New York Times Journalists Scared To Have an Op-Ed Page

[Muda69]

https://reason.com/2020/06/04/new-york-times-journalists-scared-to-have-an-op-ed-page/

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Last night, The New York Times, which has long maintained the pretentions of being the serious journalistic institution in the United States, published an article about how its own employees were scared—not just irritated, or "deeply ashamed," but terrified—that the publication in its pages of an op-ed from a sitting U.S. senator would threaten their very lives.

The purportedly dangerous piece, by the reliably authoritarian Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), called for President Donald Trump to send military personnel, using the Insurrection Act of 1807, to help put down the rioting that has sometimes broken out at demonstrations against abusing policing.

"His message undermines the journalistic work of our members, puts our Black staff members in danger, promotes hate, and is likely to encourage further violence," alleges the News Guild of New York, the union that represents Times staffers. "Invariably, invoking state violence disproportionately hurts Black and brown people. It also jeopardizes our journalists' ability to work in the field safely and effectively."

Like Defense Secretary Mark Esper, I do not think the president should invoke the Insurrection Act, now or for whatever other hare-brained schemes he may have. And like the army of journalism professors and lefty media critics busy mashing the "like" button on every new anti-Cotton tweet, I am no fan of the senator. My first piece about him, five years ago, was headlined "GOP's New Foreign Policy Hero Is a Surveillance-Loving Interventionist Nightmare."

But Tom Cotton is, sadly, a senator. And one of the most longstanding traditions among journals of national aspiration—the Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Atlantic—is publishing advocacy essays by people in power.

For instance, then-Rep. Charlie Rangel (D–N.Y.) wrote a 2002 New York Times op-ed headlined "Bring Back the Draft" (talk about "invoking state violence" in a way that "disproportionately hurts Black and brown people"!) without stirring this sort of protest. More recently, Michael Bloomberg took to the Gray Lady to advocate banning flavored vapes. Ask the family of Eric Garner how they feel about the racial distribution of stepped-up anti-nicotine enforcement in New York. One begins to suspect that the objection to Cotton is not a principled observation that state power is disproportionately wielded against the less fortunate.

This publishing flap, which in comparative importance is a sputtering match next to the hell-inferno of spring 2020, is nonetheless symbolic of a shift bearing more tectonic heft. Our liberal institutions, not unlike our conservative intellectuals, are noisily abandoning liberalism.

While the Trump-era trolls on the right gleefully transgress the bounds of discourse (particularly concerning race, gender, and sexuality) to provoke the sensitivities of the forces they call "the Cathedral," the solons of the institutional left expend a frightful amount of energy serving as intellectual bouncers—deciding, sometimes based on organization affiliation or even immutable characteristics, who is allowed to be in the club and dance on the "platform." It is an ever-escalating slap-fight between two sides who have given up on the idea of don't-categorize-me individualism.

The woke left's march through the institutions, from experimental liberal arts campuses to the most hallowed journalistic outlets, has been breathtaking in its speed and scope. It's a generational war, and the GenXers for whom this stuff doesn't come natural are learning that they have to become fluent in the new language or end up as pariahs in their own newsrooms. The country's top editors—Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, David Remnick at The New Yorker—discover during moments of staff revolt that their old-timey notions about broad public squares and multi-viewpoint conversations are no longer tolerable.

Outlets that once waved the flag of provocative viewpoint-diversity—Salon, The New Republic, Vice—have long since become barely distinguishable enforcers of a joyless orthodoxy. Just today, Vox's Zack Beauchamp engaged in ritual self-criticism after getting ripped by the kids for having tweeted, "I'm sorry but 'abolish the police' seems like a poorly thought out idea that's gotten popular with shocking speed."

As The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf observed/predicted, "There is ascendant pressure on journalists to reify positions that are held by a minority of the public and a supermajority of journalists. If it succeeds it will not advance social justice. It will make journalistic institutions that value social justice less influential." All this can be mortifying to watch.

For those editorial leaders who remain on the inside even after having committed the sin of expressing a Wrongthink or publishing a Deplorable, the price to pay is either a full public confession or a cowed explanation full of more caveats than the subway's full of rats. An example of the latter genre was published today by Times editorial page chief James Bennet. There is zero question, in reading Bennet's timid defense, which way the wind's blowing on Eighth Avenue. The bouncers may have let Cotton sneak under the velvet rope, but the next poseur won't be so lucky.

So do staffers at The New York Times truly believe, as their union alleges, that the publication of a single op-ed by one of 100 sitting U.S. senators represents "a clear threat to the health and safety of journalists"? If so, then that is yet another data point that the whole taking politics seriously not literally concept, with all the intellectual corruption that entails, is no longer and perhaps has never been the exclusive province of the Trumpite right.

Cotton, whose piece (should anyone actually care about such things) condemns the "wrongful death of George Floyd" and makes a point of distinguishing "peaceful, law-abiding protesters" from "looters" (though I'm dubious his pined-for military responders would), would, if barred from making his argument in The New York Times, have to resort to the hinterlands of, uh, C-SPAN, Fox News, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and just about any other newspaper in America. You would need a powerful microscope indeed to calibrate the marginal increase in likelihood that Trump would now take Cotton's advice just because it appeared in the paper he hates.

Given the startling erosion in meaning of such once-fixed concepts as "safety," and the twin degradation of evidentiary requirements when making sweeping accusations of racism, the likeliest explanation for the Cotton panic is that the frenzy at this point is feeding on itself.

Words have clear definitions, and grave accusations have clear need for verification, and yet you will not see a day go past when the Times and its journalists will act as if such standards do not exist. "They are parallel plagues ravaging America," the paper's lead paragraph of its lead article asserted Friday. "The coronavirus. And police killings of black men and women." That is not how language works.

New York Times Magazine correspondent and anti-Cotton ringleader Nikole Hannah-Jones (a "Pulitzer winner," the paper reminds us in its coverage about its own staff being mad at the Opinion section), stated as fact Tuesday that "Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence." As National Review's Michael Brendan Dougherty snarked, "Opeds are violence, acts of arson are opeds."

And fear, apparently, is everywhere. The most unintentionally hilarious sections of the paper's article about itself speak volumes about where elite journalistic institutions are heading. The first is writer Marc Tracy worrying out loud that readers of the country's leading intellectual light might be too stupid to understand newspaper traditions: "The distinction between opinion pieces and news articles is sometimes lost on readers, who may see an Op-Ed—promoted on the same home page—as just another Times article." Abolish all Op-Eds!

And the second comes from inside the house: "Three Times journalists, who declined to be identified by name, said they had informed their editors that sources told them they would no longer provide them with information because of the Op-Ed."

If this cramped cowardice is the future of journalism, then journalism has no future. Thankfully, readers and viewers and listeners who rightfully find all this to be crazy talk have a universe of other options.

We most certainly do have a universe of other options.  And journalism as we know it is doomed because of such cowardice. 

[Muda69]

James Bennet's Resignation Proves the Woke Scolds Are Taking Over The New York Times

https://reason.com/2020/06/08/james-bennet-new-york-times-opinion-woke-tom-cotton/

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James Bennet resigned as editorial page editor of The New York Times on Sunday, following a successful campaign by irate staffers to oust the person who published an inflammatory op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that suggested the government deploy federal troops to "restore order in our streets."

"Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we've experienced in recent years," Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said in a note to the paper's staff. "Both of us concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required."

This development is remarkable for several reasons. First, Bennet was widely expected to be a frontrunner for the Times' top job, executive editor, when current chief Dean Baquet retires. His sudden fall from grace opens up unexpected opportunities for others.

But more importantly, Bennet's resignation was an instructive show of force from those Times staffers who want the paper to be more transparently progressive. Their successful strategy—describe their opposition to someone else's speech as a matter of personal safety—is straight out of the woke left's playbook. Dismayingly, we should expect to see this tactic deployed more frequently in the future.

Cotton's op-ed was poorly argued, constitutionally unsound, morally questionable, and factually flawed. But Cotton is not some random right-wing kook. The fact that he is a key policy maker of the Trump era might suggest that publishing his authoritarian dictates is a better course of action than keeping Times readers in the dark about them.

A cadre of staffers reacted with apoplectic rage that the paper would dare solicit Cotton's opinion on such a sensitive topic. "As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this," said Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times reporter who has also been credibly accused of making factual errors, though don't expect any walkouts at the Times over it.

Vox's explanation of the Cotton clash, which quotes several anti-Bennet staffers anonymously—their names redacted "for fear of retaliation," an amusingly mixed-up concern—paints the issue as one of Times reporters growing increasingly frustrated. They were frustrated with Bennet, and with opinion page writers Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss, whose columns are generally conservative, contrarian, or otherwise at odds with the paper's left-leaning staff. (For what it's worth, I've criticized Stephens but find Weiss genuinely insightful and interesting.) Some of their frustrations are understandable, if not entirely defensible: News reporters are generally discouraged—or even prohibited outright—from expressing their opinions on social media, which might put some in the position of feeling like they can't publicly dissent from opinion pieces published under their own banner. Vox claims that some Times reporters are losing stories because sources won't talk to them after the Cotton op-ed, though it's hard to put blind trust in anonymous claims.

In any case, Times staffers merely denouncing the op-ed would have been one thing. The op-ed deserves denunciation, so it would be hard to argue that they were wrong to do so, considerations about keeping news and opinion separate notwithstanding.  

But here's the key aspect of this affair: The progressive group didn't just say that the op-ed was wrong and shouldn't have been published. They stated directly that publishing it undermined their personal safety. Their choice of phrasing was deliberate—part of an effort to gird their opposition to the op-ed in the language of workplace safety, according to a piece by Times media columnist Ben Smith:

That pattern continued last week, as Times staff members began an extraordinary campaign to publicly denounce the Op-Ed article written by Senator Cotton. Members of an internal group called Black@NYT organized the effort in a new Slack channel and agreed on a carefully drafted response. They would say that Mr. Cotton's column "endangered" black staff members, a choice of words intended to "focus on the work" and "avoid being construed as hyperpartisan," one said. On Wednesday evening around 7:30, hours after the column was posted, Times employees began tweeting a screenshot of Mr. Cotton's essay, most with some version of the sentence: "Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger." The NewsGuild of New York, later advised staff members that that formulation was legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety. "It wasn't just an opinion, it felt violent—it was a call to action that could hurt people," one union activist said of Mr. Cotton's column.

This is quite obviously nonsense: Cotton's words placed no one in imminent danger. Sadly, it's becoming distressingly common for progressive employees who wish to silence a dissident view to cite workplace safety as a pretext. To take just one example, this was how conservative writer Kevin Williamson got fired from The Atlantic.

This is a disturbing trend that ought to concern everyone—liberals included. It's an insult to actual workplace safety issues, for one thing. For another, it makes the office a dangerous place to express a potentially unpopular opinion. Journalistic institutions shouldn't live in fear of difficult conversations, or of provoking offense. But the necessary consequence of this new regime of safetyism will be everybody walking on eggshells.

My book Panic Attack contains countless other examples of woke young people weaponizing ever-expanding definitions of safety against people who disagree with them. In the book's closing pages, I observed that they'd been able to "hijack existing, well-intentioned harassment law in order to make campuses more repressive places. It's not impossible to imagine the same thing happening in the work place." Not impossible at all: It's happening before our very eyes.

Yes, it sure is.  Now private workplaces will have to also become "safe spaces" for the snowflakes working there, or else they may hear or see something that "offends" them or make them feel "unsafe".  

 

[Muda69]

The New York Times Says Tom Cotton's Essay 'Fell Short of Our Standards.' What Standards?

https://reason.com/2020/06/10/the-new-york-times-says-tom-cottons-essay-fell-short-of-our-standards-what-standards/

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The op-ed piece that ended now-former Editorial Page Editor James Bennet's career at The New York Times raised the hackles of black staff members who portrayed its central argument as a clear and imminent threat to their personal safety. They claimed the essay, in which Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) urged President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up active-duty troops in response to the urban unrest that followed George Floyd's deadly May 25 encounter with Minneapolis police, "puts our Black staff members in danger," because "invoking state violence disproportionately hurts Black and brown people."

Officially, however, the problem with Cotton's op-ed—the problem that led Bennet and the Times to part ways—was not the senator's message but the way he communicated it. "The basic arguments advanced by Senator Cotton—however objectionable people may find them—represent a newsworthy part of the current debate," says a five-paragraph apology that was added to the top of the piece two days after it appeared. Regrettably, however, "the essay fell short of our standards."

Regular readers of the New York Times op-ed page could be forgiven for wondering: What standards? Every sin Cotton supposedly committed—with the exception of the "basic arguments" that the Times still says were "a newsworthy part of the current debate"—has been a frequent feature of the paper's opinion pages for many years without generating such conspicuous internal controversy.

"The tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate," the Times says.

Unnecessary harshness, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. When Times editorial board member Michelle Cottle danced on Joe Arpaio's political grave in a 2018 opinion piece, I'm sure she thought she was employing exactly the right amount of harshness. Cottle called the former Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff "a disgrace to law enforcement," "a sadist masquerading as a public servant," "the proto-Trumpian embodiment of fearmongering ethnonationalism," and "a true American villain" whose "24-year reign of terror" was "medieval in its brutality."

Although I tend to agree with Cottle's assessment, Arpaio, who sued her for libel, definitely did not, and neither did his supporters (including Trump, who used his very first pardon to clear Arapaio's criminal contempt conviction). And while I don't agree with Cotton's position on using soldiers to do police work, his harshness—condemning "bands of looters," "nihilist criminals," and the "feckless politicians" who "prefer to wring their hands while the country burns"—seems pretty mild by comparison. Cotton also decried "a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters," saying, "A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn't be confused with bands of miscreants."

While Cottle zeroed in on a deserving target, Times columnist Paul Krugman's harshness is less discriminating. "At this point," he declared in 2018, "good people can't be Republicans."

A writer's thoughtfulness, like his harshness, is contingent on the reader's perspective. Perhaps some left-leaning Times readers consider the abolition of capitalism a plausible solution to global warming, as proposed by a 2017 Times op-ed piece. But it is harder to understand how the routinely incoherent Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who reliably demonstrates the intimate relationship between lazy writing and lazy thinking, meets the paper's standards. Here is Gene Healy on a 2011 Friedman column headlined "Are We Going to Roll Up Our Sleeves or Limp On?":

If you think about it, we can do both. But thinking through the images your words create is too pedestrian for the Maestro of Mixed Metaphors.

Here, Friedman argues that we need fiscal austerity and President Obama's $447 billion "jobs program," and closes the column by landing the rare double mixed metaphor with a triple axle and a twist of lemon.

If partisanship rules congressional budget fights, Friedman warns, "the rest of us will just sit here…hunkering down for a bad century." OK, no more limping—but what do we do with our sleeves?

Healy again on a Friedman column from the following year:

Friedman asks why, despite some "breathtaking chainsaw-nails-pounded-into-heads violence," post-Saddam Iraq didn't "explode outward like Syria"? Because: "For better and for worse, the United States in Iraq performed the geopolitical equivalent of falling on a grenade—that we triggered ourselves."

Barely leaving us time to ponder the "for better" upside of that move, what "chainsaw-nails" are and how something can "explode" any way but "outward," Friedman's off to the grenade races without his obstetrics textbook:

"[Nobody's] willing to fall on the Syrian grenade and midwife a new order. So the fire rages uncontrolled…and the Shiite-Sunni venom unleashed by the Syrian conflict" strains relations regionwide. Will venom-grenades give way to chainsaw-nails? It's a "breathtaking" performance that really makes your head pound.

More (so much more!) on Friedman from Matt Welch here.

The Times also says Cotton's essay included "allegations" about the role of left-wing activists in violent protests that "have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned."

What about the claim, frequently made in the Times opinion section, that arbitrarily defined "assault weapons" are uniquely suited to mass murder and have no legitimate uses? Surely those assertions qualify as allegations that "have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned."

The merits of banning so-called assault weapons may be too timely an issue for the Times to clearly see the erroneous factual assumptions underlying such laws. What about stuff that happened more than a century ago?

Katherine Stewart claimed in a 2017 Times op-ed piece that "attacks on 'government schools'…have their roots in American slavery, Jim Crow-era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism." To support that claim, Stewart offered an 1887 quotation from "Presbyterian theologian A.A. Hodge."

But as Jesse Walker noted here, Hodge was not opposed to government schools, and he was not expressing anti-Catholic sentiment. Walker added that, contrary to Stewart's thesis that the rhetoric she decried can be traced to supporters of slavery and segregation, the abolitionist Gerrit Smith "used the phrase 'governmental schools' sneeringly," and "he did it in 1858, three decades before the lecture that Stewart called 'one of the first usages of the phrase 'government schools.'"

Then there was Kristen Ghodsee's risible claim in a 2017 Times op-ed piece (later expanded into a book) that "women had better sex under socialism." Cathy Young, who described Ghodsee's original essay as "one of the most mercilessly mocked New York Times op-eds of recent memory," spoke from experience in debunking her thesis: "As someone who lived in the Soviet Union until emigrating as a teen in 1980, I can say that Ghodsee must have a truly enormous pair of rose-colored glasses."

Finally, the Times says Cotton's "assertion that police officers 'bore the brunt' of the violence [by rioters] is an overstatement that should have been challenged." 

If the Times is keen to avoid overstatement on its opinion page, what are we to make of legal columnist Linda Greenhouse's assertion that a unanimous Supreme Court defeat for the Obama administration in a 2014 cases involving recess appointments was actually "a major victory for the president…by any objective view"? Or columnist Nicholas Kristof's unsubstantiated 2015 claim that "some 100,000 minors are trafficked into the sex trade each year in America," which echoed similarly dubious guesstimates? Or the 2019 op-ed piece in which former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and anti-smoking activist Matthew Myers averred that the e-cigarette flavors overwhelmingly preferred by adults are clearly designed for children, then falsely implied that vaping-related lung injuries were caused by products like Juul?

At the risk of making an unsubstantiated allegation and speaking hyperbolically with unnecessary harshness, I am going to suggest that the Times does not really care about its alleged "standards," except when they help rationalize a decision it has already made for other reasons. More charitably, the paper's editors are simply blind to violations of these rules when they are committed by writers whose conclusions they like.

The NYT and what's left of the other major newspapers are in a quandary.  The old print advertising model they employed for decades no longer works,  so a larger and larger portion of their income now comes from individuals purchasing subscriptions and reading the paper online.  So in order to grow and maintain this subscription model they have to kowtow more and more  to the political leanings of those subscribers.   Advertising is a politically risk-adverse industry and under the old model most advertisers wanted the paper to "play it safe" in order to satisfy the vast majority of the readership. After all the companies paying for the advertisers don't want feedback like "I now refuse to purchase products made by Company A because of that horrible op-ed published in the NYT. Company A must support that position!"