The Times at Ebb Tide

James Bennet Eviscerates Our Most Important Newspaper

As a native New Yorker and a lifelong journalist, the New York Times has been a lodestar in my life. It is an addiction, a trusted friend, a pain in the ass. I have written for the Times Sunday Book Review. I’ve had six books reviewed in the Times, for good and ill. Most important, I’ve worked alongside Times colleagues—especially overseas, and on political campaigns—and found them to be not just first-rate, but extremely courageous in their pursuit of the truth…and boon companions, besides. This is not about them.

But there has been a sickness to the place, a growing intellectual rot that has been apparent for the past 40 years, a debilitating moral pomposity that has rendered the Times untrustworthy, in subtle ways, on some issues; not on everything, but certainly on the cultural issues that are most divisive in our society right now. This diminution tracks, a bit too perfectly, with the decline of freedom—and the rise of identity politics—on elite college campuses and in the Democratic Party. This is no coincidence: most Times reporters come from elite colleges. And it is fitting that a week after the Presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn made free-speech fools of themselves before a Congressional Committee, James Bennet, one of the finest journalists of our time, has fired a broadside in the Economist that has exploded with devastating impact amidships the Grey Lady.

Bennet, you may recall, was jettisoned by the Times after he published an op-ed by the conservative Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, positing that it might be necessary for the federal government to send troops to control the rioting after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. I thought Bennet’s firing was shocking at the time, a body-blow to free speech. Cotton’s op-ed was predictable, and well within the bounds of civility and history; federal troops had been called out before to quell racial disturbances. But it caused a rebellion among Times staffers, who famously said that its publication had “threatened their safety.” I thought of Dexter Filkins risking his life in Iraq and Chris Chivers doing the same in Afghanistan, and the late Robin Toner left abandoned by the Pat Robertson campaign bus in South Carolina, and John Kifner dodging rocks and bottles with me during the busing riots in Boston—and I had to laugh. Real journalism often requires facing down a threat, not just to life and limb, but also to cherished assumptions. It is work that involves constant recalibration, if one is to be honest when reporting a story; sometimes that can be very uncomfortable. I’ve often enjoyed the discomfort of new information—it could also be called learning—if not the actual threats to my security that came when I took inconvenient positions. Hilariously, many of those who feared for their safety, according to Bennet, were culture writers for the paper. Such people should have no say in judging the work of actual journalists.

This is very serious business; obviously, close to home for me. Let me lay out a summary of Bennet’s case and then amplify how, in my experience, the Times has added to the hyper-partisan myopia of American life. He starts with a bold declaration:

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

He proceeds to recount the joys of having been a journalist, especially those that come with covering new and different topics; in his case, the elderly in the outer boroughs—at the behest of Metro editor Gerald Boyd—and both sides in the Middle East:

[T]here was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were. You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

But when he left the Times to edit The Atlantic, Bennet began to see the corrosive effects of illiberal identity politics: It was proposed to him that “trans” people should cover trans issues, which was precisely the opposite of what Gerry Boyd had taught him—familiarity breeds intellectual lassitude. By the time Bennet returned to the Times, as op-ed page editor, the symptoms had become a cancer:

The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters. New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them…

As the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration approached, the editors who compile letters to the Times, part of my department, had put out a request to readers who supported the president to say what they thought of him now. The results had some nuance. “Yes, he is embarrassing,” wrote one reader. “Yes, he picks unnecessary fights. But he also pushed tax reform through, has largely defeated isis in Iraq,” and so forth. After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting, so I turned over the entire editorial page to the Trump letters.

I wasn’t surprised that we got some criticism on Twitter. But I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision. During the session, one of the newsroom’s journalists demanded to know when I would publish a page of letters from Barack Obama’s supporters…

Bennet still adheres to a Timesian discretion. He doesn’t name names. The situation grew worse:

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias…

The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

In the end, he came to the conclusion the illiberality had overwhelmed the newspaper, an ideology—emanating from elite universities—that stood very much at odds with freedom of the press:

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it. They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be.

This last part cuts to my own beef with the Times: the paper’s frequent inability to be honest about race, crime, welfare, poverty and education. This bias perfectly mirrored the Democratic Party’s recent failure to speak the truth about these issues which, I believe, provided the fuel for Donald Trump’s right-wing populism. It was also a form of racial condescension, an inability to recognize the complexities of the black community, to understand that the “activists” so often quoted in the Times represented only a slice of black opinion. It was also, too often, a form of cowardice, an inability to tell unpleasant truths and stand up to the racial extremists in its own ranks, like those who marketed the 1619 Project. This is how the Times came to be “the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”

Let me give two recent op-ed examples:

First, there is Michelle Goldberg, who seems distressed, and somewhat mystified by liberal celebrities who turn from left to right—people like the exceedingly coddled and damaged Russell Brand and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Let’s leave aside the fact that such people—and Naomi Wolf, too—have the impact on our society of tinsel on a redwood. They are not nearly as important as a black minister who can’t abide by liberal orthodoxy on crime, gender fluidity and abortion, though we almost never hear from the latter in the Times.

Goldberg does note that the left has been losing altitude in general, lately. But she has nothing to say about the obvious causes: that the Far Left has too long lingered in the embrace of economic determinism, the detritus of Marxism, which proved a disastrously faulty theory long ago, and it remains in thrall to the simplistic dichotomy of colonists v. oppressed, which has some validity but doesn’t come close to explaining the tribal complexities of global politics. In the 20th century, fascism and communism were defeated by freedom; in the 21st century, freedom seems at risk to authoritarianism. The Left is a bystander in that contest.

The academic left is infuriated by wealth in a way most American are not. It has also, foolishly, embraced identity as economics faded as a casus belli, fitting out the rest of society—especially the media and publishing—with the shackles of political correctness, of illiberality, of the excessive DEI nonsense so brilliantly demonstrated by the university presidents last week. Much of Left-thinking has become painfully out-of-date, a boutique ideology. (Which is not to say that the authoritarian right is any better; it is far more dangerous—but the Left’s ineptitude has made fascism a more likely threat to democracy.) Goldberg claims she’s an incrementalist, a liberal hoping for change in society. I think of myself that way, too—but she’s strayed off the beaten path and entangled herself deep in word-jungle of illiberality that has overtaken the Times. And all too often, especially when it comes to education, the Left stands in the way of real progress.

Then, there is Jamelle Bouie, who is always literate and often smart, but somehow is allowed to get away with this whopper:

We need to fight political despair everywhere we find it, which means this country needs an overhaul of its economic system, its political institutions and its public life.

Its economic system? Its political institutions? Yes, yes, a constant spirit of reform is essential to liberalism, but how about a little perspective: The American economy is the envy of the world. Poor people here would be considered middle class in most other places. That’s why so many folks over there want to emigrate. Our political institutions, threatened now by right-wing populism and left-wing illiberality, have stood the test of time—and we’d better think twice before we make any changes to these basic structures, at least until a veto-proof majority of the electorate can pass a basic citizenship exam. I would contrast Bouie’s theoretical leftism with the powerful humanity of Nicholas Kristof’s first-hand reports of barbarity and injustice in the real world.

The Heart of My Beef With the Times

I have no complaints about the Times’ coverage of foreign affairs. It is flat out excellent. Op-ed columnists like Tom Friedman, Bret Stephens and Maureen Dowd are as good as any on the planet. I found great comfort writing for the Times Book Review, especially under the leadership of Pamela Paul who encouraged me to take on controversial topics like an assessment of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s work (more about him later). She has become a refreshing voice of moderation on the op-ed page.

But I have found a real deficiency, a weakness based in bias, in the paper’s coverage of domestic policy issues, especially those that have to do with race and poverty and culture. This bias is sometimes obvious, as in the use of loaded identity phrases like “people of color,” “Latinx,” LGBTQ+, the capitalization of black but not of white, the shredding of binary pronouns—which are the signposts of an ideology that many people in this country find oppressive and inaccurate. (And yes, yes, racism, sexism and all those other isms exist, but the Left’s oft-foolish obsession with identity has given nightly fodder to the ugly, intemperate voices on Fox News.)

Far more profound is the disservice the Times has done the urban poor. There is a strangled adherence to the mouldy tenets of industrial-age, welfare-state liberalism: more money is always the answer to social programs that don’t work, crime is too often a consequence of deprivation rather than depravity, the police are brutal and racist, racism is immutable and central; there has been no progress toward an integrated, multi-cultural, multi-racial society. All of these are dangerous oversimplifications.

In my experience—a half -century now, starting with an informal tutorial at the feet of Daniel Patrick Moynihan—there are three essential components to a successful anti-poverty agenda: family preservation, neighborhood stability that comes with strict law enforcement and more creative schooling. (Other factors like better housing and mental health facilities certainly don’t hurt.) But you don’t often read about family structure, outrageous street behavior or the collapse of our inner city public schools often in the Times. Which is only the beginning:

—You don’t read much about the fact that black people are far more concerned about crime than white people are. You do read a mindless, totally uncritical celebration of extremist groups like Black Lives Matter, which is plagued by corruption and smitten by irrelevant (to the issue) causes like Palestinian “liberation” and, most important, refuses to acknowledge the vast majority of black lives that are lost to black criminals, to say nothing of the black lives protected by the police. Those lives matter, too.

—You see almost nothing about the widespread success of charter schools. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal was the only major publication, to my knowledge, that made anything of a massive recent Stanford University study that demonstrated how well the charters are working nationally. When was the last time the Times took a look at the progress being made by the all-charter school system in a the very poor city of New Orleans? When has the Times done anything but tacitly celebrate the thuggish teachers’ unions, which kept the schools closed far too long during the pandemic? Why did we have to read about the utter impossibility of getting a public school teacher fired in The New Yorker more than a decade ago? Why do we read so little about the wild success of the Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools? Or the incredible sacrifice, and great love—and academic success—demonstrated by the nuns in inner city parochial schools? (Ahh, the unions and their minions at the Times reply, the charter and parochial schools can get rid of bad actors, public schools can’t. But the New Orleans schools can’t, either—and the parochial schools expel very few.)

—You may read in the Times that early childhood education is a crucial component of learning and that lots more money should be spent on it, but you don’t see very much about the widespread failure of the Head Start program (or almost every other government anti-poverty program that doesn’t involve straight cash transfers— especially those involved in “community development,” which have been a disaster going back to the 1960s).

—Why is so much space and credibility given to simplistic race pessimists like Ibram X. Kendi and so little given to the most important racial development of the past 60 years: the phenomenal growth of a black middle and professional class—including the journalists who populate publications like the Times and seem unable to acknowledge that America has made a significant effort to include them in ways we didn’t help their parents?

—And speaking of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, why do we see so little in the Times of the absolutely undeniable evidence that two parents are better than one? Not always, of course, but usually.

—Why does it feel that we’ve examined the life of almost every trans person in the metropolitan area, but know so little about the struggles and small triumphs of Latino bodega owners…and why they’re slipping into the Republican Party?

I could go on. And I’m sure Times editors can cull for occasional clippings to disprove my assertions. But the failure has been monumental. It has done nothing to alleviate or illuminate the true causes of poverty. It has done the black community a disservice; indeed, it has played into the hands of right-wing bigots who fantasize that blacks are mostly militants and criminals and that Latinos are malingerers sponging off our health care system and food stamps. The illiberal left is not allowed to acknowledge progress in the black and brown communities, only oppression. It has helped exacerbate the current public atmosphere of anger and intolerance. When was the last time you heard a Democratic politician, or a Times columnist, celebrate the racial progress that has been made?

I don’t know what impact the testimony of James Bennet will have against the magisterial impregnability of the Times. But it is time for a major campaign, from the center and from the liberal left, against the illiberal bigotry that has overtaken mainstream discourse. It is not enough to have a free press in a democracy as complicated as ours. Elite media institutions like the Times have to be responsible, too.

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