The New York Times is no longer a news outlet with a liberal slant, but has morphed into one with an “illiberal bias,” wrote James Bennet, the former editorial page editor, who was infamously cast out in 2020.
“The Times’s problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether,” Bennet wrote in a lengthy essay for The Economist’s 1848 Magazine headlined, “When the New York Times lost its way.”
“All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that [Publisher A.G.] Sulzberger did not emphasize: courage,” he wrote.
The scathing commentary recounts Bennet being unceremoniously dumped by the Times after he published an OpEd by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton calling for the use of U.S. troops to be deployed to cities where protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder had morphed into looting and riots. Bennet maintains that Sulzberger at first supported its publication, noting that then-President Donald Trump shared a similar view, but that backlash among Times staffers and on social media swayed the publisher into calling Bennet and demanding a resignation “with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me.”
“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,” Bennet wrote. “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,” he continued.
Bennet said he believes Sulzberger shares his viewpoint, based on interviews and the publisher’s own writing defending “independent journalism” — “or, as I understand him, fair-minded, truth-seeking journalism that aspires to be open and objective.”
But he maintained such values have “fallen out of fashion not just with journalists at the Times and other mainstream publications but at some of the most prestigious schools of journalism.”
Bennet stated that journalism today requires a particular kind of courage “in an era when polarization and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonizes for fear they will harm its cause.”
“One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down,” he continued. “This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of The New York Times is losing control of its principles.”
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