If Paul Krugman Didn't Have Enough Juice at the New York Times, Who Could?

Many years ago, ESPN let longtime employee and SportsCenter anchor Rich Eisen go, deciding against signing him to a new contract. This was considered a major surprise at the time, as Eisen was one of the network’s stars, a fixture on SportsCenter back when the program was appointment viewing for a vast swath of sports fans. Longstanding rumor has it that Eisen asked for a lot more money and the negotiations became contentious. Eisen, for his part, has said that he was unhappy with ESPN’s decreasing emphasis on news and highlights and increasing reliance on analysts, which would seem to presage contemporary complaints about the network being driven by contrived shouting. (It’s just straight up an analyst’s network now, and the term “analyst” is generous for some of them.) Otherwise, Eisen has never gotten very specific about what happened, beyond calling the outcome “surprising.” It seems to have worked out for him; he’s been employed by the NFL Network for more than two decades.

This all happened in mid-2003. In early 2004, ESPN debuted its new competition show Dream Job. On the show, competitors tried to win a contract to serve as anchors on SportsCenter, taking part in a series of tests and challenges to demonstrate their skills on camera, showcase sports knowledge, and display truly deranged amounts of enthusiasm towards the network, Sportscenter, and the competition. Dream Job slotted in very comfortably with the reality-competition TV craze of the time, most notably American Idol, along with a whole host of imitators. Eventually a winner was crowned, and he was indeed given a contract and did indeed appear on SportsCenter. He would ultimately only work for ESPN for about three years, and two more seasons of the show had even more underwhelming on-air repercussions.

But I don’t think ESPN brass had on-air consequences in mind when they came up with Dream Job. I think they were thinking about Rich Eisen, or really about their on-air talent in general. I wasn’t exactly a savvy business mind at the time, but I still remember laughing out loud when I first saw an ad for Dream Job; it seemed so clearly to be a response by the network to on-air personalities like Eisen who were fighting for better pay and more power. The reality show, I believe, was meant to send a loud message to any of their employees looking to secure a better contract: you are so replaceable, we can literally pull someone off the street to do your job. Underlining this was the Dream Job winner’s salary, which was reported as $95,000 for the first year. $95,000, in an industry in which on-air personalities were typically drawing in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in annual salary.

Of course, battles between entertainment companies and the talent are nothing new, whether for more money or more creative control or any number of other contractual issues. And while ESPN minted big names who went on to long and lucrative careers, like Eisen or Dan Patrick, it’s also true that the real “stars” of the network were always going to be the sports themselves. And as reports of a potential $20 million a year contract for Stephen A. Smith show, they’ll open their checkbook in the right situation. But I never forgot how the early 2000s demonstrated the network’s leverage in the fundamental conflict between cost-and-control conscious suits and creative talent. Which brings me to Paul Krugman’s recent retirement from The New York Times, which appears to have been far more contentious than the term “retirement” would suggest.

I’ve written for the New York Times as a freelancer maybe a half-dozen times, and have happily served as a briefly-useful cog in a very large machine. That comes with the territory: it’s a big impersonal institution that publishes such a vast amount of writing that it can’t help but have an assembly line approach. The upside is obvious. People write for the Times for a lot of reasons, but the most common is to be known as someone who has written for the Times. It’s one of a shrinking handful of publications that writers invoke to impress other writers, and while I’d prefer to pretend to be above such things, I am not. Unfortunately my last interaction with the paper was an unpleasant one, but that isn’t really relevant here. What is relevant is that the last time I wrote for them and got something published, I had something similar to the unpleasant editing experience that Krugman has shared publicly. The distance between Krugman and me, in stature and professional reputation and importance to the Times, could not possibly be wider. (My Nobel prize appears to have been lost in the mail.) It was surprising, then, that his account of his split with the Times sounded so familiar to me, based on the last piece I published with them. Krugman, in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review:

The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.

…. [NYT Deputy Opinion Editor] Patrick [Healey] often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless

Krugman even suggests that his editor had taken to trying to dictate the subject matter of what he wrote. I’ve never been a columnist so can’t speak to that, but “flat and colorless” certainly jibes with my experience as a reader of the paper. Krugman has always seemed like a preternaturally even-keeled guy, and the fact that he felt the need to go public like this is remarkable, even beyond his resignation from the paper. He has to really feel strongly about this draining of personality.

I’ll repeat the caveat that our scenarios are entirely different, given that he was an accomplished and long-tenured columnist beloved of the readership and I a freelancer who could not possibly be less consequential to the paper. That said, what Krugman said to CJR exactly echoes my experience putting my last piece for the Times to bed. The piece received editing that was bizarrely onerous, seemingly intentionally so, and largely geared towards sanding off the stylistic features that define a writer’s voice. I was also asked for sources in a way that seemed pedantic even for the New York Times. For example, in my initial draft I made the seemingly anodyne observation that in recent years the Star Wars franchise has attracted as much fan controversy as fan appreciation. This would not be regarded as a contentious argument in pretty much any online forum dedicated to Star Wars or the broader “fandom” community; since at least the release of the absurdly controversial 2017 film The Last Jedi, the fact that the Star Wars fandom is never not tearing itself apart has been a very common topic of conversation in those spaces. It’s become a subject of constant dark humor within that community. Ask my sister, who writes a fandom-based newsletter and has been ensconced in that space for her entire adult life. She’ll tell you that all fanbases have internal conflict, but that in the past decade or so Star Wars has gone to another level. Again, this is an entirely banal and widely-held perspective.

How to prove it, though? I can’t really remember how that particular edit shook out, but I suppose I may have sent some quotes to that effect from relevant publications. Really, there’s no direct way to establish the factual accuracy of what I was saying; no quantitative analysis exists or could exist that accurately measures the relative proportion of controversy to appreciation for a vastly-influential pop culture franchise. And, frankly, I shouldn’t need to provide any. Like it or not, mass online opinion often has to be discussed without as much precision as we might like. The observation in question is an example of exactly the sort of claim that a writer might advance as a disputable claim in an argumentative essay, that is, part of the argument. (The fact that such statements are disputable is why they’re worth writing about.) Still, the larger issue was that the language was run through such a punishing process of standardization and watering down that several longtime fans of mine who read it said there appeared to be nothing of my voice left. And while I think the ideas in the piece are the right ideas, there’s really no reason to publish me if my voice isn’t going to survive. You aren’t publishing me because of my spotless reputation.

For the record, I certainly don’t blame the editor who worked with me on the piece. I think the problem is structural. I’ve done a ton of freelancing, all over, for a decade and a half. I’m not trying to claim expertise, but I do claim experience. And I believe that the problem with young editors is not that their edits are wrong, in any deracinated or general sense. The problem is that they tend to feel a lot of pressure to justify their position. They need to demonstrate that they’re doing something. And part of the fundamental difficulty with editing as a professional venture is that the amount of editing that’s appropriate can only ever emerge from the context of a particular draft. In an ideal world, this doesn’t have to be a difficulty at all; some drafts are clean, some are not, and the sheer number of edits required should flow naturally from the internal logic of a piece of writing. But in the real world, there’s the simple fact of ordinary human workplace politics, the ambitions of editors, and the fear of appearing to not be working hard.¹ If you’re a young editor in a company that’s notorious for its brutal culture of internal competition, you likely feel tremendous pressure to justify your professional existence. It’s the reality of getting what many people see as a dream job; you’re always aware that there’s tons of people who would gladly take you it from you if they got a chance.

When conservatives accuse the NYT of various biases, I often tell them that the biggest “bias” there is not a liberal one or a Democratic one or an urban one. Rather the bias that matters most is that inherent to being an elite institution, one that has become subject to all of the status and credentialing demands that have swallowed elite American institutions. It’s a smart kid bias, a front-of-the-class kid bias. There’s never been a time in the paper’s history when NYT staffers weren’t elite in some sense, but I am willing to bet a great deal of money that the ranks of valedictorians and Ivy League graduates and competitive fellowship awardees there have grown dramatically in the 21st century. They sometimes still talk about themselves as the paper of David Carr, but I’m confident that there aren’t a lot of UWisconsin-River Falls alums in the building. And there’s a (yes) bias inherent to a publication being taken over by people with the most sterling meritocrat resumes, an implicit ideology. Such people tend to be ruthless in the pursuit of their personal glory but also born rule-followers, grade-grubbers always ready to appeal to or defer to authority as the moment demands, especially when advancement is on the line. The endless arms race of degrees and awards and laurels has unique dangers for publications like the New York Times, and the dominance of the New York Times has unique dangers for journalism and commentary. If nothing else, employees that walk into the office all too aware that they’re locked in a permanent competition with other relentlessly ambitious people are employees that will put their immediate professional survival first.

Of course, there are benefits to attracting so many elites. The Times is genuinely a hyper-competent publication, forever finding new ways to deploy their immense talent pool. They employ a remarkably deep bench of talented and committed reporters. They clearly have editorial mandates on good guys and bad guys when it comes to issues like Ukraine and Venezuela, which hurts their coverage, but it would be foolish to question their ability to gather facts or their ongoing commitment to spending immense resources on important stories that will nonetheless have little payoff in terms of page views. For the record, I’ve always heard that the actual reporters there are far less monolithically liberal in their basic political orientation than many think. They’re at their worst when defending their turf, such as in this big-footing piece on Substack, where the reporters make basic errors about the contrived “platforming Nazis” controversy. But in general it’s an organization that’s deeply dedicated to getting the basic factual information correct. They employ a lot of talented writers on the opinion side and also Bret Stephens. Their web design is top notch, their travel and style coverage are excellent, their games are indeed addictive. The paper is a mouthpiece for capital and empire, but they all are. Were this industry healthy, problems like “the Times seems intent on watering down the prose it publishes to the point of being utterly featureless” would not seem like very big problems. But of course the industry is not healthy, the NYT occupies a position of such comical dominance that it breaks things without seeming to notice, and the leadership appears doggedly uninterested in recognizing the problems inherent to their influence.

Times Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury admitted to CJR that the editing of columnists had become more heavy-handed since she took over for James Bennet in 2020. Is that a broader trend? I can’t say. But this from Krugman in his own essay about leaving the Times definitely rings some bells:

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers…. I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject.

It should be said that, until fairly recently, this outcome would have been unthinkable. It’s Paul Krugman! Whatever you think about his opinions, he was a crown jewel for the paper, a representative who combined outsized academic success with the kind of good-natured elite liberalism NYT readers crave. And so the absurdity of telling a Nobel prize winner who your readership loves that he has a “problem of cadence” speaks to specific motives. Stopping a columnist who was once perhaps the paper’s biggest star from writing too much isn’t the same as a money dispute or even a dispute about editorial freedom. It’s an exercise in discipline, one that asserts the primacy of the paper’s politburo over its creative talent. As has happened in so many institutions in American life, it’s the bureaucracy cracking its knuckles, reminding everybody who’s boss. Of course I don’t think that the Times let Krugman walk to make an example of him. But I do think that, here in the paper’s imperial period, they don’t mind if he serves as one. The Times didn’t do whatever they needed to do to keep Krugman in the fold because to them, everyone is expendable, and perhaps his leaving serves as a convenient demonstration of that fact to their other employees. The Times clearly believes that it’s bigger than any given reporter or writer or podcaster it employs or could employ. That this belief is plainly true is exactly why I keep writing these pieces. Institutions that don’t need anyone are dangerous institutions.

I’m sure some commenters will remark that I write too much media criticism. The good news is that I can write what I think is important and true without having to get anyone’s permission. And now, so can Paul Krugman.

1. There’s also, it should be said, a fetishization of editing in this business that I find unhelpful. Of course good editing is essential. Of course editors play a vital role in making sure what gets published is comprehensible, well-expressed, and true. And, also, sometimes editors are wrong and need to be told so. Good editing is good, bad editing is not, and hopefully you and the editor work out which is which in the process. The problem is that a lot of piety gets injected into the subject of editing, as if editing is good for its own sake , a sacrament. Good editing is that which results in good writing. Editing is as editing does and so editing should be regarded as an indispensable tool rather than as a marker of maturity, as a totem.