The New York Times takes a good long hard look at itself in the mirror…
….and is pretty darn pleased with what it sees, for the most part.
Just needing a little tweaking to get the narrative right.
The link above is to a Slate article about a session Times executive editor Dean Baquet had recently with staff:
The remarks showed Baquet and the other speakers conceding some technical and procedural failings but rejecting, or avoiding, deeper criticisms of the paper’s performance. A staffer, submitting a question anonymously, suggested that the headline that had caused all the trouble—“TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM”—“amplifies without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country.”
Baquet and other editors addressed the headline as an operational problem, the result of a “system breakdown,” where a front-page layout had left too little space for nuance. “We set it up for a bad headline,” Baquet said, “and the people who were in a position to judge it quickly and change it, like me, did not look at it until too late.”
The headline Baquet is referring to is one in which the paper did something extraordinarily rare for the Times: relate what someone on the right had said without simultaneously adding a spin that informed readers just how awful the speaker actually is. In other words, what used to be called “reporting the news.” My favorite phrase there was not from Baquet, but from the unidentified staffer who characterized that straightforward and accurate headline as “amplifying without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country.”
In other words: when Trump does something good, or says something right, we can’t just tell you what he said without somehow negating it. We can’t “amplify” his words by publishing them “without critique.” We must negate anything good he says lest people start to trust him or like him or think he’s not a racist.
Because they know, absolutely know, he’s a racist, and anything he says that goes against that perception must not be allowed to stand. Baquet is quite clear in saying that they threw everything they had into the collusion charges, and now that it’s fizzled, “Trump is a racist” is the new focus.
But how best to do it? A lot of verbiage is exchanged on that score. Baquet indicates it can’t be done too explicitly. You can’t keep writing “Trump is a racist, Trump is a racist.” It needs nuance. It needs depth, variety and finesse. But some on staff want the paper to be more bold. Here’s the longer quote from that staffer (my remarks in brackets):
Saying something like divisive or racially charged is so euphemistic. Our stylebook would never allow it in other circumstances. I am concerned that the Times is failing to rise to the challenge of a historical moment. What I have heard from top leadership is a conservative approach that I don’t think honors the Times’ powerful history of adversarial journalism. I think that the NYT’s leadership, perhaps in an effort to preserve the institution of the Times, is allowing itself to be boxed in and hamstrung. This obviously applies to the race coverage. The headline represented utter denial, unawareness of what we can all observe with our eyes and ears. It was pure face value. I think this actually ends up doing the opposite of what the leadership claims it does. A headline like that simply amplifies without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country. If the Times’ mission is now to take at face value and simply repeat the claims of the powerful, that’s news [pun almost certainly unintended] to me. I’m not sure the Times’ leadership appreciates the damage it does to our reputation and standing when we fail to call things like they are.”
You can see right there, as clear as can be, the Times’ sense of its mission. Forget the old function of the editorial page or of op-eds. An editorial isn’t enough; the opinion must be in the article and in the headline, force fed to the reader. Here’s Baquet again:
…what was wrong with the story is that the “Trump said X” headline wasn’t enough to capture the hypocrisy and all the kind of nuance we’re talking about. So I think we built a page on deadline that made it really hard to put a headline on it…We [should] have redrawn the page in away that allowed us to put a more nuanced headline on it. That would have been, in retrospect, the ideal situation.
Read the whole thing, if you can stomach it.
NYT peers through the looking glass.
Subscribing to the New York Times for a few years made me a conservative. I found its bias, especially in the headlines, repulsive. That was over twenty years ago before they felt they were justified by “unusual historical circumstances” to abandon any pretense of objectivity.
Nothing about this particularly surprising but the part that puzzles me is why Slate would publish this piece.
This would seem to be the type of thing that would stay their little secret.
Griffin:
It’s my impression that Slate is on the side of the paper’s more radical staff as against the more cautious Baquet and the article is in support of that side
Neo uses the term “session” to describe this event. Well done, just the ticket, “session”, I think, for this looks like an effort at “community organizing” within the paper staff itself. Not at all the “Townhall meeting” I’ve seen headlined (moronically) elsewhere.
And why the hell not, for if the paper is intent on setting out to make men into sheep, then they may as well become sheep themselves in order to demonstrate it can be done!
Or alternatively, merely on the principle: in for a dime, in for a dollar. After all, what could be less serious in such an in serious rag?
They are so far down the rabbit hole that they don’t even realize that what they are doing is wrong. Incredible!
Unserious
As I have written here many times before, the aim of the Left’s Gramscian Long March is to subvert/destroy and then to replace the societies/cultures/dominant value system/political orders/ruling cadres of the nations of the “bourgeois” West with those of the Left.
One way of looking at this process of attack, subversion, destruction, devolution, and replacement/parasitization is to view it as the process of turning what used to be our almost uniquely successful “high-trust” culture–particularly here in the U.S. –into the type of “low-trust,” much less successful culture that prevails in most of the world.
See a discussion of this and other associated topics at https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/terror-without-trust/
We all knew that the NYT was crazy against Trump, but to see this in print is something else. The NYT is no longer a serious newspaper; it is a propaganda rag.
neo,
Yeah, I suppose they are but by shining light on all this they are weakening the NYT further when anybody paying attention to the media world in the last few years has to know that they would have jumped on the next ‘get Trump’ train no matter what.
Now any candidate can simply refer to the Slate article to disregard any NYT attack.
Snow on Pine,
Interesting and disturbing article. I would argue that, in government, we have been moving toward a “trustless system” for several decades now. Our laws get more and more detailed and prescriptive and our civil servants have less and less latitude to exercise their own judgment.
In contrast, in the private sector, the tendency is the opposite. Our managerial goals are to push decision making down to the lowest possible level and “trusting” that the individuals closest to a problem are best able to solve that problem.
As for trust in society, consider the degree of trust involved in buying something on the internet… We trust our private institutions today to a degree no one considered possible only a few decades ago. So, when we speak of trust in institutions, it is important that we distinguish between the public and private.
I stopped subscribing to the Washington Post years ago when I couldn’t tell the difference between the front pages and the editorial pages. The WP, like the NYT is nothing more that Pravda for the democrats.
Ray Nathanson writes : “Our laws get more and more detailed and prescriptive and our civil servants have less and less latitude to exercise their own judgment.”
I beg to differ. Bureaucrats have never had more power than they have now. Congress passes “intent” but leaves regs, implementation, and enforcement up those buried within the various departments. This is how we got what some call the “deep state”
The major media exists to provide emotional validation to their employees and their core constituency. If the ad sales suffice, they stay afloat. They’re not actually in the business of providing information to anyone. About 15 years ago, Camille Paglia offered that the self-understanding of The Times as a ‘paper of record’ was ‘twenty years out of date’. Now it’s 35 years out-of-date. That iteration of The Times disappeared in increments after AM Rosenthal retired, gone entirely by the time Howell Raines was waging a bizarre Alinskyite campaign against the Augusta National Golf Club (while mollycoddling Jayson Blair).
I have a social circle shot through with bourgeois liberals. What amazes is how little they take an interest in actual policy or verifiable social conditions. The Democratic Party is now a weird socio-political cult, mostly devoted to contriving insults and harassment directed at disfavored social strata. See, for example, ‘ethnic studies’ curricula, which simply have no legitimate purpose.
Don’t need to read it; the NYT is birdcage liner and has been for a long time. Nothing they do shocks or surprises me; it’s a bunch of Leftists from Manhattan, that’s who they are. Fine. We get it. Might be nice to admit that instead of pretending to be objective, though.
Where it really goes off the rails is the readership which is apparently too sheltered to recognize propaganda when they see it. Or, they only want to read propaganda. Either way they’re not what we would call “informed” in the true sense of the word.
On top of all that, the NYT drives much of what the rest of the media covers, like a self-replicating virus.
It’s a horrible mess and when they head for bankruptcy court someday, I’ll be cheering.
Larry Weber,
You are right, but it is the bureaucrats at the very top that write the rules. The functionaries below have less and less authority and responsibility. All of the power (and opportunities for corruption) get more and more centralized. And, yes, this exactly why we talk about the “deep state”. It is this monopoly on power that needs to be broken up.
Snow on Pine and Roy,
Fernandez has a posting today that feeds right into your “trustless” observation:
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/terror-without-trust/
And there is also an interest article ponting out that the FBI should look under all the floor tiles and any recently poured concerete on pedophile island:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/50721/jeffrey-epstein-had-100k-item-rushed-his-island-ryan-saavedra
“One way of looking at this process of attack, subversion, destruction, devolution, and replacement/parasitization is to view it as the process of turning what used to be our almost uniquely successful “high-trust” culture–particularly here in the U.S. –into the type of “low-trust,” much less successful culture that prevails in most of the world.” Snow on Pine
‘America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.’ Abraham Lincoln
“The NYT is no longer a serious newspaper; it is a propaganda rag.” Cornhead
Arguably, it hasn’t been a serious newspaper since the 30s. If by serious… you mean objective.
“The Democratic Party is now a weird socio-political cult, mostly devoted to contriving insults and harassment directed at disfavored social strata.” Art Deco
That’s true of liberals and of true believer leftists. Not of hard core leftists of the ‘Stalinist’ persuasion. Does anyone imagine that strident American femi-nazis are actually unaware of their ignoring the treatment of women in the Muslim world?
“Where it really goes off the rails is the readership which is apparently too sheltered to recognize propaganda when they see it. Or, they only want to read propaganda. Either way they’re not what we would call “informed” in the true sense of the word.” Jeff Brokaw
The indoctrinated are only interested in what they want to hear, the ideology they’ve embraced shelters them from all that contradicts that ideology. The primary difference between indoctrination and an informed education may be that indoctrination purports to have attained all truth.
There’s also the forthcoming 1619 Project, which is all about the legacy of slavery in America. As far as I can tell, it’s just more bad history combined with an anti-white bias, because it’s more important nowadays to have the right feelings than to think about how people really lived, and why they acted as they did.
Besides, everyone knows the first slave in America was actually Cabeza de Vaca, who as one of the very few survivors of the Narvaez expedition was taken captive by Indians (sorry, I mean Native Americans, or First Peoples) in what is now the state of Texas. This was in 1527, and after years of wandering and suffering, acting as a medicine man and holy pilgrim, he made his way back to Spanish Mexico in 1536.
Fortunately, he was able to return to Spain, and write a very engaging account of his travels and what he saw along the way. So take that New York Times, as Cabeza de Vaca has 92 years of precedence and a far better story to tell.
This is the paper of Walter Duranty. There is literally nothing it will not do.
This all gets down to NYT’s execution of its “powerful history of adversarial journalism”. They saw nothing to be adversarial about during the Obama years. They see nothing wrong with the inanity and insanity being spouted by the Democratic presidential field. In other words, they are Pravda for Democrats. In the NYT’s view, the home team always wins or its opponents cheat. The refs stole the game. The umpire is blind. Chamberlain stuck his eye in Russell’s elbow.*
OK. The NYT can be whatever its ownership wants it to be. Just don’t tell me they are still doing great journalism, because they aren’t. They are propagandists of the first order. They are lick-spittles of the Democrat Party, which is having a breakdown over Donald Trump.
*Classical reference. See Johnny Most, radio man for the Boston Celtics.
Furthermore, there are lots of ways that an intelligent news organization could explore the controversial aspects of the Trump presidency without defaulting to “Racist Orange Man Bad”!
For instance, why can’t anyone explore the consequences and performance of the essentially transactional nature of Trump’s decisions? Is there really a strategy there, or is it just the thought that the USA is so strong that we can get a better deal in any bilateral negotiation? And what does Trump think is a “better deal”? What does he mean when he says “we lost money in China” when we entered into voluntary transactions in which we got things we wanted? Are tariffs a good way to resolve disputes about theft of intellectual property? Will the USA or the world be better off with China hurt, angry, and desperate? Will the US consumer end up paying for all the interventions by the US government into voluntary international trade transactions?
These are all questions that could be probed with outcomes favorable to Trump very much in doubt. But even if Trump emerges on the winning side of such arguments, the discussion would be worth having, because it would bring clarity.
Are there any intelligent news organizations left? The NYT certainly has a case of the dumb-dumbs, but maybe they always did.
Then “1619 Project” is to be incorporated in school children’s history books. We now have departments of “Engineering Education” in good Engineering schools like Purdue. The department chair does not have an Engineering education, as one might expect, This is a small part of the war on merit in this society. NASA does not have a successful mission in 50 years but spends it budget. Bridges that are “beautiful” fall down and kill people but there is no public investigation. Navy ships collide and sailors die but the identities of the officers (Guess what sex.) remain secret for over a year while the male captain is dismissed.
We now have departments of “Engineering Education” in good Engineering schools like Purdue. The department chair does not have an Engineering education, as one might expect,
It looks like a BS program run by teachers’ college faculty. NB the Digest of Education Statistics reports 106,000 baccalaureate degrees in engineering were awarded in 2017 and 17,000 in engineering technology. It reports no degrees awarded in ‘engineering education’ or anything similar. About 1,500 degrees in
‘engineering, other’ and ‘engineering technology, other’ were awarded, so maybe it’s a subset of the miscellandy.
NASA does not have a successful mission in 50 years but spends it budget.
?
Bridges that are “beautiful” fall down and kill people but there is no public investigation.
The National Transportation Safety Board did investigate and produced a report. Litigation is also ongoing and one of the contractors has been through Chapter 11. The name of the firm which designed the bridge is known (FIGG Bridge Engineers) as well as the name of the lead engineer on the project (W. Denney Pate). Guy has some miles on his odometer.
https://heavy.com/news/2018/03/denney-denny-pate-figg-florida-fiu-bridge-collapse/
We now have departments of “Engineering Education” in good Engineering schools like Purdue. The department chair does not have an Engineering education, as one might expect,
It looks like a BS program run by teachers’ college faculty. NB the Digest of Education Statistics reports 106,000 baccalaureate degrees in engineering were awarded in 2017 and 17,000 in engineering technology. It reports no degrees awarded in ‘engineering education’ or anything similar. About 1,500 degrees in
‘engineering, other’ and ‘engineering technology, other’ were awarded, so maybe it’s a subset of the miscelland.
NASA does not have a successful mission in 50 years but spends it budget.
?
Bridges that are “beautiful” fall down and kill people but there is no public investigation.
The National Transportation Safety Board did investigate and produced a report. Litigation is also ongoing and one of the contractors has been through Chapter 11. The name of the firm which designed the bridge is known (FIGG Bridge Engineers) as well as the name of the lead engineer on the project (W. Denney Pate). Guy has some miles on his odometer.
https://heavy.com/news/2018/03/denney-denny-pate-figg-florida-fiu-bridge-collapse/
Pressthink has a long piece on this. I made the point–didn’t register–that the NYT was in the position of a movie character charging a door which is opened at just the moment of impact by a guy inside. The character flies across the room ending up against the far wall amidst broken furniture.
So the collusion thing fell apart despite their best efforts to report on and inflate a hoax. Their response; we need a new hoax.
If you read Rosen’s article and the responses, the tell is the number of times the words “racist” and “racism” are used. Far too often. If it were a valid accusation, the words could be profitably used far less often. Instead, the pixels/letters/keystrokes are slathered on in order to impose by repetition a subliminal belief in the reader.
IOW, they know they have nothing.
But they’re going to lie. And they know they’re going to lie. And they don’t care who knows they’re lying. And the commenters don’t care.
The name of the firm which designed the bridge is known (FIGG Bridge Engineers) as well as the name of the lead engineer on the project (W. Denney Pate). Guy has some miles on his odometer.
The female Engineer who bragged about designing this “beautiful bridge” has vanished.