The Times Is Changing, Badly Editors and managers at a great newspaper gather around Twitter to find out what they think. Holman Jenkins Jr.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-times-is-changing-badly-11613170637?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
Untenable was the principle enunciated last week by the New York Times in a kerfuffle over a distinguished reporter who was expelled for uttering the N-word in an innocent discussion of the N-word. Happily for the next victim but not the latest one, the paper has belatedly seen the error of its ways.
Donald G. McNeil Jr. “has done much good reporting over four decades,” said management even as it escorted him out the door. Executive Editor Dean Baquet had previously declined to fire Mr. McNeil over the two-year-old incident, saying it was clear the term hadn’t been uttered in a “hateful or malicious” way.
But that was before a tsunami of intolerance from the forces of tolerance inside the paper. Mr. Baquet announced last week that Mr. McNeil would be leaving after all because “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” Oops, it was universally pointed out that the Times then would have to fire itself. A Factiva search shows the paper using the word 1,271 times as far back as 1969 and as recently as a week ago, as it must in covering the world. The new standard, “a threat to our journalism,” was “a deadline mistake and I regret it,” Mr. Baquet admitted on Thursday.
What a mess. I don’t know Mr. Baquet. By all accounts, he’s a fine person and a good reporter, but you know what he’s behaving like here—he’s behaving like somebody who knows he can’t trust his own boss to back him in any decision unpopular with the woke mob.
Contrary to myth, the last thing John Kennedy was saying in “Profiles in Courage” was that persons in authority at every moment should be ready to throw away their livelihoods over a matter of principle. Mr. Baquet won’t get advice from me on whether his job is now impossible, or, for that matter, whether it’s doubly important that he stick around for après moi reasons.
The problem is the person who can’t be fired, Times scion Arthur G. Sulzberger. We later learned that a Sulzberger intervention was to encourage the spiking of a piece by the paper’s own columnist noting the absurdity of the “intent doesn’t matter” standard.
Let us admit a generational schism at play here. If you laughed out loud on hearing that the Times complainers insisted in their missive “Our community is outraged and in pain,” you grew up in a world dominated by WWII vets.
When you heard that Mr. McNeil could be brusque and was ungifted at today’s elaborate sensitivities, you thought, that’s the definition of the adult male.
Unfortunately, it’s also logarithmic that if the paper in its most visible public decisions is flopping around like a gaffed grouper, everything is worse for those making the invisible daily decisions about how to cover the news without losing their careers. Mr. Sulzberger’s important job is not to decide whether he agrees with each decision, but to protect management’s ability to make decisions. He’s not doing his job.
The element that really sings institutional cowardice isn’t the firing or flip-flopping, but the apparent need to extort a North Korea apology from Mr. McNeil as he left. “I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended,” he conceded probably on the advice of his bank manager. “I now realize that it cannot.”
I doubt he really feels this way but the formula does nicely move the goal posts to accommodate Mr. Baquet’s wild kicking. Mr. McNeil is still fireable under the new standard that context matters after all. In every other way, though, putting words in its reporter’s mouth is not a good look for a “paper of record.”
The larger quandary is the drastic loss of newspaper ad revenues and a consequent temptation to pander to paying readers, to the point where news reporting becomes fantasy fulfillment. Well worth your time is a lengthy piece in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri tracing the evolution of the New York Times toward “post-journalism.”
Not every bad habit, though, can be blamed on social media. In 1996, the Times accused a Texaco executive of using the N-word based on a transcript drawn up by a self-interested trial lawyer from a muddy and indecipherable tape recording.
When Texaco did what the Times could have done and hired an audio professional, the word turned out to be Nicholas. The tape really showed a worm’s-eye view of Texaco middle managers wrestling, not insensitively, with pressure from on high to downsize even while advancing minorities and women.
Rich and novelistic evidence of how life is really lived inside a big corporation, I thought at the time. How sad that we approach it like “salivating trolls playing ‘gotcha.’ ”
Perhaps the real solution for journalism is to stop acting this way.
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