James Bennet was pushed out as top editor of the NYT Opinion section in an uprising orchestrated by the paper's newsroom reporters in 2020. His crime? Publishing the OpEd of a conservative US senator.
Doug Sheridan says….
Doug Sheridan says….
James Bennet was pushed out as top editor of the NYT Opinion section in an uprising orchestrated by the paper's newsroom reporters in 2020. His crime? Publishing the OpEd of a conservative US senator. He writes in the Economist's 1843 magazine...
Since Adolph Ochs bought the The New York Times in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the publication has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favor.” That is not true of the institution today—it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.
To assert that the Times plays by Ochs rules today is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the NYT too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.
The reality is that NYT is the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist. And the problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.
As preoccupied as it is with the question of why so many Americans have lost trust in it, the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason—that it in turn has lost faith in Americans. News journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.
“In truly effective thinking,” Walter Lippmann wrote 100 years ago in Public Opinion, “the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted.” Lippmann was calling for journalists to struggle against their ignorance and assumptions in order to help Americans resist the increasingly sophisticated tools of propagandists. That calling is missing today.
To Sum It Up: Today’s new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia—from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth... that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative—whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears—has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine what goes into the public mind.
Our Take: News journalism in general is held in low regard by the public not so much because of the challenges it faces from the internet and social media, but due to its response to those challenges. Far too many journalists and their editors have taken the easy way out, choosing to play the role of instigator rather than informer... even as they indulge their most base political instincts. It's shocking how far they've fallen.