The truth about The New York Times
PLUS: Why the MAGA witch hunt of Hunter Biden is a national disgrace
James Bennet is the epitome of what an American journalist and editor should be —and must be again — in a world where all around us an illiberal tide is rising. Bennet spent his career at The New York Times and The Atlantic, before returning to the NYT to edit the Opinion section, reporting directly to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
Bennet left the NYT in 2020 under a wave of recrimination, denunciation, intimidation and enforced contrition. He describes what occurred through a devastating 16,000-word dissection of how an intolerant dogma erased Americanism — an abiding faith in democracy, pluralism, decency and freedom of speech and freedom of conscience — at the Times.
famously expressed in a resignation letter her views about the culture of bullying and intellectual harassment at the NYT. What Bennet and Weiss both describe is a brutalist culture that is totalitarian in disposition and utterly roiled by a churning confluence of hypocrisy, myopia and intolerance that flow from an ideological headwater that rejects pluralism as harshly as MAGA extremism does.James Bennet dared to publish an opinion piece in the pages of The New York Times written by United States Senator Tom Cotton. Cotton — stupidly, in my view —proposed to deploy the US military to protect property and life during civil unrest that exploded across America after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers.
Bennet’s account of what happened at the Times when he published the Tom Cotton op-ed is genuinely astonishing. He paints a bleak picture of journalistic integrity, basic fairness, honesty and any fidelity towards the concept of dissent at an American institution sustained by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
This moment of national crisis in the United States has been wrought by a collapse of trust in American institutions by the American people. There is corruption everywhere, and everywhere there is a breach of faith. Suffice it to say that it includes vast proportions of America’s tycoons, CEOs, big tech companies, political parties, government, news media, insurance companies and universities. Religious institutions, the Boy Scouts and a thousand other organizations could be named on a long and ignominious list of institutions that breached the faith of the people that trusted them.
What Bennet makes staggeringly clear is how shattering the NYT’s conduct has been toward its standards. As he says in his piece:
The Times’s failure to honor its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative's concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it. A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics.
Let me be clear: the result of this arrogance and hypocrisy is Donald Trump. When Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet ponder how it can be that Joe Biden is losing to Donald Trump, they can have the dissatisfaction of looking in the mirror and knowing that they have been the wind beneath Trump’s wings. Their shoddy, access journalism and ideological madhouse have been the thermals pushing him ever upwards.
Whatever hypocrisy smells like, the stench is surely the same whether it rises from Mar-a-Lago, the Fox News lie factory on 6th Avenue, or the NYT’s gleaming steel towers on 43rd Street. What Bennet makes clear are the dimensions of the infestation at the NYT. The moral rot of the “paper of record” is palpable all the way through Bennet’s journalistic tour de force. He describes an Orwellian world where the corruption of language, overt dishonesty and clear misrepresentations are held to be virtuous because of the outcome that can be achieved through the lie. Case in point, when referring to the Cotton op-ed:
Shortly after we published the op-ed that Wednesday afternoon, some reporters tweeted their opposition to Cotton’s argument. But the real action was in the Times’s Slack channels, where reporters and other staff began not just venting but organising. They turned to the union to draw up a workplace complaint about the op-ed. At least one of the reporters who covered news media took a strong position in this internal debate: “Amplifying a message that argues for MORE force only puts our own people in harm’s way, and undermines the paper’s commitment to their safety,” this reporter argued to colleagues in Slack, going on to offer suggestions for how the union should attack the op-ed: “I think it’s good that a lot of us will put our names on a strong condemnation.”
The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.
This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s. Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”. That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest. The Times did not publish a correction or any note acknowledging the story had been changed.
This passage by Bennet is clarifying, disturbing and deeply satisfying because it finally makes clear what the NYT did to me when it assaulted my integrity through an absolutely dishonest and misleading headline that appeared over a Jeremy Peters story. The headline read: “Former Top McCain Aide Says He Lied to Discredit a Times Article.”
What I actually said, and made perfectly clear, in a written essay — upon which Peters’ story was based — was that John McCain made me complicit in his public lie by telling me about it AFTER the fact:
The Times headline was this travesty. It was personal, vindictive, and abusive towards the Times reader. I asked for it to be corrected, and the NYT refused. It has never been corrected and never will because The New York Times under its present mismanagement is as dishonest as Fox News with the arrogance to think their cynicism is virtuous, while at least at Fox the nihilism is embraced with transparency.
What Bennet makes clear is that if the reporter mob at the NYT despises you, or perhaps more specifically, your apostate political views, then it is okay to attack and destroy. This, of course, is Trumpism at its core, a philosophy of revenge based on lies for the purposes of destroying reputations against those that have the wrong politics.
It’s disgraceful and it is the legacy of Dean Baquet and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. They did for The New York Times what Mitch McConnell did to the US Senate, Kevin McCarthy to the US House, and Trump and Ronna McDaniel did at the RNC. They wrecked it. This is an organization that is a smoldering ruin of its once great self.
What Bennet describes is a brittle, arrogant and overrun institution whose ethos has been overthrown and its leadership neutered morally, intellectually, professionally and spiritually. Perhaps the most chilling part of James Bennet’s account of his demise is the sense of encirclement it elides. The mob was angry that day. Very, very angry.
What I find extraordinary about reading this account is that I wrote about the corruption of language and groupthink 48 hours ago. It is worse than I thought. Much worse.
The confession has always been a staple of authoritarian systems and necessary for release from political imprisonment after indoctrination and re-education. In fact, the confession is the first part of the indoctrination. I have written about Winston’s confession from “1984” when he is tortured by the state into believing that three fingers can be four if the state says it’s so.
Reading about one of the greatest journalists of this era being surrounded by a Zoom mob of thousands of NYT reporters and forced to recant, apologize and acknowledge everyone’s pain caused from Tom Cotton’s op-ed is an embarrassment for the NYT that eclipses the Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair disgraces. It is worse than immoral omissions caused by ambition and a lust for access. It is worse than fabulism. It is evidence of a brokenness that is profound and deep.
The NYT may be a financial juggernaut, but it isn’t the NYT anymore either — the one that separated news and opinion journalism, that was independent and impartial, and the one that had as its compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favor” — if James Bennet is telling the truth. It is clear that he is on the basis of a lifetime of demonstrated commitment, courage and dedication towards reporting it.
Let me be perfectly clear about the political consequences of what James Bennet is describing. There are few dispositions and attitudes that fuel MAGA more than the moral smugness, censoriousness, preening and arrogance of the American power caste as typified by the pampered and indulged witch-hunting mob on 43rd Street.
There is one deficit within the Bennet account. He inaccurately refers to his departure as having been in “disgrace.” Nonsense. He left as a Times man — at least the type Arthur Ochs would have recognized. Ochs would celebrate Bennet in this moment.
We all should. Sunshine is always the best disinfectant.
VIDEO COMMENTARY: Why the MAGA witch hunt of Hunter Biden is a national disgrace
Here’s my reaction to the impeachment inquiry into Hunter and Joe Biden, and why it is a national disgrace to treat a private citizen this way:
Steve, as the widow of a journalist who spent nearly 30 years at the NY Times in every station of the cross, including Op Ed columnist, from the late 1950s through the mid 1980s, I can tell you with assurance that nothing you have cited as "truth" or different about The Paper is different now than in the past. The Times has always been a for-profit news organization like every other and, like all the others based in New York is subject to pressure from the New York power structure, the US Government power structure, and the NY social elite.
My husband wrote myriad columns about Donald Trump during the 1980s, dubbed him "young Donald" (which he hated and made people laugh at him), called out his hypocrisy, his thievery, his lies, racism and his misogyny.
It is ironic to see the Trump "boxes" at Mar-a-Lago because we had a Trump box in our document storage room for years, full of letters of complaints from tenants, in addition to Trump's threatening letters, signed in golden sharpie, calling Syd a "loser" and vowing to sue. What was written about Trump 30 years ago remains true.
It's all the same stuff, just version 3.0.
As long as publications and broadcasters are for-profit entities sails will be trimmed, voices will be silenced and truths will be bent. Those with the courage to call out the creeps are loved by the readers (3000 letters were received when Syd's column was discontinued) but frighten their colleagues who fear for their careers and the inability to pay their kids' private school fees.
Our Democracy is cracking at the foundation. So the question for me, is not who-said-what-to-whom, or who's up or down, but who is tough enough, courageous enough and persistent enough to drown out the disinformation with truth. That requires a measure of authenticity, however, and ideologues don't come across as authentic.
The real question at hand -- which no one can answer (even the astrologers won't predict) -- is will our house divided crumble to the ground next November to be replaced by a foul-mouthed fascist dictator, or will we have an octogenarian with his finger in the dyke and fascists clawing at the White House doors?
My friends say we must fight for Democracy and fight for our rights, especially we women. But I don't want to fight for Texas, or Florida or any of the other places that want to bend laws to comport with their social and religious beliefs, the diminution of basic rights.
So how is that any different than the noisy newspaper ideologues protesting an opinion that is repugnant to them being published in their paper?
I'm not sure there is a difference. And I keep wondering what others in the middle, who feel as I do, can do. Meanwhile, I hear the foundation cracking and wonder whether it will heave when the earthquake comes or whether it's strong enough to remain intact.
More importantly than either of these stories is: While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was meeting with President Biden this week to ask our help defending his democracy against the brutal, violent aggression of Russia, Republican lawmakers in DC were meeting behind closed doors at a Heritage Foundation event with representatives of Hungary’s strongman president Viktor Orbán. It got almost no press coverage at all, other than The Guardian.