Op-Ed Sections, Threat or Menace?

I'm reassuming semi-control of the edit page in the paper I'm at now. I know my audience and will lean conservative, but my radar is tingling on Big Lie and white supremacy content. I will Mutombo that shit into the rafters.

 

Archibald: Hide the silver and the dirt; columnists descend on Bama

https://www.al.com/news/2022/06/arc...-and-the-dirt-columnists-descend-on-bama.html

 

Bennet / NYT redux in The Economist. At great length.

https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way

 

It's a little long winded and common knowledge, but still pretty damning. Journalism has changed over the past 20 years or so and I'm not sure it's for the better.

 

New York Times Publisher AG Sulzberger responds to an essay by former opinion page editor James Bennet | The New York Times Company

James Bennet and I have always agreed on the importance of independent journalism, the challenges it faces in today’s more polarized world, and the mission of The Times to pursue independence even when the path of less resistance might be to give into partisan passions.

But I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about The Times.

Our commitment to independence is evident in our report every day. Whether in the wars in Europe and in the Middle East, the turmoil on college campuses, or the political mood of the country on the eve of another election year, our 2,000 journalists are breaking stories, holding the powerful to account, and seeking to shed light rather than heat on the most divisive issues of our time, regardless of whom our coverage might upset.

Our readers now also have the benefit of an Opinion report that has grown in size and ambition since 2020 and has only expanded upon its commitment to exploring a wide range of viewpoints. Today we have a far more diverse mix of opinions, including more conservative and heterodox voices, than ever before.

James was a valued partner, but where I parted ways with him is on how to deliver on these values. Principles alone are not enough. Execution matters. Leadership matters.

 

Nothing in that response rebuts the back third portion of the Bennet piece. The damning part - apologizing on Zoom, the Slack channel of rage, the “well, people are mad, so” etc - of the piece.

 

As you and I discussed at the time, I think Sulzberger is right to say the whole episode was a failure of both "execution" and "leadership."

There's a reason Bennet waits until he's most of the way through a 16000-word piece to tell us he didn't even read the Cotton OpEd before it ran. He spends a lot of narrative energy thereafter trying to hang his #2 for being the line editor of the thing.

As we said then, most editors of a student newspaper would know that to run something so incendiary at such an explosive moment, it has to be offset by the opposing argument on the same page at the same time.

So go ahead and run a three-column Cotton opinion piece with the hed "We Must Put US Troops in the Streets."

But it has to run next to a three-column hed reading "We Must Never Put US Troops in the Streets" above a column arguing the opposite.

It doesn't matter what you've run in the past or what you plan to run in the future (both of which Bennet nods to without ever detailing).

To me that's a pretty simple newspapering failure of both execution and leadership, without reference to cultural or social sensitivities.

And to write something that long without reference to the history of newspapers and the politics of their owners and publishers seems shortsighted and self-serving.

As does the reference to 'Russia' or 'Hunter Biden' as evidence of Times' liberal bias - without noting the Hillary Clinton email stories that may have cost her the election.

 

A failure of leadership, indeed — and the publisher should've known that op-ed was coming. Whether the blame for that lays on Sulzberger not being curious enough as to if explosive op-eds are about to appear or the editor not having the foresight to run that bomb by him, I don't know.

 

Ms Sullivan agrees, a short thread.

 

Agreed up this point...as the piece more or less proves, the NYT brass suddenly found its moral outrage after the fact.

 

It's pretty simple: June 2020 was a weird time in this world, the NY Times was under pressure and Sulzberger needed a scapegoat. Bennet was it. Nothing more, nothing less.

I would imagine one of the reasons Bennet didn't read the piece is because he didn't think it was that big of a deal and didn't realize how fragile his newsroom had become. There was a lot going on in June 2020. Everyone was working from home. That column shouldn't have elicited that sort of response.

In some ways, it reminds me of the Al Franken situation from a few years ago.

A talented, decent guy got railroaded because of feelings.

 

I guess I'd argue that if the Cotton piece had been presented in the way I suggest, in tandem with its opposite, none of the rest of this happens.

Worth asking how much Slack - and real time internal criticism - plays a part in something like this.