You, the commenters, talked a lot yesterday about that A.G. Sulzberger column blaming Trump for efforts around the world to censor the press.

I gave you a gift link to read the whole thing in what was my first post of the day: "A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, has an opinion piece in The Washington Post: 'How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America.'"

It was a long piece, and I really did have a lot to say about it myself, but I didn't want to get dragged down dissecting what was so infuriatingly wrong about it. So I appreciated the active comments section.

The #1 thing I didn't say but wanted to say was that contrary to Sulzberger's perverted argument, criticizing the press is not censorship. Criticizing the press is more speech. Trump has been criticizing the press. It is Trump's antagonists who have pursued censorship, for many reasons, including his criticism of the press.

I'm prompted to revisit yesterday's post because I see that Glenn Reynolds is linking to it this morning. He says:

A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, has an opinion piece in The Washington Post: "How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America."

Here's a gift link so you can read the whole thing. Excerpt:

It has been only eight years since Donald Trump popularized the term “fake news” as a cudgel to dismiss and attack journalism that challenged him. 

That phrase, from the president of the United States, was all the encouragement many would-be authoritarians needed. In the following years, around 70 countries on six continents have enacted “fake news” laws. Nominally aimed at stamping out disinformation, many primarily serve to allow governments to punish independent journalism. Under these laws, journalists have faced fines, arrest and censorship for reporting on a separatist conflict in Cameroon, documenting Cambodian sex-trafficking rings, chronicling the covid-19 pandemic in Russia, and questioning Egyptian economic policy. Trump has effectively championed this effort, as he did when he told Bolsonaro at a joint news conference, “I’m very proud to hear the president use the term ‘fake news.’” 

"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.

"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 New York Times announced Sunday that Editorial Page Editor James Bennet is resigning — amid reports of anger inside the company over the publication of an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton..."

"... about the George Floyd unrest last week. Bennet, the brother of 2020 White House candidate Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., had apologized late last week after previously defending the piece, titled, 'Send in the Troops.' Cotton, R-Ark., called for the government to deploy troops as a last resort to help quell riots and looting that emerged amid the anger over Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody last month. The publication sparked a revolt among Times journalists, with some saying it endangered black employees. Some staff members called out sick Thursday in protest, and the Times later announced that a review found the piece did not meet its standards.... 'Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we've experienced in recent years,' [Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote]. 'James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.'"

Fox News reports.

ADDED: NYT writer Bari Weiss has some very useful commentary at Twitter:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.  The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption. The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it "safetyism," in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.

It's interesting that people who made safety so overwhelmingly important would accept rioting and vehemently oppose government's protecting citizens from the forces of chaos.

"If one of the most powerful women in the world, helming an organization that champions equal pay, might have been punished for advocating for herself, what hope is there for the rest of us?"

That's the question women have reason to be asking on the occasion of the ousting of Jill Abramson, says The Nation's Michelle Goldberg.

But Goldberg's main subject is how Abramson was on the right side of a few internal debates about journalism — things that were not about gender, like ads that look like editorial content, infusing the text with video, and looking into the BBC sex scandal. The NYT CEO Mark Thompson came to the job from the BBC:

“After Thompson had been hired for the job but before he’d started, Abramson sent Matthew Purdy, a hard-charging investigative reporter, to London to examine Thompson’s role in the Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC,” writes [Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine]. “Abramson’s relationship with the two executives never recovered. ‘Mark Thompson was fucking pissed,’ a source explained. ‘He was really angry with the Purdy stuff.’ So was Sulzberger. ‘He was livid, in a very passive-aggressive way. These were a set of headaches Jill had created for Arthur.’”

... The suggestion Abramson should have ignored this story because it embarrassed a powerful Times hire says something troubling about the paper’s priorities.

"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?

Calling a bitch a "bitch."

I said it 3 days ago: "How the NYT called Jill Abramson — its axed executive editor — a bitch." I was doing a close reading of the first NYT article on the subject of axing Abramson, "Times Ousts Its Executive Editor, Elevating Second in Command." That article was dated May 14th. What I discovered was that the NYT article linked over to a Politico article (from a year ago) where the man who has now replaced Abramson was quoted saying: "I think there’s a really easy caricature that some people have bought into, of the bitchy woman character and the guy who is sort of calmer... That, I think, is a little bit of an unfair caricature." And that was how it became fit to print to call Abramson a bitch.

But the bulk of the public discussion in the aftermath of the axing focused on Abramson's complaint about pay equity. Now, there's a statement from NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., released yesterday, aimed at pushing back this talk that Abramson was fired because she demanded equal pay with males in the NYT organization. And it is this statement (not the earlier article I'd analyzed) that has led to this headline at Drudge:



Drudge links to a report at Bloomberg — "NYT Publisher Sulzberger Says Abramson Firing Driven By Conduct" — which doesn't print the full text of the statement. The new article at the NYT is called "After Criticism, Times Publisher Details Decision to Oust Top Editor." That too only has excerpts from the statement. The full text is here, at Politico.

So let's pick apart the text of the statement. Based on the Drudge headline, the hypothesis is that in the effort to fight off attacks that put the New York Times in the position of Enemy on the pay equity front of The War on Women, Sulzberger bumbled into the misogyny front.

Now, let's take a close look at the Sulzberger statement.

News from the front in the War on Women: "New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was abruptly fired from the paper on Wednesday...."

"The news of her departure was met with shock throughout the newsroom. Senior editors were unexpectedly summoned to a 2 p.m. leadership meeting..."

In his announcement, [publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr] said Abramson’s departure was related to “an issue with management in the newsroom,” and had nothing to do with the quality of the paper’s journalism during her tenure....

Despite significant achievements, Abramson’s tenure was marred by disagreements with Times CEO Mark Thompson, who took an unprecedently hands-on approach to managing the paper’s editorial resources....

Abramson also suffered from perceptions among staff that she was condescending and combative.

The male CEO  "took an unprecedently hands-on approach" to the paper's first female executive editor and staff said she was "condescending and combative"? Would they have said that about a man?

I'm reviewing my "Ban Bossy" notes.

ADDED: AHA!



The link goes to this Ken Auletta piece in The New Yorker:

Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. 

Emphasis added. She leaned in! And she got called pushy and she got pushed out. 

Now, the NYT has financial woes and her predecessor had more seniority, but so what? The NYT has been hot on the "equal pay" story for years. Let it be judged by the standards it has pushed — pushily — all these years.