This was a really interesting read about the growing polarisation in media and the US.
Like me, Baquet seemed taken aback by the criticism that Times readers shouldn’t hear what Cotton had to say. Cotton had a lot of influence with the White House, Baquet noted, and he could well be making his argument directly to the president, Donald Trump. Readers should know about it. Cotton was also a possible future contender for the White House himself, Baquet added. And, besides, Cotton was far from alone: lots of Americans agreed with him—most of them, according to some polls. “Are we truly so precious?” Baquet asked again, with a note of wonder and frustration.
The answer, it turned out, was yes. Less than three days later, on Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation. I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.
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.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/JxGro
But... you keep quoting AG and the NYT as examples of why the article is wrong, AG is clearly one of those at fault in the article and the entire article is making the same points as you are? They're not praising the NYT.
AG is clearly one of those at fault in the article, but I’m not convinced that that is the voice the author is coming at it from.
It’s so long that I’m not going to read it all in depth. Maybe that means I am going to miss something but I just now made a pretty lengthy concerted effort to skim and try to see if your reading makes sense, and I’m still having trouble. So like, check this out:
The whole framing of the article is that the “untruth” AG needs to be setting straight is overly sensitive political correctness from progressives, and analyzing everything he’s doing through that lens. Whether we have to be neutral and present progressives and “conservatives” on the same footing, or whether we should take a side and say the progressives are wrong. Right? Have I read that part right in your opinion?
I think once you’ve framed AG’s dilemma in those terms, you already fucked up. That is not AG’s dilemma. His dilemma is that part of the US political spectrum is explicitly fascist now, and his decision as far as I can tell is that we need to go further than the Times’s editorial voice being on the side of the neoliberals as it always was, and now needs to be the fascists or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, whether or not that’s the reality.
Here’s an extremely instructive example:
Right? I still won’t say I’m 100% sure on 100% of the thesis of the article, but is that not Bennet arguing that AG needs to enforce better the pro-fascist standard of truth?
I kinda read it differently. I'm not saying you're wrong, since this is of course all pretty subjective. But at least the way I read it, Bennet is saying that the NYT has a duty to help both sides understand each other, and the way to do that would be by giving a voice to the right and centrists without necessarily endorsing any faction. I agree with it to some extent - as both sides have polarised and pulled away from each other, it's gotten hard to be a neutral viewpoint in any number of topics without being roundly condemned by both sides.
That's a tough one. Dogwhistles, weasel words, doublespeak are all things to watch out for. He's condemning the NYT for changing the language Cotton used, but I'm not familiar enough with US politics to have an opinion if they changed the meaning or just polished the turd.
Regardless, I appreciate the different viewpoint you presented. As usual, there's no black and white in these scenarios.
I think that this is a superficially pleasing argument but actually quite dangerous. It ignores that the NYT is itself quite powerful. Anything printed in the NYT is instantly given credibility, so it's actually impossible for them to stay objective and not take sides. Taking an army out to quash protestors gets normalized when it appears in the NYT, which is a point for that side of the argument, but the NYT can't publish every side of every issue. There's not enough space on the whole internet for that. This is why we have that saying that I mentioned in the other comment, that journalists should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, or that journalists ought to speak truth to power. Since it's simply impractical to be truly neural, in the sense of publishing every side of every issue, a responsible journalist considers the power dynamics to decide which sides need airing.
The author of the OP argues that, because Cotton is already a very influential person, he ought to be published in the NYT, but I think that the exact opposite is true. Because Cotton is already an influential person, he has plenty of places that he can speak, and when the NYT platforms his view that powerful people like him should oppress those beneath them, they do a disservice to their society by implicitly endorsing that as something more worthy of publishing than the infinite other things that they could publish. For literally all of history, it's been easy to hear the opinions of those who wield violence to suppress dissent. Journalism is special only when it goes against power.
I get what you're saying. The flip side, is that at the other extreme you get echo chambers, which is arguably where we've landed today in a lot of media. It's a pretty tough question, and I don't claim to have the answer, but I think it's a good thing to be having this discussion instead of sweeping it under the rug.