The New York Times’s effort to placate its increasingly illiberal workforce looks more like a failing hostage negotiation.
It serves the publication right.
The predicament that the paper finds itself in now, its leaders ceding ground every day to staffers who demand not to be offended, is a no-win situation of its own making. The New York Times can never truly satisfy this demand — because for some at the paper, being offended is a personality trait. Yet the paper trudges on nevertheless, laboring under the delusion that cowardly editorial tweaks and precision firings will appease its ultrawoke ranks. At this rate, it will not be long before the demand-makers are running the show, the newspaper’s more even-keeled but soon-to-be-extinct leadership a forgotten memory.
Case in point: the abrupt resignation this weekend of former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet following the publication of a June 3 opinion article by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
“Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger said Sunday in a staff memo announcing Bennet’s supposed resignation.
Acting editorial page editor Katie Kingsbury told staffers separately, “Anyone who sees any piece of opinion journalism, headlines, social posts, photos — you name it — that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.”
Why is the New York Times’s news section dictating what the opinion section should publish? Why are low-level news staffers now being given veto power over the content of the opinion section? The breaching of the firewall between news and opinion should be a much bigger concern for the paper’s chief editors than any employee complaint about an op-ed.
The offending Cotton op-ed, titled originally “Send in the troops,” argued that military force should be used to assist the police departments that have been overwhelmed by rioters who have taken advantage of the response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. The nuance of Cotton’s straightforward proposal, however, has been lost on the delicate sensibilities of several New York Times staffers, including New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.
“Senator Cotton certainly has the right to write and say whatever he wants in this country, but we as a news organization should not be running something that is offering misinformation to the public unchecked,” she said in a recent CNN interview.
If only her alleged dedication to truth and accuracy were both genuine and applied consistently.
Hannah-Jones, the founder of the factually challenged 1619 Project, and similarly aggrieved New York Times staffers have not, for example, protested the newspaper’s false characterization of Cotton’s argument following the blowup over his op-ed.
“James Bennet,” the paper reported this weekend in a since-amended article on the former editorial page editor’s departure from the paper, “has resigned after a controversy over an Op-Ed by a senator calling for military force against protesters in American cities.”
This is not what the senator argued. Cotton said military force should be used as a backup to suppress rioters should they overwhelm the local police departments. He never said anything about turning the military loose on peaceful and lawful protesters. The report has been updated since to reflect more accurately the thrust of the senator’s argument. There is no editor’s note or correction, by the way, noting the stealth edit.
Also, as far as aggrieved New York Times employees are concerned, it cannot go unmentioned that Hannah-Jones and her like-minded anti-Cotton colleagues had exactly nothing to say when their paper very recently published a propaganda opinion article authored by a leading Taliban officer.
Cotton’s op-ed, by the way, now bears a groveling 300-plus-word editor’s note apologizing for its tone and content. The New York Times’s Feb. 20 Taliban op-ed, which is a blatant piece of propaganda, bears no such editor’s note.
The New York Times’s opinion section published a controversial opinion article, as opinion sections often do. In turn, the paper’s employees revolted. They demanded a sacrifice from management, and amazingly, they got it in the form of Bennet’s resignation — and all because the news section took offense at what is not even close to being the most offensive or controversial article that the opinion section has published this year.
It seems, at this point, that there is no turning back for the New York Times. By acquiescing repeatedly to the ridiculous and censorious demands of its more radical employees, leading to major editorial changes and even so-called resignations, the New York Times is sending a clear message: It exists not to serve as a paper of record but to appease the liberal pieties its loudest and “wokest” staff and readership.
