OK, BUT I’M NOT SURE IF PINCH WILL:

● Shot: “I’m a White Man. Hear Me Out.”

—Headline of New York Times column this weekend by Frank Bruni, 52.

● Chaser:

Not long ago, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the 41-year old publisher of the New York Times, was greeting people at a party in the Metropolitan Museum when a dignified older man confronted him. He told Sulzberger that he was unhappy about the jazzy, irreverent new “Styles of the Times” Sunday section. “It’s very”—the man—paused—“un-Times-ian”

“Thank you,” Sulzberger replied. He later told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means “we’re doing something right.”

—“Tumult at the Times,” New York magazine, November 16, 1992.

It was during that era that former Timesman Peter Boyer described the atmosphere in Pinch’s newsroom as “moderate white men should die,”  according to William McGowan in his exceptional 2010 book Gray Lady Down.

Based on Bruni’s cri de coeur yesterday, it sounds like little has changed there.