"Asked about his high points as [NYT] executive editor, Baquet cited the [Harvey] Weinstein investigation and the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project."

"Both efforts, said Baquet in an interview, became 'bigger than newspaper stories. They changed the whole conversation'.... Another high point for Baquet was the [Bill] O’Reilly exposé.... O’Reilly was dethroned as king of cable news.... Routine political coverage in Baquet’s Times occasionally showered undue respectability upon false and authoritarian pro-Trump talking points.... A Harvard study found that coverage in the final months of the 2016 campaign was a feast of false equivalency in which Trump’s controversies received slightly less attention than Hillary Clinton’s controversies...."

Writes Erik Wemple in "Dean Baquet’s hands-on Times run is coming to a close" (WaPo).

"Joe brings impeccable news judgment, a sophisticated understanding of the forces shaping the world and a long track record of helping journalists produce their most ambitious and courageous work."

Says A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, quoted in "Joe Kahn Is Named Next Executive Editor of The New York Times" (NYT). 

Mr. Kahn, 57, currently the No. 2-ranking editor at The Times, will take on one of the most powerful positions in American media and the global news business. He is to succeed Dean Baquet, whose eight-year tenure is expected to conclude in June... 

Mr. Kahn has in recent years spearheaded the paper’s efforts to re-engineer its newsroom for the speed and agility required of modern media. He dismantled the print-focused copy desk, expanded the use of real-time news updates and emphasized visual journalism as much as the written word.... 

At the same time, The Times is grappling with shifting views about the role of independent journalism in a society divided by harsh debates over political ideology and cultural identity. Mr. Kahn said securing the public’s trust “in a time of polarization and partisanship” was among his top priorities....

I've been relying on the NYT for longer than Joe Kahn has been alive, and I have never seen anywhere better to go to follow the news and the culture. I criticize what I find in the NYT. That's the #1 thing I do on this blog, but I dearly hope for it to be as good as possible, and I wish Joe Kahn the very best.

"The parents of adventurous young meritocrats paid $5,490 (plus airfare) for two weeks studying 'Public Health and Development in the Andes.'"

"On that trip, the reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., got into a series of heated arguments with students, none of them Black, on the charged question of race. Their complaints would ultimately end his career as a high-profile public health reporter for The Times, and again put The Times at the center of the national argument over journalism and racism and labor.... The student at the center of this story is Sophie Shepherd, who isn’t among the teenagers who have spoken anonymously to other news organizations. She and two other students said she was the person who spoke the most to Mr. McNeil and spent the most time with him on their 'student journey.' She was 17 at the time, and had just finished her senior year at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school sometimes rated America’s best."

 Writes Ben Smith in The New York Times — at "Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside The Times Won’t Stop/Other news organizations have their own personnel dramas. But none attract the spotlight the way The Times does." 

The New York Post publishes the Bret Stephens column that the New York Times spiked.

It's not that Stephens, a regular NYT columnist, can or would just give the rejected column to another newspaper to publish. The Post tells us the column — which defends the NYT reporter who got ousted for saying the n-word — "circulated among Times staffers and others" and the Post got hold of it "from one of them, not Stephens himself." Presumably, the Post publishes it because it is newsworthy — not as an opinion on the news but because the spiking of it is news, so we need to see what it is. 

Let's read it:

Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention. 

It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act).

Speaking of Donald Trump, it's the question I think should be at the core of the impeachment trial but is not: Did Trump intend that the crowd break into the Capitol and terrorize the members of Congress?  

It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage. A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention.

Yeah, why are the House Managers indifferent to this distinction? I am getting distracted! This Stephen's column reads like a criticism of the House Managers case against Trump. Trump said something, perhaps without any intention of causing the harm, but the harm did ensue. To care about the harm and not what the accused person intended is a "hallmark of injustice." Noted!

"'Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended.' The science reporter... described the 'n-word' incident..."

"... as having occurred during a dinner discussion about the use of racial slurs, in which one student on the trip asked whether a classmate should have been suspended for using racist rhetoric in a video. 'To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself,' McNeil wrote. He apologized for 'extraordinarily bad judgment' to both the staff of the Times, singling out those he worked closely with, and to the students on the trip. 'I am sorry. I let you all down.'... Times executive editor Dean Baquet had previously said McNeil should be 'given another chance' because his comments were not 'hateful or malicious' in intent, but in a message to staff on Friday, the top editor wrote, 'We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.'"

From "NY Times Star Reporter Donald McNeil Exits After Daily Beast Exposé" (Daily Beast).

In the old days, a big deal was made of the "use/mention" distinction. It doesn't seem to matter anymore. Even McNeil, defending himself, asserts that he "used" the word.

I understand wanting to say that "intent" shouldn't be decisive, because it presents evidentiary problems. What went on in a person's head? Did he somehow mean well? But the "use/mention" distinction doesn't require a trip into someone's mind. If you have the outward statement, you can know whether the speaker/writer used the word as his own word or was referring to the word as a word. 

You don't need to know whether I think Dean Baquet is a coward to distinguish the statement "Dean Baquet is a coward" from "I can imagine someone saying 'Dean Baquet is a coward.'" And writing that last sentence, I can see why the "use/mention" distinction went to hell!

"New York Times Admits Its ‘Caliphate’ Podcast Fell for ISIS Hoaxer’s Bullshit/HOOK, LINE, SINKER."

"The newspaper says it didn’t properly scrutinize the claims of Shehroze Chaudhry, who has since been charged with making up his terrorism past." 

Headline at The Daily Beast. 

The New York Times on Friday released the findings of its internal investigation into star reporter Rukmini Callimachi’s reporting on ISIS and extremism in the Middle East.... Callimachi came under intense scrutiny after the main subject of her Peabody award-winning podcast, titled Caliphate, was charged in Canada earlier this year with making up a terrorism hoax in which he claimed to have joined ISIS in Syria and have been a part of its brutal police force. Law-enforcement officials said that, in reality, Shehroze Chaudhry, better known by his alias Abu Huzayfah, lied about his exploits to the media, and had actually never traveled to Syria. His arrest immediately sparked questions at the Times, which through Callimachi’s reporting had leaned heavily on Chaudhry’s allegedly fabricated story.

ADDED: NPR has good detail:  

"Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750."

"He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made. As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.."

The NYT reports, saying that it "has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office."

At his press conference today, Trump called this "totally fake news."

ADDED: From "An Editor’s Note on the Trump Tax Investigation": "Some will raise questions about publishing the president’s personal tax information. But the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment allows the press to publish newsworthy information that was legally obtained by reporters even when those in power fight to keep it hidden. That powerful principle of the First Amendment applies here."

"Seeing the brutality of a white power structure toward its poor black citizens [on the streets of Ferguson], and at its rawest, helped shape the way a generation of reporters..."

"... most of them black, looked at their jobs when they returned to their newsrooms. And by 2014... Twitter...  offered a counterweight to their newsrooms, which over the years had sought to hire black reporters on the unspoken condition that they bite their tongues about racism. Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.... The fights at The Times are particularly intense because Mr. Sulzberger is now considering candidates to replace the executive editor, Dean Baquet, in 2022, the year he turns 66. Competing candidates represent different visions for the paper, and Mr. Bennet had embodied a particular kind of ecumenical establishment politics. But the Cotton debacle had clearly endangered Mr. Bennet’s future. When the highly regarded Sunday Business editor, Nick Summers, said in a Google Hangout meeting last Thursday that he wouldn’t work for Mr. Bennet, he drew agreement from colleagues in a chat window.... Mr. Sulzberger... told me... 'We’re not retreating from the principles of independence and objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective about things like human rights and racism.'"

Writes Ben Smith in "Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms/Staff members’ demands helped end the tenure of James Bennet as Opinion editor of The New York Times. And they are generating tension at The Washington Post. Part of the story starts in Ferguson, Mo." (NYT).

We’re not retreating from the principles of... objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective....

"The Failing New York Times, in one of the most devastating portrayals of bad journalism in history, got caught by a leaker that they are shifting..."

"... from their Phony Russian Collusion Narrative (the Mueller Report & his testimony were a total disaster), to a Racism Witch Hunt. ...'Journalism'has reached a new low in the history of our Country. It is nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party. The reporting is so false, biased and evil that it has now become a very sick joke...But the public is aware! #CROOKEDJOURNALISM"

Trump tweets this morning.

The Washington Times gives the context:

Conservatives were stunned by the transcript of the staff “town hall” led by executive editor Dean Baquet, a recording of which was reportedly leaked to Slate, which posted what was described as a transcript on Thursday.... The most troubling part of NYT editor Dean Baquet’s speech to his newsroom was his admission: “our readers...cheer us when we take on Donald Trump.” He added that Trump voters don’t read the Times....

I'll read the transcript for myself. Here are my notes as I read it:

"'Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism,' was the correct description in the first headline by the Failing New York Times, but it was quickly changed to, 'Assailing Hate But Not Guns'..."

"... after the Radical Left Democrats went absolutely CRAZY! Fake News - That’s what we’re up against... 'This is an astounding development in journalism. I’ve never seen it happen before, I’ve just never seen anything like this! Is that journalism today? I don’t think so!' Mark Penn, Former Clinton Advisor.
@TuckerCarlson After 3 years I almost got a good headline from the Times!"

Tweeted Trump this morning.

We talked about the NYT headline switcheroo yesterday, here.

Here's some discussion of the topic in the Columbia Journalism Review, "Times public editor: The readers versus the masthead":

[R]eader expectations of the Times have shifted after the election of President Trump. The paper... saw a huge surge of subscriptions in the days and months after the 2016 election... The Times has since embraced these new subscribers in glitzy commercials with slogans like “The truth is more important now than ever.” Yet there is a glaring disconnect between those energized readers and many Times staffers, especially newspaper veterans. [Executive Editor Dean] Baquet doesn’t see himself as the vanguard of the resistance... He acknowledges that people may have a different view of what the Times is, but he doesn’t blame the marketing. “It’s not because of the ads; it’s because Donald Trump has stirred up very powerful feelings among Americans. It’s made Americans, depending on your point of view, very angry and very mistrustful of institutions. And some may think newsrooms like the New York Times and the Washington Post are supposed to be Donald Trump’s adversaries or the leaders of the adversarial movement to take down Donald Trump.... I think it’s healthy for each generation to come in and discuss what the rules are. You have to accept that there’s something at the core of the New York Times and the Washington Post that won’t change, but there’s a lot that can change at the edges.”

"Dean Baquet, [the NYT] executive editor, says 'we were overly cautious' in our handling of [E. Jean Carroll’s] allegations against the president."

Lara Takenaga writes in the NYT:

Many have written to ask us why we didn’t give the allegations more attention on our website and in print. (The Times published an 800-word story on Friday evening, but did not promote the story on its home page until late Saturday morning and did not run a print story until Sunday.) Some questioned whether the lack of prominence showed too much deference to the president’s denials, or whether it even suggested misogyny or an unwillingness to believe a victim’s account.

The Reader Center took the concerns to The Times’s top editors and sat down with Dean Baquet, the executive editor. He said the critics were right that The Times had underplayed the article, though he said it had not been because of deference to the president.... “We were overly cautious.”...

In The Times’s reporting on the Weinstein and O’Reilly cases, editors developed an informal set of guidelines for when The Times would publish such allegations. Those guidelines include locating sources outside those mentioned by the accusers who not only corroborate the allegations but also are willing to go on the record.

So the Times, even in its "overly cautious" approach, was more aggressive than required by its own policy. It ran the story, just not conspicuously. Then, when criticized for that, Baquet interposed a new rule:

[T]he Carroll story, Mr. Baquet said, was different because the allegations were already receiving broad attention.... “We were playing by rules that didn’t quite apply,” Mr. Baquet said. “They’ve allowed us to break major stories, from Bill O’Reilly to Harvey Weinstein. But in this case, it was a different kind of story.”

That is, when they are breaking the story,  they look for corroboration, but when the story is already out there, they can cover the fact that there is a story that is already public. The news is fit to print because somebody else printed it? Or is that about who is getting accused? No...

The fact that a well-known person was making a very public allegation against a sitting president “should’ve compelled us to play it bigger.”

It's about who the accuser is? And E. Jean Carroll is "a well-known person"? I'm skeptical. Baquet seems to be avoiding saying that the NYT should help out the Trump-hating side but it's hard to believe that's not what pushed him to say they were "overly cautious."

I had to look up who E. Jean Carroll is. Wikipedia:

"As a rule I don't go off the record with high-ranking officials, particularly the president."

"As the person overseeing coverage, I don't think officials should be able to tell me things that I can't publish. And I don't want to be courted or wooed."

Said NYT executive editor Dean Baquet, quoted in "Why Dean Baquet Skipped The New York Times’ Meeting With Trump" (Buzzfeed).

The NYT decides, "based on individual circumstances," that not firing Glenn Thrush is "an appropriate response."

I'm finally forcing myself to read "Glenn Thrush, Suspended Times Reporter, to Resume Work but Won’t Cover White House" (at the NYT).

The New York Times said on Wednesday that Glenn Thrush, one of the paper’s most prominent political reporters, would remain suspended until late January and then be removed from the team covering the White House after he faced allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior....

[Dean Baquet, the executive editor] said Mr. Thrush was undergoing counseling and substance abuse rehabilitation on his own and that he would receive training “to improve his workplace conduct.”

“We understand that our colleagues and the public at large are grappling with what constitutes sexually offensive behavior in the workplace and what consequences are appropriate,” Mr. Baquet added. “Each case has to be evaluated based on individual circumstances. We believe this is an appropriate response to Glenn’s situation.”

I agree with that statement at the high level of abstraction where it is made, but it's a high-level-abstraction statement about how decisions should be made at a low level of abstraction, looking at the individual particularities. What confidence do I have that the NYT has any standards at all and that they will be applied fairly and consistently?

I'm looking at the specific factors without seeing analysis of what exactly was key. There was an article (in Vox) containing accusations by 4 women, only one of whom was named. The women said Thrush subjected them to "unwanted kissing and touching."

Three of the women described encounters that occurred when Mr. Thrush was working at Politico. One described an incident that occurred in June. None of the women cited in the article worked at The Times.

So... is it the totality of the circumstances, considering all the factors including the number of alleged incidents, the severity of the alleged actions, when they took place, whether the alleged victims are employees of the same company, how important the accused is to the employer, and the submission to counseling? Is that what the NYT is doing and what the NYT would recommend to other employers dealing with sexual harassment cases?

Chuck Todd's emotional journalism.

On "Meet the Press" today, Chuck Todd — interviewing the NYT executive editor Dean Baquet — showed a disturbing inability to do his job, to be a professional journalist. I don't see what's so hard about understanding professionalism. You're a journalist, you cover the people in the news, and you don't let the subjects of the news shake you up by telling you you're doing it wrong. As long as you are following principles of professionalism — maybe you aren't and that's your problem — you should be able to stand your ground firmly. Yet somehow, Donald Trump's criticism of journalists is dogging him:

CHUCK TODD: This presents a very difficult situation. I face it myself personally from him sometimes, we face it as a network, where he personalizes coverage and disagreements about coverage with the organization and sometimes with individual reporters. You're a human being, I'm a human being. It's not easy sometimes doing that. 

Is Todd play-acting, trying to drum up sympathy? It makes no sense. Consumers of journalism don't worry about how the reporters feel. But Todd could be mistaken and think acting wounded will cause viewers to want to defend him against mean old Trump. I doubt it. So maybe Todd really is hurting. But that seems ridiculous. Cover the news! If someone in the news is a gigantic bastard, so much the better for the news provider. Tell the story. What's this "I'm a human being" business?

Todd asks Baquet: "How are you instructing your journalists to handle the personal attacks that may come his way in a very public setting?" This is an odd question, and not just because of the awkward, ungrammatical "his." It assumes instruction must be given to reporters, like they're snowflakes in need of a safe room.

Baquet doesn't buy into the drama. He takes what I think is the obvious professional position: "[W]e have a huge obligation to cover this guy aggressively and fairly. And that means not letting personalities get in the way." He concedes that Trump's antagonism is "annoying" and takes note of a possible threat to First Amendment values, but he completely avoids the emotionalism of taking it personally. He puts any "personal stuff" "off to the side." Well, of course.

Next Todd brought on the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker. Todd played a clip of Trump calling the WSJ "a piece of garbage" and then asked Baker "How did you handle the direct attacks?"

Baker, like Baquet, took the professional approach. You just "get used to it." Trump has his style. The WSJ reporters know what it is. They deal with it. Baker observes that at least he can tell that Trump is reading his newspaper.

Bringing up a "leaked memo" from Baker that said "Everybody's got to be fair to him," Todd says:

Were you concerned that the personal attacks were going to make some of your reporters react? They're human. We're all human beings. And when you personally get attacked, it's hard to sort of set that aside. 

There's that human business again.



Baker concedes he was "concerned," but immediately changes the subject from how reporters feel to what Trump is like. He's "different." And some reporters feel that they're in a "contest" with Trump, which sounds a tad emotional, but Baker doesn't pursue the feelings. He just says "it's reporters' jobs to take everybody on, you know, to test everything that a politician says against the truth." In other words: professionalism.

Trump met with NYT editors, reporters, and opinion writers today.

Here are the live-tweets from the event. The most interesting subject was the alt-right:

Dean Baquet asks if Trump feels like he did things to energize the alt-right movement. “I don’t think so, Dean,” Trump replies....

Trump: “I don’t want to energize the group, and I disavow the group. It’s not a group I want to energize, and if they are energized, I want to look into it and find out why."...

On Bannon: "If I thought he was a racist or alt-right or any of the things, the terms we could use, I wouldn't even think about hiring him."...

Asked point-blank about Nazi conference in DC over wknd: @realDonaldTrump tells @nytimes "of course" "I disavow and condemn them"

Here's the NYT article from a few days ago about the conference referred to above: "White Nationalists Celebrate ‘an Awakening’ After Donald Trump’s Victory."

In the bowels of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, three blocks from the White House, members of the so-called alt-right movement gathered for what they had supposed would be an autopsy to plot their grim future under a Clinton administration. Instead, they celebrated the unexpected march of their white nationalist ideas toward the mainstream, portraying Mr. Trump’s win as validation that the tide had turned in their fight to preserve white culture.

“It’s been an awakening,” Richard B. Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right, said at the gathering on Saturday. “This is what a successful movement looks like.”...

Mr. Trump has shrugged off any suggestions that he has connections to the alt-right. But his hard-line views on immigration and his “America First” foreign policy have captivated members of the movement. His appointment as chief strategist of Stephen K. Bannon, who has called Breitbart News, the website he long ran, a platform for the alt-right, has reinforced the notion that the incoming president is on their side....

Here's the Mother Jones article in which Steve Bannon is quoted as saying — referring to Breitbart.com — "We're the platform for the alt-right." How can that be squared with Trump's statement today that if he thought Bannon were alt-right, he wouldn't even consider hiring him? Bannon could deny ever saying that, or he could clarify that when he said it, he intended the term"alt-right" — which is new and not crisply defined — to be understood in a broad sense and not the more restrictive sense that you can tell Trump intended when he threw "alt-right" into the garbled phrase "a racist or alt-right or any of the things, the terms we could use."

Trump's instinct to disavow and condemn was good politics. He'd have been slammed over any hesitation. He's seen that before. He must know he doesn't want to give his antagonists any material that could fit the he's-a-racist template they're eager to impose. It wasn't worth making any nice distinctions about the scope of the term "alt-right." Best to leave that to be sorted out later.

I miss Jill Abramson!

Is it just me, or has the NYT become boring since the departure of Jill Abramson?

No need to tell me that you've never liked the NYT. I'm trying to focus on the change since they ousted Abramson last May. Remember, just before she was fired last April, there was an incident, reported in Politico, in which she'd "called Dean Baquet into her office to complain" that the NYT "wasn’t 'buzzy' enough," she blamed Baquet, and "Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom."

In the ensuing power struggle, Baquet got Abramson's job as executive editor, and now we are seeing the results: Not buzzy enough!

I go to the NYT site every day, looking for things to read and, I hope, to blog. I'm finding myself skimming over the front page and then leaving. I can't pinpoint what was there before that pulled me in — perhaps it was overly skewed toward aging, affluent, white females like me — but I'm not going in and hanging around.

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

BTW, if you keep owning up to 'aging' then we're gonna have to revoke your status as Baby Boomer. Keep this in mind: we never age!

Here's my take on that, from last year, when I was younger (and so were you):

"Could there have been room for a simple misunderstanding, rather than that Abramson deliberately misled Baquet or Sulzberger?"

"It would make no sense, Abramson’s friends say, for her to send Baquet to lunch with Gibson without having told Baquet about the job offer. (In either scenario, a close friend of hers added, 'it’s just plain ridiculous that she should be fired for not telling a subordinate about a job offer to another subordinate.') To accept that Baquet first heard about the job offer from Gibson at lunch is to assume that Abramson, who has been amply criticized this week for her blunt, confrontational approach toward Times employees, would recoil from confronting Baquet."

More details from Ken Auletta on the firing of Jill Abramson.

Sulzberger explains himself with an inexplicable metaphor: "You don’t cut off one arm, and then wait and cut off the other."

In an interview with Vanity Fair's Sarah Ellison. The arm-lopping metaphor refers to the quick, brutally public axing of Jill Abramson.

The key revelation in this interview is the severity of Baquet's reaction to the recruitment of "Janine Gibson, the U.S. editor of the Guardian newspaper, who had worked with various Times editors, notably Dean Baquet, on stories about the N.S.A. documents revealed by Edward Snowden."

"As we know from experience, in the world of Democratic Party institutions, the choice between an older white woman and a younger black man is an easy one."

Writes Instapundit, on the subject of Dean Baquet's her-or-me ultimatum at the NYT.

And I said something similar, talking to Glenn Loury the other day about the NYT ousting the woman. This is only 17 seconds, so come on, don't be video averse. Watch this:



AND: Notice this detail from Ken Auletta's "Why Jill Abramson Was Fired: Part III," published yesterday in The New Yorker (boldface added):

Extremely well-informed sources at the paper familiar with the reasons for Abramson’s dismissal have also given this account to The New Yorker: they say that Abramson was, essentially, fired for cause, for lying to Sulzberger that she had squared Gibson’s rank and arrival with Baquet when, in fact, she had not. The sources say she misled Sulzberger when she said, in person and by e-mail, that she had consulted with Baquet about the offer to Gibson and had worked it all out in detail with him. Baquet was furious. At a dinner with Sulzberger, Baquet basically described the incident as a humiliation. He could no longer work with Abramson. It was him or her. (Politico reported that, when Sulzberger shared Baquet’s distress with Abramson, she persisted in assuring him that she had told Baquet everything.) According to this account, her breach with Baquet and Sulzberger was irrevocable. Sulzberger decided to fire Abramson and replace her with Baquet, thus making him the first African-American executive editor of the paper—but under the most sour, trying, and confused circumstances.

Who are the "extremely well-informed sources"? Baquet? Sulzberger? Abramson? It would have to be at least 2 out of 3 of them for this all to be based on first-hand witnesses. In this version, there is a conflict in the story that was told about the job offer to Gibson, and one could have gone easy on Abramson and Baquet and said that perhaps the two had different understandings of what they were talking about when they talked about Gibson.

But we are told that Sulzberger fired Abramson for lying, and if that is true, it means that Sulzberger saw it as a direct conflict in which only one person could be telling the truth and the other was a liar, and he decided the liar was Abramson. Why?

If it was Baquet who said he'll leave if she stays, Sulzberger may have chosen to believe Baquet, because if he could only have one or the other, he wanted Baquet and/or he wanted Abramson out anyway. Deciding that Abramson was the liar not only worked to keep Baquet, it bolstered the cause for firing Abramson. So did Sulzberger decide that only Baquet was telling the truth (and not Abramson or both or neither) pursuit to a valid methodology of lie detection or was Sulzberger getting the staffing the way he wanted it anyway and the cover story as good as possible?

David Carr questions "whether The Times can convince female employees that it is a fair place to work, with ample opportunity to advance."

He writes that he has "heard from several talented young women who are a big part of The New York Times’s future." One said: “I really don’t see a path for me here... Are we O.K.?”

Carr also reveals — or this is the first place I've seen this — that Dean Baquet, the new executive editor, laid down an ultimatum to the publisher Arthur Sulzberger, saying "he would leave the paper because he found the situation untenable" (i.e., it's her or me).

ADDED: Do you get leverage to oust a white woman when you use a black man as your fulcrum?