The NY Times’ former opinion editor exposes the publication’s Maoism *UPDATED*

James Bennet was the editorial page editor at the New York Times. He was fired in 2020 for daring to publish an essay from Sen. Tom Cotton arguing that President Trump should call out troops to stop the George Floyd rioting. He’s now written about the experience as well as the Maoism at the Times. The flaw in his boring essay is that, as much as he’d like to be the wise solon standing above it all, his Trump Derangement shows how much he’s part of the problem.

The essay at the Economist says in 17,000 words what could easily be said in half that many. Summed up, it goes this way: The Times was once a bastion of objective, intelligent reporting but, because of the internet, radicalized college students, and evil Trump, has become a hard-line party outlet for leftist thought, unhindered by cowardly editors and a craven publisher. (That would be A.G. Sulzberger.) That’s all true, of course.

The problem is that Bennet completely accepts all the leftist shibboleths driving the paper’s radicalism. He just thinks the Times must be less obvious about showing its values because, unless it does a swift 180, it will be unable to defeat Mr. Evil himself, Donald Trump, in the 2024 election. It doesn’t occur to Bennet that his manic hatred of Trump, untempered by facts, reason, or intelligence, is emblematic of everything wrong with the paper (and I say that as someone who is not blind to Trump’s flaws). Nor does he understand that the paper, by going full Maoist, represents the inevitable end-point of any ideology that embraces statism over individual liberty.

Image: New York Times building (edited) by Haxorjoe. CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed.

The essay opens by describing how Bennet made the decision to publish Sen. Cotton’s 2020 essay because he contained an important viewpoint from someone who had Trump’s ear and might one day run for president himself. Bennet was surprised when, the very next day, the Times’s union (a unit of NewsGuild-CWA) issued “a statement calling the op-ed ‘a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent’.” Sulzberg initially had his back and then, facing pressure from the young Maoists, fired him.

The essay would have been good if it had ruminated a bit about the problems of yielding to censorious totalitarians on the staff, but it doesn’t. Instead, it goes on and on and on and on about Bennet’s experience and values, and every itch and twitch of thought at the Times itself.

I went into a coma halfway through, but along the way, I figured out that Bennet’s problem, and the reason he could not be brief, is that he cannot acknowledge that he accepts the worldview that drove this Maoism. Here are just a few examples.

Bennet argues that, because the Times has lost its credibility, it can’t inform the readers of the truth about Trump in time for the 2024 election:

Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

In fact, he’s got it bass-ackward. Part of the Times’s loss of credibility was because it so relentlessly lied about Trump (e.g., the Russia hoax, the Ukraine hoax, the Very Fine People hoax, etc.). What he misses is very simple: The Times maligned (and continues to malign) Trump, but people looking back on his presidency see an eccentric man who was an effective manager whose policies benefitted them and who did not abuse his authority. Meanwhile, the Times relentlessly celebrates Biden, who is a corrupt radical. The Times’s narrative opposes the people’s reality, destroying the Times’s credibility.

Several paragraphs further, Bennet again exposes his Trump Derangement: The paper must act fast…to destroy Trump:

As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

Throughout the essay, Bennet does grasp some truths about the problems facing the Times, along with the goals of good reporting:

[T]o assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

[snip]

[It used to be at the Times that] You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

Fine words but, again, spoiled by the fact that Bennet cannot get past the barrier that is Trump. The Trump bogeyman means that the Times’s lies are true and Trump is irredeemably evil and must be destroyed.

You can read the essay if you want. For now, at least, it’s not behind a paywall. And honestly, if you have the patience, it offers a bit of an insight into the fanaticism behind the print. But of course, you don’t really need the details. The Times’s work product was enough.

And for those who note that American Thinker also has a point of view, that’s true. However, we don’t purport to be an objective newspaper relaying facts to the masses. We are open about our biases, which makes us a lot more honest than the Times.

UPDATE: When I wrote the above, I was unaware that Scott Adams had compiled a list of anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, and anti-conservative hoaxes. As you read them, you will discover/remember that the NY Times participated in each one of them. Bennet is essentially saying that the Times should pretend moderation so that it will be believable for the next round of unbelievable attacks against Donald Trump:

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