".... how unwelcome such questions were. By asking, I’d revealed that I wasn’t on the same team as my colleagues, that I didn’t accept as an article of faith the liberal premise that voter suppression was a grave threat to liberal democracy while voter fraud was entirely fake news. Or take the Hunter Biden laptop story: Was it truly 'unsubstantiated,' as the paper kept saying? At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism. Nor is a vague unease with difficult subjects. 'The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable,' a colleague once told me. This was something I was used to hearing from young progressives on college campuses, but not at work...."
Writes Adam Rubenstein, in "I Was a Heretic at The New York Times/I did what I was hired to do, and I paid for it" (The Atlantic).
Rubenstein was the primary editor of the Tom Cotton op-ed that caused an uproar in 2020. This long article is mostly about that experience, which, he says, "was never about safety, or the facts, or the editing, or even the argument, but control of the paper and who had it."
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