All hell is breaking loose in the media.
Suddenly it’s The New York Times that’s on defense.
And one insider shared a secret that could bring down The New York Times.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger fired editorial page editor James Bennet in the summer of 2020 after Bennet published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling on President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down the Black Lives Matter riots terrorizing American cities following George Floyd’s death.
Polls showed nearly 60 percent of the public supported using the military to end the riots and Cotton was a prominent advisor to Donald Trump.
Bennet thought the editorial pages of the Times was the perfect place to debate this issue and expose readers to the position held by a majority of their fellow citizens which could very well become reality.
But Bennet thought wrong.
After a Maoist struggle session, woke staffers at the Times claimed Bennet publishing Cotton’s op-ed put their black colleagues’ lives in danger.
Publisher A.G. Sulzberger soon relieved Bennet of his duties.
Bennet struck back.
In a 17,000-word essay published in The Economist, Bennet described how the Times and the rest of the media were always biased towards liberals.
Now, however, the journalists and editorial staff at the Times adopted an “illiberal bias” where their instinct was to censor and suppress speech that might lead Americans to come to the “wrong” conclusion about events.
“The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether,” Bennet declared. “All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.”
Bennet said the bias inside the Times was so suffocating that his fellow editors had no idea about the world in which they operated.
When Bennet came onboard, he saw it as his mission to publish more conservative opinions so Times readers could experience the full spectrum of the American political debate.
But Bennet recounted other editors told him that him publishing more conservatives led him to push his journalists to be more liberal.
“I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world ‘without fear or favor,’” Bennet continued. “And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.”
Bennet lamented the modern state of journalism.
Journalists no longer view it as their job to inform the public.
Members of the press believe their mission is to guide the public to the “correct way” of thinking.
Bennet warned that polls show Americans losing trust in the media because the media now sees itself as a gatekeeper for left-wing ideology and that anyone who holds a view to the right of Mitt Romney should never be seen nor heard.
“As preoccupied as it is with the question of why so many Americans have lost trust in it, the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too,” Bennet stated. “The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”
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