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16 tweets,
5 min read
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I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you, @nytimes, but we both know you don’t give a shit about the answer. 
This headline is both accurate and important. The only thing wrong with it is that it doesn’t lead the front page.
FFS. Nobody’s asking headline writers to perform cold fusion. It’s a headline that portrays a famously racist person as being anti-racism. If it’s too difficult for the world’s most prestigious news company to avoid doing *that,* journalism is broken.
Writing a *great* headline? Sure, that’s hard. Even a good one. But if you honestly think it’s too much to expect that headline writers avoid portraying an overtly racist president as anti-racism, maybe you shouldn’t be a journalist.
Like, if I go to a restaurant and they serve me a plate of sawdust with a dog shit purée, and when I complain they say “look, cooking for 60 tables a night is hard” ... that doesn’t fly, you know?
Roughly zero people criticizing the Times are doing so solely because of “one headline” and it’s ridiculous to pretend they are. Particularly when *the tweet you’re responding to* notes it’s a pattern of bad judgement.
The second version of the headline is bad, too, which rather neatly deminstrates how vacuous the “its just one headline” backlash is.
It is not one headline, it is decades of doing big things badly, from Whitewater to 2000 election to cheering on the Iraq war to emailsemailsemsils to hiring climate deniers. “It’s just one headline” is just the latest dismissal of legitimate criticisms.
Arrogant, condescending lectures that critics should lighten up are just another reminder that the Times never took seriously critiques of its previous failure; they dismissed them so thoroughly, they now pretend the criticism never even happened.
And everyone involved knows this. Everyone you see saying “it’s just one headline” knows damn well it isn’t just one headline, that the outrage over this headline comes from people already fed up with previous failings. Anyone dismissing it as “just one headline” is lying to you.
I probably write some version of this thread 3-4 times a year, because the NYT keeps doing big things badly then, and each time its employees and fans dismiss critics as being overly worked up about one headline/article/column.
I rest my case.
I keep omitting this one and I really shouldn’t:
No. Nobody honestly believes this. It is their way of saying they don’t care about past failures, and that they will pretend they don’t remember this one when the next comes along.
It’s about damn time.
Dumb and condescending is a bad combination.
