*.... and is therefore not worth reading, except by those who study propaganda,* *journalistic corruption, and/or social pathology.*
MEDIA <https://nymag.com/tags/media/> NOV. 9, 2020 Times Change In the Trump years, the New York *Times* became less dispassionate and more crusading, sparking a raw debate over the paper’s future. By Reeves Wiedeman <https://nymag.com/author/reeves-wiedeman/> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-times-heated-reckoning-with-itself.html Illustration: Adam Maida On October 23, eleven days before the presidential election, Manohla Dargis, one of the movie critics at the New York *Times, *popped in to the #newsroom-feedback channel on the company’s Slack to pose an existential query. “Friendly question,” Dargis wrote to more than 2,000 of her colleagues. “What is this channel now?” The #newsroom-feedback channel had been created in June, after the *Times* published <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html> an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas arguing for the deployment of the military <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/tom-cotton-is-wrong-about-the-insurrection-act.html> to quell unrest stemming from nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd. The column was quickly lambasted: for factual errors, an inflammatory headline — “Send in the Troops” — and a feeling that the *Times* should not be in the business of publishing arguments for the use of American troops to crack down on American citizens. In response <https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/new-york-times-writers-speak-out-against-tom-cotton-op-ed.html>, dozens of the paper’s employees took to Twitter, writing in unison, “Running this puts Black @nytimes staffers in danger.” This was a break from* Times*ian tradition, which prohibited employees from expressing their anger at the paper to the broader world. So the staff turned to Slack, taking aim first at the column (“It’s very Bolsonaro of Op-Ed to run this”); then at the op-ed section’s editor, James Bennet (“We’re tiptoeing around the elephant in the room, trying not to notice the stink of the huge pile of crap it’s just dumped. Should JB be replaced?”); and, eventually, at the *Times* itself. Employees of color felt unheard — “We love this institution, even though sometimes it feels like it doesn’t love us back” — while tech reporters worried the *Times*’ defense of the column, in the name of an open consideration of a wide range of opinion, was making the paper look like the companies its reporting was taking to task: “It is frustrating to hear some of the same excuses (we’re just a platform for ideas!) that our journalists and columnists have criticized tech CEOs for making.” *Click on the link for the rest.* --- Support News from Underground: https://bit.ly/NFUSupport Visit News from Underground: https://markcrispinmiller.com You received this email because you are subscribed to News from Underground. To unsubscribe from this email list, please go to: http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=pIdjNUgiG2h8yxbhC54SSy4SEskAoEMs For archives, please go to: https://archives.simplelists.com/nfu
