Paul Cantrell
Paul Krugman confirms what I’ve long suspected: the rot at the NYT sits not with the reporters and essayists, but with the editors.
And the editors aren’t necessarily handing down explicit orders to bury the truth and massage the fascists’s feet. No. They’re just grinding the reporters down by making it a daily battle •not• to do those things. Sabotage by exhaustion; journalistic death by a thousand cuts.
1/2
Paul Cantrell
❝Patrick [the editor] often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft.
It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.❞
Krugman quit.
jz.tusk
The best way to understand the current NYT, for me, is that it is trying its hardest to *not* report certain stories.
Its best use is as a negative guide: to understand our world one should look where it is emphatically not pointing.
Paul Cantrell
While basically agreeing with what @weyoun6 says here — yes, catering to the aristocracy runs deep in the NYT’s blood, absolutely — I find this sort of “they always sucked” reaction a bit too facile.
Something really has shifted at the NYT in the last 10-20 years. I don't think I’m imagining that it used to be a better paper, used to have more teeth. The above used to be marbled in with truly great reporting; now…rarely.
Paul Cantrell
My unpopular opinion is that the NYT actually did a pretty •good• job of reporting the run-up to the Iraq War, and we remember the Judith Butler megafail precisely because it •stood out• as unusually bad. I knew her reporting was almost certainly wrong when it came out because of other context I got •from reading the NYT•.
Now the whole paper is rife with uranium-tube-style slop every day. The uranium tubes fiasco wouldn’t even stand out if it happened today.
CurtAdams
@inthehands One thing that backs this up is the longstanding NYT practice of slapping a conservative-biased headline on a basically decent article.
Paul Cantrell
@CurtAdams
Strong agree. I think the moment the light bulb went on for me was their reporting on Debby Ramirez. They had an absolute •bombshell• that there was a second Kavanaugh accuser, and the headline they ran was:
“Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not.”
…and then what was obviously the reporter’s original lede was just sitting there something like 10 paragraphs in. Could hardly ask for a starker example of the editor’s hand in the finished product.
Paul Cantrell
@Subterfuge
Agreed, and I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s not intentional. Not obvious, agreed; not intentional…mmmm, maybe sometimes, but.
Subterfuge
@inthehands yes, and treating journalists that way also conditions them to change the way they work. Not intentional but damaging nevertheless.
Anton 🏳️🌈 🇬🇷Pappas (he/him)
@inthehands What about the HIV crisis that took place in its home turf? Shouldn't the paper of record record what's happening a few blocks over?
Paul Cantrell
@antnisp That was an egregious failure on their part.
Note that absolutely nowhere in my post above did I say that the allegiance to the aristocracy was not present at any point, or that their reporting used to be perfect. Nowhere.
Paul Cantrell
@donaldball
Note that absolutely nowhere in my post above did I say that the allegiance to the aristocracy was not present at any point, or that their reporting used to be perfect. Nowhere.
Donald Ball
@inthehands Mmm Whitewater, Travelgate, Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell - they had an editorial agenda in the 90’s.
Remember too they sat on Bush’s wiretapping story for a full year. Had it come out in 2004, well, he probably still gets reelected but that doesn’t excuse their malpractice.
Paul Cantrell
Accurate.
wasabi brain
@inthehands newspapers did such a better job than tv and cable in run up to the war in terms of providing historical context. Unfortunately it was the case of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Overall the papers did too little to push back on administration claims.
Anton 🏳️🌈 🇬🇷Pappas (he/him)
@inthehands My point is that whether something "has really shifted in the last 10-20 years" is debatable. I raised something earlier and people will probably find something earlier still.
The most damning thing is that its obvious that the NYT is institutionally unable to recognize those "failures".
Paul Cantrell
@antnisp
Agreed with that last bit, and I think it's some of the best evidence that something has in fact shifted: they did a lot of self-flagelating about the WMD reporting fiasco, and forced Judith Miller to resign over it.
I simply cannot imagine anything like that happening now.
Paul Cantrell
@donaldball
Not abrupt; over the course of the past decade or two. Boiling the journalistic frog.
Donald Ball
@inthehands Erm, apologies, I wasn’t trying to imply you did. I guess I see less of an abrupt change recently than you do.
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