What James Bennet Saw at the New York Times’ Revolution

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, December 14, 2023

 

Hanukkah has already begun and Christmas is just around the corner, so I wanted to commend this essay by James Bennet of the Economist entitled “When the New York Times Lost Its Way” as a fine seasonal gift to all readers who wish to have every single negative thing they ever believed about the Gray Lady’s internal culture confirmed spectacularly. (Understand: For conservative journalists, this is an honest-to-goodness “Happy Holidays!” moment.)

 

Those of you with long media memories will recall that James Bennet was summarily and humiliatingly forced out of his position as opinion editor of the Times after he published a piece by Senator Tom Cotton on June 3, 2020, calling for the use of the National Guard to quell rioting. Cotton’s piece took aim not at protesters but at violent criminality — the epidemic of burning and looting that raged across America’s cities in reaction to the twin provocations of Covid-era lockdowns and the death of George Floyd. I remember thinking it was a pretty good piece, and that the Times had earned a measure of credit for actually giving voice to an argument the vast majority of Americans supported.

 

So of course it was only a matter of days before a massive internal rebellion at the Times, coordinated via Slack and social media, lopped off Bennet’s head to be presented in a basket for the baying throngs of staffers. The Times first subjected the Cotton piece and Bennet’s decision to run it to humiliating coverage from the Times’ own news division — coverage that, tellingly, was factually inaccurate in critical particulars. Then, for the coup de grâce, they forced Bennet to participate in a classic public self-denunciation session and grovel humiliatingly before being terminated altogether. (He “resigned,” because in this industry you do not want to be fired.)

 

In other words, it was a wildly hilarious scene: the sort of jolly, high-spirited fun I can rarely remember having with a media story since the good ol’ days of Jayson Blair setting his master’s house ablaze. As a disaffected conservative and lover of gallows humor, how could I not laugh as the internal mob coordinated with an external one — an entire generation of angry digital children with no interest in older journalistic standards but a zealously inculcated lifelong taste for persecution — and simply devoured Bennet like piranhas furiously skeletonizing a cow? The utter indifference of the mob to truth, the reliance upon emotive safetyism, the transparent ulterior motives; there these kids were, doing everything we had warned they were about to do. It was the richly mordant consolation of a Cassandra. It was the Platonic ideal of a “confirmation of priors.” It was glorious, and I wish you’d been there.

 

I don’t wish that upon James Bennet, however, who was a genuinely innocent victim in all of this, whiplashed by social dynamics far beyond his control. The man got canned from what must have been his dream job, left not only in unearned disgrace but forced to give way in the most public fashion imaginable to the awful trends triumphing within the Times. Now, with this piece — which in its inordinate detail inevitably reads like a cri de cœur — he takes his just revenge.

 

Bennet’s essay is sprawlingly long (17,000+ words — though it is hard to fault the man for fully unburdening himself of every ridiculous detail of his professional flaying), so I won’t attempt to summarize it here (it is definitely “weekend reading”). His frame is wide, deservedly so: He puts the June 2020 Times revolt in the context of his own career as a journalist, as well as the shifting financial incentives and challenges faced by the New York Times in the digital era, before getting into the ugly (and at times seriocomic, if you enjoy tales of folly) details of l’affaire Cotton.

 

But the most important takeaway from Bennet’s piece, in my opinion, is the space he devotes to chronicling how the news and opinion sections of the paper became inextricably confused. He reveals details I had been unaware of even as I noticed the changes in Times coverage over the years. To boil a complicated tale down to its essentials: In the digital-media age of the Voxsplainer, the opinion/news hybrid was selling. It was also irresistible catnip for an entire generation of primarily digital-only journalists with no shoe-leather experience or respect for the sorts of older journalistic pieties their professors were no longer even teaching them in the first place.

 

So the news divisions started getting into the opinion game (disguised as “cultural criticism,” a fig-leaf that allowed younger writers to work their worldviews into daily coverage). And unlike the opinion division, there was no requirement to seek any kind of ideological balance, or to even pretend such a thing existed. After years of this, writers and editors at the Times apparently believe they have earned the privilege to slant hard news coverage to tell “their truth,” not “the truth.” And now all lines of authority within the paper are hopefully confused, governed only by the throbbing social hive mind of the Times’ staff: a perfect machine for creating and sustaining an intellectual monoculture.

 

That brings us finally to one delightful anecdote that did emerge from the muck of the staff mutiny that not only ended Bennet’s career but the Times’ public pretenses: When journalists in the Wall Street Journal’s overwhelmingly left-wing news division saw what was going on at the Times with Bennet, they took the opportunity of the “woke moment” to complain to the publisher with a list of offensive pieces published by the the Journal’s famously conservative opinion section. Management responded with admirably brutal finality: “We are not the New York Times.”