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How NY Times became what it is
Dec. 18th, 2023 10:59 amЛучше прочесть целиком, но ниже выжимка для ленивых. Даже и так длинновато получилось, наверное. Подозреваю, что товарищи слева не оценят.
I [James Bennet, the author] was the editorial-page editor of the Times, and we had just [in June 2020] published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, that was outraging many members of the Times staff. ... Cotton, an army veteran, was calling for the use of troops to protect lives and businesses from [BLM] rioters.
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.
Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. 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 such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise. 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 has lost faith in Americans, too.
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.
( Read more... )
I [James Bennet, the author] was the editorial-page editor of the Times, and we had just [in June 2020] published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, that was outraging many members of the Times staff. ... Cotton, an army veteran, was calling for the use of troops to protect lives and businesses from [BLM] rioters.
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.
Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. 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 such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise. 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 has lost faith in Americans, too.
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.
( Read more... )
