“New York Times”: Exorcism in Lieu of Enlightenment (2020)
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To be fair to the NYT -- to be the devil's advocate, as it were:
The reason they backpedaled on the Tom Cotton piece wasn't because of the basic ideas expressed (the idea of sending federal troops, as such): but because the surrounding text was, well, basically unhinged and disconnected from reality -- and in that sense, basically irresponsible and (considering the historical moment) profoundly inflammatory.
As the Times explained in its notice explaining its decision to formally backpedal:
For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece. The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged.
That's why the editor who approved this hot, steaming piece of mindless -- and essentially pro-violence -- drivel got "cancelled".
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/business/donald-mcneil-ne...
"We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent," Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn said in a memo to staffers.
This "regardless of intent" is a pretty scary standard. Ancient magical thinking which placed taboo on certain words at least had the excuse that people really believed that uttering such words would indeed summon literal demons or other malevolent supernatural entities. Joe Kahn probably does not suffer from such superstition and yet behaves as if he did.
Which is plainly false of course.
Within +/- 2 weeks of that famous pronouncement there was a Times Magazine article (no less) featuring that very word, spelled out in full.
The fact is the NYT can't even put the words of a sitting US Senator on their pages, with no implicit _agreement_ of its factual value, and instead decapitates their own for it, shows crippling ideological constraint.
While I agree that sheltering its readers from their ideological enemies is not a good thing, I do think there should be a minimal standard of non-drivel-tude.
For example, I don't see any benefit to its readers in passing along opinion pieces from the Flat Earth Society. Or proclamations from nutjob senators claiming that it was the police "bore the brunt of the violence" during the uprising that followed the George Floyd lynching.
Why would you choose selective ignorance to those which wield power?
> ...
>Digital transformation had been the subject of earlier reports at the Times and all over the media world. But there was a startling tone to this one. It gave minimal attention, if any, to the Times’ most important asset: the editorial and critical judgment that would be necessary as a counterweight to the need to drive traffic.
> ...
>There is also a hectoring tone in the report, which can even seem to anticipate the tone of "cancel culture," praising news organizations that have used "buyouts" for "clearing out reporters and editors who were actively opposing changes" – a sweeping approach that extended into 2017 at the Times and opened the paper to heightened forms of political advocacy.
To be quite honest, if you read between the lines, it sounds a lot like the New York Times basically turned large parts of itself into Buzzfeed or Gawker in order to adapt to a revenue model that fit today's social-media landscape, in the process basically trashing their own institutional knowledge of how to do journalism and (this being the goal, from the owners' point of view) deskilling their journalistic workforce.