I WAS A HERETIC AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Adam Rubenstein in the Atlantic on the paper’s young staffers’ 2020 meltdown over Tom Cotton’s op-ed:
All of this happened in the first five years of my career. In the worst of those days, I was attacked not only by colleagues, but also by acquaintances and friends. One friend contacted my girlfriend of seven years, asking whether she would take a stand against “Adam’s role in promoting fascism.” She—the tough-as-nails daughter of Peruvian immigrants who grew up hearing stories of her parents fleeing the Shining Path—ignored it, and some eight weeks later, we were engaged.
As painful as it was in my mid-20s to think that my journalistic career would end as a result of this episode, it’s even more painful to think that newsrooms haven’t learned the right lessons from it. If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.
By telling the story the Times told about Cotton’s op-ed, the paper seemed to avoid confronting the tough reality that despite many staffers’ objections, the article was well within the bounds of reasonable discourse. What did it mean for the paper and its coverage that Times employees were so violently opposed to publishing a mainstream American view?
It was clear to me then and it’s clear to me now that the fight over Cotton’s op-ed was never about safety, or the facts, or the editing, or even the argument, but control of the paper and who had it. In the end, all that mattered was that an example had been made.
Rubenstein is no longer with the Times, but as Ed Morrissey writes, the rot is still very much there: Former NYT Editor: It’s a Cult, and I’m Its Heretic.
And it infects every bit of the NYT, not just the opinion section. The staff revolt proved that much, but so does its product. How else can one explain why the New York Times ran the unsubstantiated story that Israel had destroyed the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza at the start of the present war and killed 500 people, without waiting for the sun to come up? Within hours, the Hamas claim was proven false as the hospital remained standing, and it became clear within the day that a Palestinian rocket had misfired and landed in the parking lot.
And yet it took the NYT a week to add an “editor’s note” to their original report that Hamas had “failed to make [the] case” that the IDF had hit the hospital. As I wrote at the time, the NYT wasn’t interested in reporting news but in amplifying propaganda:
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Nor is this limited to Israel, or even Donald Trump. Nicole Gelinas has a must-read essay at City Journal today titled “Department of Incorrections,” in which the Times tried to cover for Mayor Eric Adams and his cash giveaway to migrants. Gelinas had reported on the no-bid deal to disburse $150 million to migrants for food and shelter, but without any safeguards or accountability. Instead of following up and getting answers, the Times went after Gelinas while blaming the criticism on “Republican leaders and conservatives voices.” The piece misrepresented what Gelinas had written, and then refused to correct it when Gelinas asked them to do so.
The Times treated Rubinstein the same way, throwing him under the bus when the staffer revolt erupted. They took his Slack messages out of context to make it sound as though he’d approved Cotton’s piece with “false equivalences” when that message pertained to specific photographs rather than the essay. And even apart from that, there was nothing all that novel about what Cotton advocated. Rubinstein notes the bitter irony of the opposition to Cotton’s suggestion of using the National Guard to quell the George Floyd riots that emerged just a few months later:
On January 6, 2021, few people at The New York Times remarked on the fact that liberals were cheering on the deployment of National Guardsmen to stop rioting at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the very thing Tom Cotton had advocated.
William McGowan’s 2010 book Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America begins with a tribute to the legendary Abe Rosenthal, who was executive editor of the Times from 1977 to 1986:
Rosenthal retired from the executive editor position in 1986 and then wrote a twice-weekly column on the op-ed page until 1999. Along with James Reston and a handful of others, he is identified with the New York Times’ golden age, a time when the paper spoke to—and for—the nation. In May 2006, Rosenthal died after a massive stroke at the age of eighty-four. He had worked fifty-three years for the Times, after coming aboard as a copyboy in 1946 in his early twenties.
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A tribute of sorts to the ideological neutrality of Times news reporting under Rosenthal had come from a rather unusual source: William F. Buckley’s National Review, the very bible of American conservatism. In 1972, as Spiro Agnew railed against the “elitist Eastern establishment press,” and Richard Nixon was livid over the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers and its looming endorsement of George McGovern, the National Review produced an article examining the charges of left-leaning bias. Conservatives had long dismissed the Times as “a hopeless hotbed of liberalism, biased beyond redemption and therefore not to be taken seriously,” the magazine observed, asking, “But to what extent was this impression soundly based?” A subheadline telegraphed its findings: “Things on 43rd Street aren’t as bad as they seem.” The National Review audit examined five developing stories, which it said had a “distinct left-right line,” and concluded: “The Times news administration was so evenhanded that it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition.” It went on to state that conservatives and other Americans would be far more confident in other media—specifically newsmagazines and television networks—if those media “measured up to the same standard” of fairness. “Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated,” National Review said, “the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.”
McGowan noted:
While encouraging reporters to write with more flair, Rosenthal eschewed the subjectivity of the New Journalism, seeing this genre as substituting reportorial ego for a commitment to fact. He was vigilant about conflicts of interest, once firing a reporter who was found to have been sleeping with a Pennsylvania politician she covered while working for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t care if my reporters are f**king elephants,” Rosenthal was said to have declared, “as long as they aren’t covering the circus.”
But as 2020 proved, and as Rubenstein writes at the Atlantic (curiously, heretics don’t last very long there, either), the circus could be found each day inside the Times’ Slack channel.
UPDATE: When Will the Atlantic Apologize for Its Own Behavior? “The editor of the Atlantic at the time was Jeffrey Goldberg. The editor of the Atlantic is still Jeffrey Goldberg. Does he have something to share with us?”