This perspective seems almost exactly wrong, considering what's been happening with the NYT lately.
Which actually proves that the New York Times still works perfectly fine. That's not the sort of conflict an independent journalist would even have, because they would never even dare to publish something that would anger their likely homogenous readerbase and thus threaten their paycheck.
It's actually precisely because the NYT still works like a reasonably diverse newspaper that they constantly end up in one shitstorm or the other, not despite of it.
And for what it's worth, I read several people online who I'd be happy to pay and I respect them enough intellectually that when they hold opinions I disagree with, I end up changing my mind as often as not. I may be a weirdo, but I don't think it's unheard for people to seek out online writers precisely because of their independent-mindedness rather than their dogmatic adherence to a party line. In my experience, it seems to be traditional media that has drawn up along party lines.
I admire the NYT as an institution, but I certainly don't think it has anything like a monopoly on journalistic integrity.
That is basically dereliction of duty considering that the piece is from a sitting US senator advocating for military intervention against American citizens. Should he have stayed on in that job?
It shouldn't come as a surprise that that topic would cause more public consternation than doxxing the author of a semi-popular blog that the majority of Americans have no stake in.
Certainly it's debatable whether that piece should have been published, but the stories about failures of professionalism sound like reasons they came up with after they published something that plenty of other major newspapers would have published, and discovered that their readership and employees really didn't like it.
To be clear, I think it's totally fine that the organization runs that way, but I think it's wrong to put them on a pedestal.
the cotton piece was published exactly to generate outrage and partisanship, not to be informative, and it backfired--a lack of editorial integrity, not an issue with the offensive content itself.