Paul Krugman confirms what I’ve long suspected: the rot at the NYT sits not with the reporters and essayists, but with the editors.
And the editors aren’t necessarily handing down explicit orders to bury the truth and massage the fascists’s feet. No. They’re just grinding the reporters down by making it a daily battle •not• to do those things. Sabotage by exhaustion; journalistic death by a thousand cuts.
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❝Patrick [the editor] often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft.
It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.❞
Krugman quit.
While basically agreeing with what @weyoun6 says here — yes, catering to the aristocracy runs deep in the NYT’s blood, absolutely — I find this sort of “they always sucked” reaction a bit too facile.
Something really has shifted at the NYT in the last 10-20 years. I don't think I’m imagining that it used to be a better paper, used to have more teeth. The above used to be marbled in with truly great reporting; now…rarely.
EDIT: If you about to reply because you heard “They used to be perfect!!” anywhere in that previous paragraph, please slow down and read it again.
My unpopular opinion is that the NYT actually did a pretty •good• job of reporting the run-up to the Iraq War, and we remember the Judith Miller megafail precisely because it •stood out• as unusually bad. I knew her reporting was almost certainly wrong when it came out because of other context I got •from reading the NYT•.
Now the whole paper is rife with uranium-tube-style slop every day. The uranium tubes fiasco wouldn’t even stand out if it happened today.
@inthehands What about the HIV crisis that took place in its home turf? Shouldn't the paper of record record what's happening a few blocks over?
@antnisp That was an egregious failure on their part.
Note that absolutely nowhere in my post above did I say that the allegiance to the aristocracy was not present at any point, or that their reporting used to be perfect. Nowhere.
@inthehands My point is that whether something "has really shifted in the last 10-20 years" is debatable. I raised something earlier and people will probably find something earlier still.
The most damning thing is that its obvious that the NYT is institutionally unable to recognize those "failures".
@antnisp
Agreed with that last bit, and I think it's some of the best evidence that something has in fact shifted: they did a lot of self-flagelating about the WMD reporting fiasco, and forced Judith Miller to resign over it.
I simply cannot imagine anything like that happening now.