"[T]he editing was very light... even when I took positions that made Times leadership very nervous.... [T]he columns themselves were published as I wrote them.... Then, step by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile for me were taken away.... [I]n 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive... toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument.... ... I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.... [W]hat I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness, toward avoiding saying anything too directly in a way that might get some people (particularly on the right) riled up. I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section?"
Writes Paul Krugman, in
"Departing the New York Times/I left to stay true to my byline" (The Contrarian).
What's going on there? Who wants blandly written columns? That doesn't solve any problem I'm aware of.
Anyway, I appreciate Krugman's link to this PrawfsBlawg post from last year,
"Worthwhile Canadian Initiative":
In 1986, The New Republic ran a contest to see if anyone could find a more boring headline than "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative," which appeared on a Flora Lewis column in the New York Times. ... [S]ome of the nominees were "University of Rochester Decides to Keep Name," "Trade: A Two-Way Street," ""Prevent Burglary by Locking House, Detectives Urge," and "Debate Goes on Over the Nature of Reality."...
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With Krugman the problem was always that his ideas were bad, inaccurate, and/or Party propaganda. I have no idea how he held that job for so long, but perhaps because the NYT fell in quality over the same period he seemed okay?
“What’s the frequency, Donald?”
—— Jim Acosta
Another victim of common sense. When will it ever end?
Krugman, seldom right but never uncertain.
Shorter version - I work for a giant corporation who pays me money but won't let me do whatever I want, waaaaahh.
Welcome to being a grown-up.
Nobody cares.
Krugman Falls In Forest, No One Hears It
Was it here that the Amanda Marcotte article on Trump and DEI was discussed last week? It was pretty typical for an opinion piece: no facts, no research, just assertion of what one side believes and attacks on what the other side believes. If somebody at the NYT wanted to make the man who believed the internet was just a flash in the pan that wouldn't last check his reasoning and support his assertions with evidence was that a bad thing?
If Krugman were writing for the business pages, something real and material would be riding on his words, and he'd be expected to write more than his off-the-top-of-his-head opinions and what journ-o-list tells him to say. Such credibility has he has comes from his economics Nobel. That would suggest that he should strive for more than just being provocative and supporting the home team.
Or,
Doubt was for the weak; being wrong was his strength.
What's the most insane thing Krugman ever wrote?
I vote for his trillion dollar coin scam.
Just print more money! You know, like counterfeiters.
That was so stupid, the Biden administration didn't do it. If you can't convince the Parkinson's guy, or the crazy kids secretly running his administration, about your wonderful economics, that's kind of a problem, no?
I have to wonder how much of that is going on "over there" as a rule, vs. how much of it is happening to Krugman.
It's almost (*almost*) as if the NYTimes has realized just how far off the rails they are. And maybe draconian methods are needed for anyone outside of Manhattan's toniest neighborhoods to trust them ever again.
I despise Krugman more than any other opinion writer. His work was merely a hate filled rant against anything right of extreme left wing bullshit. For a Nobel winner he sure was an idiot. Remember the classic - the internet will never amount to much. Given the invective he heaped upon the right, I wonder what the NYT needed to mute - probably calls to kill all republicans or other vile hate.
"If the question is when will my credibility recover, a first-pass is never." - Paul Krugman (allegedly)
Entitled Boomer Whines
The Times toned down the raw partisanship of his opinion pieces. They made his prose bland and sterile. His early columns were marked by his incisive wit and shrewd observations about the lurking evils facing modern America. Everybody talked about his columns, and the published collections of his earlier columns remain on the best seller list. What they did to this poor man is heartbreaking, and the worst crime in publishing since Murray burned Byron's memoirs.
It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump [will win], and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?
Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.
Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
--Paul Krugman, Nov 9, 2016
The problem isn’t that Paul Krugman is too left-wing or right-wing, the problem is that he’s a dopey hack.
It seems we’ve been hearing a similar story over the last few months: “Hey, Mr/Ms legend-in-your-own-mind, readership/viewership and revenue are in the toilet. You can stay with us and take a pay cut or…”
Who did Krugman have to screw to get the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics? Definitely one of the dumbest and most politically biased economists ever.
Please do not ban me but I had to say:
"malignant dwarf"
I am sceptical of Krugman's perspective. My perspective is that the pundit left has become increasingly radical and unmoored from reality, and is becoming increasingly livid any time anyone tries to gently steer them away from their Trump Derangement Syndrome. To the extent that the editor's hand became stronger, I suspect it's because the text being edited was increasingly unhinged.
I also think the light hand remained for a long time while the text got more and more "Trump is evil, let's throw all past standards out the window because they're 'false equivalence,'" and then the editors woke up one day (perhaps Nov. 5) and went "Wait, how did we get here?"
Poe's Law strikes hard here.
If I understand this correctly, for 24 years nobody gave a rat's hind end what Krugman wrote about anything. Then, all of a sudden, they did and he quit.
Huh.
Wow. That was Paul Krugman being constrained? His ideas were even worse than what the NYT would allow him to print? Interesting that this is coming out now.
The Nobel Prize in Economics committee includes a bunch of Swedish academics, and soft professors in soft socialist countries love soft leftist professors all around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Sveriges_Riksbank_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences_in_Memory_of_Alfred_Nobel
One of Krugman's first Substack posts: "Donald Trump Wants You to Die." Left of the loony left is a bit much even for the NYT.
His contribution was valuable. Trying to leverage that credibility for his commentary complete shyte…
Don’t care about Krugman, but long ago he did win his Nobel prize fair and square. You can be a good theorist and a bad political analyst.
I really appreciate the tip to the tribune article on the Silurian Lemont limestone quarries, beautiful soft yellow stone similar to the quarries under Paris and widely used there. And limestone is not as fire proof as granite. I don’t read the trib or the sun.
I bought several houses in the chi suburbs and for each I went down to Jolliet and got the 12 by 24 inch slabs to make dry stacked walls for flowers and shrubs.
The Times finally entered the modern media content world about five years ago, and started paying attention to the clicks its columnists and stories generated. Krugman basically had poor ratings. Like a tepid Netflix show: not renewed for another series.
I join those who feel Krugman was a hack. If you were wrong as many times as he in the business world you'd be out. I stopped reading him years ago, but was always amazed when he was cited for getting some obvious point entirely wrong.
Well, I'm glad he has decided to stay "true to himself." Now he is has complete creative freedom to say whatever he wants and be broke.
Paul still thinks enron stock is a good play. His record is every bit as demonstrative as joey bidet. Demonstrably, reliably wrong. Wrong on every topic discussed.
And there is the growing trend for defamation suits, and juries seem to lack sympathy for the accused media.
Don't let the screen door hit ya Paul....
The New Republic ran a contest to see if anyone could find a more boring headline than "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative,"
I read somewhere that in the 1920’s a newspaper had a contest to find the most dramatic possible headline. The winner: “Archduke Franz Ferdinand found alive, Great War fought by mistake”.
He got mad because the NYT revoked his poetic license and demanded he stick to the facts, which were not nearly as alarming or as productive of outrage.
He was a man of many predictions, but I don't recall any of them being accurate.
"What's the most insane thing Krugman ever wrote?"
The Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s….ten years from now, the phrase “information economy” will sound silly. (1997) - Paul Krugman
Krugman reminds me of the climate scientist Michael Mann. No original ideas, and the stench of quackery and dogma. An unremarkable public persona and notoriety that would not have existed without the support of that segment of culture that decided to endorse him.
I wonder how many times that book of his collected columns has actually been read all the way through versus how many have been sold.
You only had to read the headline, and you could predict the entire column.
"I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote...."
We noticed.
Somewhere, there is a manager of a Krugman contra-fund looking for a new indicator. Jim Cramer?
I asked Grok for Krugman's "Most controversial columns" and it gave me two examples:
1. After 911 Krugman said the attack was partly caused by Low pay for airport security.
2. In 2011 he accused Bush and Gulliani of trying to "cash in" on 911.
In other words, Krugman's strong opinions just revolve around attacking Republicans or Rightwingers. THe so called "Blandness" was the NYT's editors trying to make his column less partisan and hysterical.
BTW, I always get Krugman and Friedman mixed up. Probably because they're both Jewish leftists who say almost the same thing on every subject. And are boring.
BTW BTW, I asked Grok if Tribe, Friedman or Krugman ever called Trump a Nazi and got almost the same summary: "In summary, while [insert TRibe/FRiedman/Krugman] has engaged in discussions where he compares Trump's actions, rhetoric, or the behavior of his supporters to that of Nazi or fascist regimes, he has not directly called Trump a "Nazi." His commentary tends to focus on the implications of Trump's actions for democracy and the rule of law, often using historical parallels to underscore his points."
…credit to our fellow commentator who finished a sentence …Krugman just pees under his desk. Perfect.
who is richer? how many $ in Nobel?
I always get Krugman and Friedman mixed up. Probably because they're both Jewish leftists
Man, I was up in arms, writing my passionate defense of Milton Friedman, the greatest economist the world has ever seen, and Ronald Reagan fave. I was heading to youtube to find those awesome videos where Friedman was on the Phil Donahue show and blowing up the network. And that's when it occurred to me, "oh, he's probably talking about Thomas Friedman."
(Who's not an economist and got his degree in Mediterranean studies).
Did Krugman leave the Times, or did the Times leave Krugman?
All LLMs tell you what everyone else is saying.
Expensive opinion columnists are being given the opportunity to quit or be fired, and he's just giving his version of why he quit.
No offense to the host, but Paul Krugman is old. No one does their best work past age 70. I think the NYT decided his best years were behind him, and they will replace him with someone who will bring in more readers.
He was a good economist about how industries get started in a new place, and how firms agglomerate near other, similar, firms and their workers. He's not dumb, not at all, and he taught at MIT. I wouldn't argue economics, or especially trade theory, with him. He's a Nobel-Prize level expert. He won in 2008. But 2008 is a generation ago.
Looking back, as a political columnist, I don't think what's under the hood of Krugman's skull came out much. What he said was indistinguishable from whatever partisan point was being made by everyone else that week. Also, it was usually just "Republican Bad." So, for me, there wasn't much value in reading his columns.
But, if you can handle it, his ideas about how trade works in the real world are pretty good.
I read "From Beirut to Jerusalem" decades ago. Tom Friedman was a very sensible person before he worked for the NYT.
It's very strange for him to blame this on editing. Krugman, like most journalist political pollsters and economists, see what they want to see, and so they're just not very good at their actual jobs.
They're opinion columnists, wandering far from their areas of academic expertise, which itself is often failing to see the forest for the trees.
But you cannot convince me that the Times is paying more attention to editing these days. They're far too busy trying to deal with their own internal income disparities and to capture younger readers who want only long-form hip culture and dumb advice pieces. Of course, Krugman has failed to notice this too.
Krugman was the NY Times version of Jim Cramer.
My internal wayback machine recalls the Krugman Dead Cat Bounce and the altitude of his Kicked Cat, following economic indicators that were the exact opposite of his predictions and even current statements. IIRC, it was in the National Review, back before they fired Derbyshire and went to hell.
Rubin, Acosta, and now Krugman. My cup runneth over. They would plug right in on the View or the Bulwark.
[I]n 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive... toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence.
IOW, they started calling out his bullshit, and he got his little feelings hurt.
Fuck him
Of course, those readers of the New York Times that understood the quantitively naive drivel he wrote were leaving in droves.
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