1. So, let's think about the New York Times a little bit, and the increasing criticism its getting from liberals & leftists.
2. I like ribbing the Times as much as anybody but I'm also inclined to cut them some slack because covering the Trump era is hard to cover for a paper like the Times.
3. People think of the Times a liberal paper. That's a mistake, although of course it employs some liberals & supports Democrats. The Times is really an establishment newspaper above all else.
4. It's not just the Times is very attentive to opinions of USA elite but also, more deeply, it assumes that the elite of center right & center left is fundamentally rational.
5. It takes a lot for Times to break with elite consensus -- something one the order of the Pentagon Papers showing government for years lied about Vietnam.
6. But even under Nixon, Times instinct is to try to act as mediator between competing elite factions. When Agnew complained about press bias, Times responded by hiring Safire.
7. Trump has disoriented the Times because he's a figure occupying an elite position (he's the President) but always deriding elite pretences of consensus and cordiality ("the failing NY Times")
8. With Trump & Trumpism, the Times finds itself forced to cover a clownish figure & extremist movement with a set of journalistic tics designed for a world where elite centrist consensus dominates.
9. The disorientation of figuring out how to deal with Trump/Trumpism causes the Times to repeatedly make missteps, usually in direction of normalizing.
10. A big problem the Times has is they don't know how to cover the white nationalist right, so they keep giving columns to Never Trump conservatives, who are marginal to GOP & USA politics.
11. I understand why Times won't give a column to a Pat Buchanan or a Ann Coulter. But they should at least be reporting on politics as if these are major GOP voices. Because in fact they are.
12. This is a good formulation, which I agree with:
13. One possible silver lining is the break-up of consensus politics should allow Times to be more open to voices on left as well as right -- one sign of that is hiring @michelleinbklyn as columnist.
14. If I were editing the Times (ho ho ho) I'd get someone whose job it is to follow white nationalist right & report regularly on what they are thinking. Stop pretending that reasonable Never Trump conservatives are the real GOP.
15. Also, I'd open up Times op ed to the more paleo-cons and also people on the Democratic Party left (feminists, BLM, DSA etc).
16. For more on the Times & its troubles, this is an excellent piece by my colleague @GrahamVyse newrepublic.com/article/146828…
17. Well, that didn't last very long:
18. Honestly, James Bennet & Bari Weiss should just call me. I can really advise them on how better to cover fractured opinions in Trump era America.
19. The Times both hired & fired Quinn Norton too quickly. If they had researched her background more, they could've offered her a more appropriate position & wouldn't have been blindsided backlash.
20. Hiring Norton to write about tech under her own byline makes sense (she's good at it & you can separate her dubious opinions from her writing for paper). Having her write anonymous editorials was wrong choice.
