It would seem that the Times has re-discovered its standards after people, including their staff, called them on and mocked them and cancelled subscriptions over this BS. This just came over my newsfeed:
Isn’t that like trump saying “oh, I was just kidding.”?
They have dedicated editorial staff for what? Five or six op-eds a day. Surely they have time.
Well, they didn’t endorse it, but we can continue to disagree about that. I guess we’ll just have to remain confused about what this means with regard to their “endorsement” to a much greater degree of radically opposite views that they have presented as well. I guess they just endorse it all?
The main difference is, the opinion Cotton expressed is the exact same one expressed by the current Commander in Chief, who actually has the power to do these things. One that is supported by many Americans. It is a mainstream view, even if it is probably not a majority view, and even if it is inherently extreme. The same would not be the case for, say, pedophilia.
My guess it’s that it was the cancellations that @ratel mentioned above, along with the statement from the journalists’ union. While the NYT’s target audience and staff will forgive a lot, a large portion of them won’t tolerate being them being this irresponsible in the midst of a crisis.
The core of the problem with the NYT is not the journalists. It’s not even the editors.
As with everything else, it’s the plutocrats who own it.
This. A much more important discussion, IMHO, is how this influences the range of views in totality that are considered “acceptable territory” within The Times, newsroom, Opinion section, or otherwise, than any given controversial piece that they run, which ends up setting people off.
For me, the range that is represented is the key thing, and what is weighted within that range. And I genuinely feel that The Times has room for improvement, but is actually not that bad – if you actually read it even somewhat consistently. But just picking one particularly extreme piece? Doesn’t really mean much, frankly.
The Times’ Opinion section is where I first learned of a concept called a Wealth Tax. On multiple occasions. Years ago now. It was a very seminal moment for me, in giving me more focus on and understanding of how to properly align our economic system, including our system of taxation, in a fundamental way that solves an awful lot of problems, if done correctly. The Times was way out in front in terms of representing that view – within the context of the mainstream, wherein it most assuredly lies.
What about Farhad Manjoo? He is a regular in Opinion. Extremely progressive. I have frankly been shocked about some of what he’s had run in Opinion, as it actually expanded the boundaries of what range of views I thought The Times would publish.
Michelle Goldberg? I adore her. Her ability to cut through GOP and conservative BS is grand. She is a regular in Opinion.
David Brooks is the conservative who drives me nuts, because I feel he’s a couple of clicks away from getting it… but my god man, it’s been many years, and you’re still not getting it! Wtf?!
See, I read The Times regularly, I’m a subscriber – I really do have a sense of how Opinion works, and that yes, sometimes I will see something there that will genuinely turn my stomach or get me fired up. But I can also place that in context, and that is what I think has been lacking in some folks responses here.
I know it’s probably standard operating procedure for the NYT’s manual of style, but talking about their own paper in the third person is “mistakes were made”-tier distancing language when it comes to owning a mistake.
Also, for those who haven’t read The Times’s statement in the third person because (like me) you’re not interested in wasting a free article credit on it or giving them attention for this clusterfuck…
HE DIDN’T READ IT. He spent an entire day on Twitter defending his decision to run it AND HE DIDN’T EVEN READ IT.
*shocked gif
[meme police confiscated my usual one for overuse]
Okay, media studies student here, and I just want to use this as a jumping off point (thank you, @Wanderfound).
First off, this isn’t just the NYT. One of the most egregious of these is New Brunswick’s Brunswick News Inc. and the Irving family. It’s a case study in how this works and if you are interested in media history, a good dive.
But back to the NYT.
So, you may be familiar with the NYT masthead, most specifically, the slogan: All The News That’s Fit To Print. Now the legend that Adolph S. Ochs put out, and that they would like everyone to believe, is that the first part of the phrase is important. That they would print news even if it was unfavorable to the power structure.
The first clause was never primary. If it was, they wouldn’t have needed the second clause.
There is also the legend that it was about separating the paper from the more sensationalist press of the day. Nah. Clickbait hasn’t been new and NYT hasn’t been a stranger to it (or paywalls, BTW) since the days when children yelled out headlines on the corner and made change for a nickle if you wanted to know the rest.
News that was fit to print always followed a political agenda. People in tenements might be fit to print, provided they were being properly poor and subservient, and they weren’t organizing themselves to actually do anything about their plight. Comfortable people could be upset, so long as they didn’t decide to sympathize so much as to give up their comfort.
In other words, there have always been opinions that the NYT has declined to grant space to. And there have always been ones they’ve favoured. And if you look at the pattern, it’s quite clear that “dissenting opinions” and “opposing ideas” have never actually been a part of those editorial decisions. The NYT has long been not “the paper of record” but “the paper of influence”. But, you need to look at what is deemed fit to print. Despite the RW cries of “Fake News” I would argue that the NYT is the exact opposite. For many, many people, because they believe the mythology of the masthead, if it wasn’t in the Times it didn’t happen.
Which brings me back to Brunswick News Inc. For the longest time, the Irvings owned all of the papers in New Brunswick and pretty much still do. Which meant that if it involved the Irvings doing something shitty, most people didn’t even know it happened. Of course it didn’t: otherwise it’d be in the paper, right? It absolutely influenced how people saw and treated them. It wasn’t that there was never any unrest at Irving businesses, but ask anyone who didn’t work in that particular location or industry and they wouldn’t have a clue.
NYT does the same. Anything liable to seriously disrupt TPTB is simply not covered, and good luck convincing anyone it happened. TPTB are not afraid of fascism, so much as they’re afraid of poor people not being properly poor and subservient, and they are organizing themselves to actually do something about their plight. Thus “a controversial opinion piece” from someone who seems just informed enough, to remind people what can happen if they don’t shape up. A “controversial opinion piece” from someone they fucking well knew wasn’t going to come down on the side of freedom, transparency and lollipops for everyone, especially since he’d made his name calling for the arrest of that very paper’s own reporters.
If you want to know what happened here, it’s that despite their excuses, they didn’t actually think this was the wrong call. This wasn’t a dissenting opinion at all. They just have to say that, because it made too many comfortable people sympathetic to the poor in the wrong way. It scared them because they realized that they would be targets, too. It’s okay to afflict the comfortable, provided you don’t panic or enrage them.
It short (way, way too late for that), the fact that they printed this is in no way surprising to anyone who knows the NYTs history. The only mistake was that it was too obvious, too much, too fast. The wrong people noticed. They’ve never not supported the message itself.
white supremacy is evil.
Me: This is just a editorial board that is choosing to publish what drives traffic and what they feel profits opinion journalism. They need to be held accountable for the curated words they publish.
You: That’s a naive representation of a very serious newsroom for very serious news people, and you must be too young to understand that. This is news but at the same time different and distinct from news, a tradition of diligently presenting the world of views by curation with an attempt to be objective.
NYT opinion editorial team: We never read the article we published lol
Even the NYT opinion editorial board has been forced to change their stories multiple times as the truth has been drug out. This was objectively curation based on provocation and engagement metrics at its finest, trying to wring dollars through outrage and social media traffic where any reaction is good for business. However, since the NYT is attempting to meet the standards of the truly world class publications stooping to the editorial process of a bad tabloid tend to be signs of a bad editorial department. I find this to yet another example of an entire news media organization being dragged down by the sloppy and seemingly unethical practices considered standard in their opinion staff, or at least its leadership. What’s worse is the continued misuse of shallow freedom of speech memes to try and pretend their obvious flaws are not actually flaws but their greatest strength - meanwhile the reporting on the situation on hand just shows lazy, angry incompetents.
RTFA in the extreme.
Eschaton
Friday, June 05, 2020
You Expect Us To Read Our Own Opinion Page?
A whole bunch of pseudointellectual propagandists spent hours defending the op-ed by bleating about the virtues of the NYTimes thoughtfully expanding our minds and civic discourse just so NYTimes could admit “uhhh so like we didn’t read it, we just clicked the publish button.”
https://twitter.com/marcatracy/status/1268667488356704256 …
marc tracy@marcatracy
NEW: Times spokeswoman sends mea culpa
367 people are talking about this
Hi James, do you have anything to say?
We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this.
James, did you even read it?Uh, no.
Society can only survive so many generations of elite failsons running everything. They’re stupid and lazy and immoral and dishonest and they think they’re smarter than you because of where they fucking went to high school (James went to St. Albans, you know).
Heh, and I missed the money quote:
and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.
“We are never going to publish any simpering socialism by that Schatz fuck.”
It is kinda meta, isn’t it?
A reminder that none of this is an abstract intellectual exercise or something that is never going to happen:
This is what the NYT should be using column inches, if not all their column inches, on.
