The CUNY political scientist Corey Robin once said something which has always stayed with me. I’m afraid I’m paraphrasing from a social media post that’s probably ten years old at this point, so forgive me if I’m a little inexact. Robin, who got his PhD at Yale, was talking about the problem with the superficially leftist politics of a lot of Yale professors. He said that they very well may espouse commendably egalitarian beliefs, preach equality, stand explicitly against elitism - but still, every day, they look at themselves in the mirror in the morning and say, “Holy fuck, I teach at Yale.”
I think about that when I think about The New York Times.
I’m tempted, right now, to avoid the usual throat-clearing that you always see when people consider the phenomenon that is the NYT, but I’m afraid that bit is necessary. Criticism of the Times that does not come from an explicitly conservative direction typically involves a lot of provisos about how the paper remains one of the most valuable journalistic endeavors in the world and how they employ a legion of talented people. And, indeed, I cannot resist doing that dance myself: it’s a very good newspaper. The Times has figured out monetization and found itself on stable footing, which is good, because we need it. Few organizations have the logistical, financial, and personnel makeup necessary to continue to do extensive fact-gathering journalism around the world, or can employ people to maintain specific beats that might not yield many stories in a particular year, or attract such a vast roster with a combination of decent-to-good money and ancillary professional opportunity down the line. The actual reporting, that fact-finding apparatus, represents a smaller and smaller piece of the publication; they stay alive and solvent by selling people Boggle-but-for-sophisticates and recipes with tasteful photos. But still, reporting is the soul of the enterprise, and while they make plenty of mistakes, everything about their journalistic culture suggests that they are generally fiercely dedicated to getting it right. Look, they have a Beirut correspondent. The world is better when some newsgathering agencies still have Beirut correspondents.
Granted, everyone involved with the operation is all too aware of these facts, inspiring that same shit-eating smug quality that you get when Debbie brings macaroni salad and lemon squares to the cookout. Still.
The world knows a lot of things it wouldn’t have without the efforts of Times reporters. They showcase a lot of compelling opinion pieces that I admire even when I don’t agree, and also Bret Stephens. I will say that the NYT is undoubtedly a liberal paper, where once it was merely a paper staffed with liberals, but that is a different conversation, a boring one. They have at least resisted the pressure to publish nothing but opinions held by the kind of people who subscribe to the Criterion Channel, despite dogged efforts from their younger staffers to bully leadership into that position. And the have the scope to cover things a lot of places just can’t. There’s precious little coverage of traditional artforms left, artforms that are fighting for their lives such as ballet or opera, and some of it appears in the NYT; they have that rare scope of bundling that permits them to publish stuff they expect to be low-traffic. Yes, I’m glad the Times exists. Ordinarily, the galactic pomposity that permeates the Times Building like tasteful essential oils (PLEASE CLICK AFFILIATE LINK) would be an easy price to pay. But in an industry full of people grasping for a lifeboat, such perceptions of status start to matter more and more. Their size and influence are distending an industry that’s already been pulled like taffy into an unhealthy shape.
The issue is the ever-deepening sense that The New York Times is the swirling content whirlpool into which more and more of the media industry is drawn; this is broadly understood, widely fretted about, and not something that the Times can possibly fix. The NYT is not yet in the position where its success is so large compared to competitors that they’re approaching monopoly status, but they appear built to last in a way that even the most celebrated of their peers are not. News of layoffs at the Wall Street Journal and constant rumors of a coming bloodletting at The New Yorker shake me. You’d think Dow Jones marketing to the demographic that still wears suspenders would be a good business plan, and The New Yorker has maintained an exquisitely calibrated combination of genuine excellence and entertainingly hateable pretension for longer than I’ve been alive. (This cartoon skewers a type of person only comprehensible to people who think they’re better than that type of person but actually are that type of person, and by the way it’s a stale Brooklynite meme that’s been irrelevant for fifteen years, please move on. Anyway!) There are few steady publications of genuinely national ambitions anymore, and even fewer viable business models. Nobody needs me to run the growing list of deceased digital publications to make the point.
We appear to be in the period of the great media bloodletting that has been predicted since ordinary people began logging into America Online. The conditions of the industry are awful, few if any seem optimistic, many good people have lost their jobs, and most of the rest are just clutching like death to whatever gigs they have. Crowdfunding helps someone like me enjoy an enviable lifestyle, but looking at the budget it’s unclear if I can afford to hire a Beirut correspondent. And it seems that one publication has not only cornered financial self-sufficiency but also that ephemeral but essential perk of media, the one that convinces people to try and live on $37,000 in New York (and, someday!, to work for The New York Times), the lure of prestige.
Which brings me to the sentiment shared at the top. Whether you find the architecture of the Times Building architecture tasteful or tacky - let’s just agree that it was far cooler when people were climbing it every other day, pursuing the sun like Icarus - surely, it’s a temple of self-mythologizing, a ziggurat of self-regard. Do you know how hard it is to be the most self-impressed institution in fucking New York City? A person who works at the Times may or may not have a levelheaded understanding of their place in the world, a sense of professional humility that helps them avoid losing themselves in the august haze of an elite enterprise. Many do. Some definitively do not. Far more important than individual perspective is that, as an institution, the NYT possesses that Ivy League quality where the mythos has settled in so deeply and for so long that it’s difficult for those involved there to put their work in ordinary human terms. I’ve known a lot of people who have worked there over the years, universally talented and never ones to be explicitly snobby, and most of them adopt that self-defensive “haha, look at me, at the fancy doodah New York Times!, what a goof, I don’t go in for that stuff” pose. I believe them, that they don’t consciously go in for that stuff, but those protests sound to me exactly like a Harvard graduate saying they went to school “in Boston.” Again, my very limited and unscientific observation is that most people there, on a human level, are pretty down to earth. But the publication, the organizational ethos, is perpetually too aware and not aware enough of its elevated station and what it means.
One thing it means is that there’s effectively a fence around their editorial processes, a layer of I-only-have-to-answer-emails-from-somebodys elitism that makes self-criticism difficult and admitting mistakes impossible.
So, to pick an entirely unimportant and quite petty example, look at the NYT review of my book from last September, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. There were three immediate things that struck me when it appeared. The first was that the review was negative, though this was to be expected. The people who write for and read The New York Times are exactly the self-deluding elites the book critiques, which was sort of a structural problem with the critics in general - everybody who reviews books for money is exactly the kind of self-deluding elite the book critiques. (The review in WaPo was written by a PhD from Dartmouth, the bronze medal of the Ivy League.) And anyway, while everyone says that negative reviews are good for their sales, it was legitimately the case with that particular book that bad reviews in tony New York publications were potentially valuable marketing. The second issue was that the review was by Sam Tanenhaus, with whom I had preexisting animosity. It’s hard to recall exactly, but I believe I had said that his books exude all the backbone and vitality of a flaccid penis, and I was told this got back to him. But, OK, fair game, this is part of the deal when you’re constantly beefing with people. No worries.
The last part, though, was genuinely bizarre and struck me at the time as legitimately bad professional practice. As you can see, Tanenhaus’s review starts with a very strange reference to the advance I got from Substack and my disclosing it for reasons of gender equity, while declining to link to the post in which I discussed these things - a post that was two and a half years old. Shorn from context this way, it appeared that I was merely bragging about my financial success, while the remark about gender equity would look to an average NYT reader as a bit of empty virtue signaling. But both of those things made perfect sense in the context in which they were shared. I wrote that post because, if you remember, Substack was at the time embroiled in a controversy over the advances they were handing out, and particularly the perception that they were only going to white men. That sparked some larger debates about gender equity in media. In that context, I disclosed the terms of the deal I received, including the dollar figure, because I prefer actual pay transparency. I said that I was doing it for reasons of gender equity because that was the meaningful context at the time. No one contemporaneously complained that I had invoked gender equity as a pretext for sharing that information, not a single soul, because everyone understood that the industry was having a conversation about those very issues. And, you know, absolutely none of it had a single thing to do with my book. Nothing. At all.
I was annoyed by all this, so I wrote a brief blurb about it here, grousing. I was aware though that it would be impossible to immediately gauge whether I was mad over criticism I simply didn’t agree with or mad about actual malpractice. From the standpoint of six or so months out, with time to cool off, I have to tell you… it genuinely seems to have been the latter. Of course I’m biased, but I just can’t justify including that information, despite it having no connection to the book, and with context that any writer of even minimal integrity would include. Had he included a link and told readers that the post was two and a half years old, established some sort of context, OK. It’s a weird flex but OK. The actual content of the review is fine, that’s the business we’re in. But to start with such a non-sequitur and not to link seems very much like someone who knows that his mockery won’t make sense once the context is clear. I think that crosses a line. Could be wrong. Might be right.
Here’s the thing: the thought of trying to get the Times to do anything about this is so discouraging that I wouldn’t bother. It’d be like petitioning the Vatican or the DMV. And it’s there where the miasma of superiority that I’ve been talking about really matters, really hurts; self-regard directly influences the willingness to consider that you’ve made a mistake. Including mistakes much bigger than my petty one about a fairly well-received, little-noticed book with disappointing sales.
You’d imagine that I would have unusually good chances of my complaint getting taken seriously, though. True, I am a grade-Z internet celebrity and a minor media figure who’s as well-known for scandals and instability as I am for professional accomplishment. And yet I’m also a writer who has objectively enjoyed some meaningful career success, including, you know, writing for the NYT. You’d think that I would feel at least a little empowered to say to the people in charge there, hey, you know… what the fuck, guys?
And yet there’s a great tall wall around the place, and it’s ringed by a very deep moat. People there, even the self-deprecating ones, are profoundly aware of their august status. A complaint lobbed in that direction must reach a significantly higher threshold than for ordinary publications; there are, after all, only the people in that building and hoi polloi. I was able to wrench a correction out of WaPo because the reviewer had said that I had cited only a single source to support a particular observation, when in fact I had cited nine. (You can count them, in the book. It’s easy!) I’m sure they didn’t like having to make a correction to one such as me, but pointing out a math error - and we shouldn’t be too hard on her, it’s only eight integers difference - was fairly straightforward. I found out the person to email and I emailed them. At the Times, it’s not just a matter of finding the right address, but of hoping whoever reads your email deigns to see you as someone worth paying attention to, which they probably won’t. A friend of mine, a prolific freelancer who would eventually write for the NYT, told me that an editor there once reached out to her, cold, and asked her to throw out some ideas for potential pieces. She did, but the editor never responded to the email containing the pitches they had explicitly solicited. And I 100% believe it. (The real question is, did that editor do that because they were busy and forgetful, or did they do it because they could?) To get any acknowledgement of wrongdoing from the Times would probably require me to stand outside of AG Sulzberger’s apartment in the rain, blaring “In Your Eyes” from a boombox.
Some people I was talking to recently became convinced the Times was going to (at least substantially) retract its controversial October 7th coverage. “There’s too much smoke!” they said. “She worked for Israeli intelligence! The pressure’s too strong!” I just laughed and told them that I would be very surprised if they apologized for anything. They’re the New York Times. They decide what professional ethics are. They decide what a conflict of interest is. They decide.
The other layer to this is the sheer inescapable mass of the place, its professional importance. I think the Times Books section has been really bad the last couple of years. Like genuinely, amateurishly bad. They regularly put out reviews now that make me wonder how exactly the talent recruitment and editorial processes of the paper, both justifiably legendary, could result in what I was seeing on the page. But whenever I felt like saying so, I was in a bind. I had a book coming out, eventually, and I could not risk offending the people who run one of the last remaining high-profile Books sections in the business. Not before it was released. But after release, since the review was negative, I’ve felt unable to say anything bad about the Books section, as doing so would look like sour grapes. Maybe I would have felt empowered if the review was positive, but then, there will be books in the future to worry over…. The point is that when so much of an industry is increasingly pointed in the direction of a single publication, the fear of falling on the wrong side of that publication can warp and distend so many things. In this business you have people at the top at the NYT, who have obvious self-interested reasons not to criticize the brand, and you have people there on the lower rungs, who would like to keep climbing, and then you have a vast swath of people who would very much like to work there.
Yes, because of the esteem and the prestige. Yes, because “I’m a staff writer for the New York Times” is a sentence that can get you a literary agent and speaking fees, on its own. Yes, because it’s seen by many as the pinnacle of the profession. But also, increasingly, because it’s one of a small handful of publications that you can say with great certainty will still exist next year. This is what I’m trying to talk to you about today: the inherent toxicity of a scenario where one company both hoards prestige and awards and self-importance and also is one of the only places where someone in journalism might grab on and pay the rent, have health insurance, maybe put a little something in a 401(k). I’ve always told young writers that their intuition that the most prestigious places pay freelancers the best is incorrect. That’s still true. But in another sense, with every worker in this business watching as more and more chairs are pulled away and the music winds down, the desire for financial stability and the desire for prestige point in the same small handful of directions and in so doing become almost one.
And yet still I subscribe. (That Maureen Dowd! How delightful!) I want this paper to flourish. Still, a relative decline for the New York Times, an end to its current dominance in comparison to peers, would be great. More competition at the top would be great. But I would never wish for a bad financial turn for the paper, even as it drives me up the wall on a regular basis. What a catastrophe that would be, for so many people! And what it would do to so many others hoping that this profession can stay alive. We need that one steady lifeboat to be chugging along out there, even if we know we’ll never be on it. It’s an entirely unfair expectation, that one newspaper keep the holy flame burning, and of course WaPo does good investigative work, and The New Yorker publishes beautiful essays, and Reuters and the AP bring us essential information, and New York has found its voice again, and The Atlantic reruns good stuff it published a hundred years ago sometimes, and WSJ once paid me $4,000 for a piece that didn’t run…. All of that stuff is very important. But they’re not the Times. They don't provide the beleaguered, deeply annoying workforce I am proud to be a part of with that same glimmer of hope for a better future for this industry. It’s sick, this industry, and I hope to god the NYT doesn’t catch the disease. Even as much as I hate the National Honors Society self-celebrating smart kid horseshit.
The Times is too big too fail. If it were to significantly decline, it would be a disaster for all of us. It’s now staffed up with immensely talented people, people of integrity who really care about getting it right, and also Bret Stephens. And there are a small handful of people there who, beyond professional admiration, I’d like to think of as friends. But I suspect even they get up in the morning, look in the bathroom mirror, and say, “Holy fuck. I work for the New York Times.”