation of reporters from internet broadsheets such as HuffPost who were younger and pushier with their politics. These fresh hires, and particularly the cultural critics, blurred the line between news and left-wing opinion, and the rot grew from there.

The problems Bennet documented are both stark and well established: brown-nosing woke journos moaning on Slack about the impure, older newsmen wondering how their paper ever became so precious, heretics (like Bennet) assumed guilty until proven guilty. Bennet doesn’t deny that the New York Times has always been staffed by the Left. But he draws that familiar line between the more liberal leftists of yore who believed in the power of free inquiry and the illiberal leftists of today who seek to shut down divergent views. By the time he arrived at the opinion page, Bennet said, the fix was already in: “I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost.”

Yet it’s worth asking: How much of a battle was there really? The New York Times has been growing more insidiously woke in recent years — if anything, Bennet is understating his case on this. But it’s not clear when those old-school liberal lions ever roared, when they made a real effort to try to stop an increasingly ugly slide into the abyss.

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Back in 2009, Tucker Carlson took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and said something no one expected: “The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it is also … a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.” He was booed for his trouble, but at least a few of us in the room were nodding along.

I’m a longtime reader of the New York Times. It’s funny because I don’t share the paper’s political views. I’ve never lived in New York City and would sooner drink hemlock than ever move there. Yet what’s kept me coming back is that Carlson had a point. Once upon a time, the New York Times featured the best newspaper journalism in America. Its features were vivid and engrossing. Its foreign coverage was among the finest on earth. Even its much-maligned political reporting featured plenty of color from the halls of Congress and the Iowa caucuses alike.

A conservative read the New York Times because he wanted to be as informed as possible, and nothing like the New York Times existed on the Right. That’s not to say right-leaning outlets haven’t done groundbreaking work but simply that the New York Times had a 170-year head start. The sheer breadth of coverage and level of detail were enough to make you clothespin your nose against the bias and schoolmarmish tone. (The one rule, ironically for Bennet, was that you never read the opinion section. That was the only place on earth where Paul Krugman and Charles Blow were taken seriously. Monsters be there.)

It was around the Obama administration that something began to change, and that something began not on the opinion page but in the weeds of the so-called straight news copy. Ideas once clearly embraced by the New York Times but nonetheless presented as open for discussion were increasingly reported as straight fact. It was no longer the case that many believed America had a systemic racism problem — America had a systemic racism problem. It was no longer true that a majority of climate scientists thought climate change was a threat to humanity — climate change was a threat to humanity. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 only cemented this newfound certainty. The paper, naturally, was one of the leading cheerleaders of the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian stooge.

The result was that the New York Times became even more difficult to read for anyone who didn’t share its preconceived notions. It also became kind of funny. To take just one example, a few years ago, the New York Times ran a feature piece about those seeking therapy for “climate anxiety,” the fear that the world is about to be vaporized by climate change. Here’s how the article began:

“It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl.

“Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children.”

In a sane world, a woman fretting about nuts would be portrayed as just that, or at least as a bit eccentric. Climate anxiety would be presented as a subcultural phenomenon, worth covering because it exists but with the context that most people can still eat a cashew without having a panic attack. And, of course, the necessary question would be asked: Are those who whip up fears over climate change causing unnecessary anxiety? 

Yet the article skips over all this. Climate anxiety is seen as largely mainstream and even rational. The New York Times’s ideological tin ear can’t register the ridiculous.

Or take another New York Times gem: “Five novelists imagine Trump’s next chapter.” Given that the article was published in 2018, it’s not clear why a new chapter in Trump’s life was dawning. But no matter: The New York Times was trying its hand at fiction, and it was an entry by Zoe Sharp that stood out most. In Sharp’s short story, a Russian agent (natch), having been told Trump has outlived his usefulness, attempts to assassinate the 45th president. When, in a deeply imaginative twist, his gun misfires, he’s approached by a Secret Service agent who hands him a Glock. “Use mine,” the man says.

Fantasizing about a presidential assassination does seem a tad more incendiary than anything Cotton ever wrote (and trite — would you believe the Russian had been up all night drinking vodka?). You might even argue, to echo New York Times staffers, that it could put people’s lives in danger. But then the New York Times was oblivious to all this for the same reason it was oblivious to the silliness of the Sunflower Seed Scare: Its woke ideology had cocooned it off from real life.

These examples of bias, while important, are also extreme. More often, what you find in the New York Times is a subtler slant that’s nonetheless obvious to anyone who doesn’t share it. Take this lede from what should have been a straight news article about the Trump administration published on Valentine’s Day 2017:

“The resignation of Michael T. Flynn as national security adviser caps a remarkably tumultuous first month for President Trump’s White House that has burdened the early days of his presidency with scandal, legal challenges, personnel drama and questions about his temperament during interactions with world leaders.”

That isn’t the usual stuff conservatives usually quarrel about with liberal news outlets, the biased story choice and stylebook double standards (“progressive” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez versus “archconservative” Freedom Caucus). It’s just preaching. It’s telling the reader exactly how he’s supposed to think about the information to follow. Every clause, practically every word, is calibrated to make Trump look bad.

Or take this piece about Trump published that same year and slugged as a “news analysis,” meaning it ran in the news section, not on the opinion page:

“Never in modern times has an occupant of the Oval Office seemed to reject so thoroughly the nostrum that a president’s duty is to bring the country together. Relentlessly pugnacious, energized by a fight, unwilling to let any slight go unanswered, Mr. Trump has made himself America’s apostle of anger, its deacon of divisiveness.

“Its pope of petulance. Its ayatollah of acrimony.”

Then there’s the coverage of race by the New York Times’s staffers, whom Bennet aptly described in his essay as “people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock.” The total devotion to woke dogma on race led the New York Times in 2019 to kick off one story this way: “Can a photographic lens condition racial behavior? I wondered about this as I was preparing to speak about images and justice on a university campus.” Or just try to make it to the end of this subhead from 2021: “Tourists, particularly black travelers, are paying close attention to how destinations and travel service providers approach diversity and equity after a year of social justice protests.” (Really? Is that really front of the mind for anyone planning a vacation?)

This is why I don’t think Bennet quite does justice to what’s happened at the New York Times. The ideology is so ingrained that it affects even the word choice. The problem also can’t be blamed solely on those illiberal youths. That piece on Trump’s first month? It was written by Michael D. Shear, the New York Times’s White House correspondent, who’s been a reporter since 1989 and has been at the New York Times since 2010. The climate anxiety feature was written by Ellen Barry, who has been at the New York Times since 2007.

***

Saying something happened “gradually, then suddenly” is a cliche and one we should probably stop using: With all due respect to Mike in The Sun Also Rises, most changes in life happen gradually, then suddenly. So, too, with the New York Times’s shift to the illiberal Left.

What began as linguistic tweaks during the Obama years evolved into tone-deafness during the early Trump years. And then, suddenly, came a cascade of humiliating controversies that suggested the New York Times wasn’t even trying anymore. 

There was the forced resignation of talented science reporter Donald McNeil in 2021 after he quoted someone using a racial slur while on a trip to Peru. There was tech reporter Taylor Lorenz falsely accusing businessman Marc Andreessen of using the word “retard” on a Clubhouse call. And, of course, there was the launch of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, which claimed the real cause of the American Revolution was slavery and which the New York Times stood by amid endless historical inaccuracies.

And there were more scandals inside the opinion department. In 2020, the classically liberal columnist Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times, blaming the familiar culprits of “bullying by colleagues” and an “illiberal environment.” In 2018, the New York Times hired the writer Sarah Jeong despite her having posted “satirical” tweets that made ugly remarks about white people. (Jeong shouldn’t be canceled, and wasn’t, but then why weren’t McNeil and Weiss afforded the same benefit of the doubt?)

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For anyone who had been following the New York Times, none of this came as a surprise. And for the few conservatives who might not have booed Carlson back in 2009, it meant time had run out. Who on the right or even the center-right is going to keep reading a paper whose hostility to their values filters all the way down to the semantics? How do you fix all this when what’s needed seems less like depoliticization than deprogramming?

On Christmas Eve 2023, the New York Times ran an op-ed deploring the destruction caused by Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. Fair enough, except the author of the piece was Yahya Sarraj, the mayor of Gaza City who had been appointed by Hamas. Publishing Sarraj was arguably a justifiable decision, but in light of what happened to Bennet, it seemed like the perfect coda for the New York Times’s disorientation. By all means, let’s hear from a terrorist puppet — but a Republican lawmaker?! Are you trying to get people killed?

Matt Purple is a writer and editor whose work has been featured in the Washington Examiner, American Conservative, Spectator, and many others. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children.