Those of us who pay attention to the media have been aware of the turmoil in Times Square. Most amusing is the fact that the New York Post has to report on The New York Times.
The Gray Lady’s convulsions continue.
Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says she’s dismayed by the troubles surrounding the New York Times op-ed section, particularly the departure of its editor James Bennet after he published a commentary by a U.S. senator calling for military force to quell riots.
“I don’t think that James Bennet should have been forced out at The Times,” Abramson told The Post, adding she “felt terrible” about it.
“He and I worked together in the Washington Bureau of the Times and I think he is one of the great journalists of our time. So I was very sad to see him pushed out,” Abramson said.
Abramson, who led the Times newsroom from September 2011 to May 2014, expressed sympathy for Bari Weiss, who shockingly resigned from the op-ed desk this week in a blistering open letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Weiss said she’d been bullied and criticized by a Twitter-obsessed Times culture increasingly intolerant of any ideas outside its progressive, leftist orthodoxy.
There’s more at the original.
We have previously noted the ‘turmoil’ at the Times, and that, just a few days later, editorial page editor James Bennet was fired resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was demoted reassigned to the newsroom. We noted Bari Weiss Twitter thread that “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.” A few days later, Miss Weiss was gone, too.
And, of course, we noted how the Gray Lady retained young reporter Ali Watkins, even though she had been sleeping with one of her sources, though the Times at least tried the fig-leaf cover of reassigning her to a different beat.
Well, there is a rather simple solution. Get rid of your child staffers!
Miss Weiss noted, in her resignation letter, that:
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
Miss Weiss used the terms “unlawful discrimination” and “hostile work environment” in her letter, something which should have immediately alerted the Times management and its attorneys that there is a huge potential legal problem. Assuming that Miss Weiss’ allegations are true, the Times maintained and paid for an internal chat system which some employees used to harass, on the basis of religion and ethnicity, another employee, to the extent that it forced the employee to resign. How is that not a firing offense?
At the very least, the Times ought to research and discipline all employees who created the hostile work environment, and specify that inter-company communications systems may only be used for professional communications.
But it’s worse than that: The editors of The New York Times quickly surrendered to the woke in its newsroom:
New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards
After a staff uproar, The Times says the editing process was “rushed.” Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” essay is now under review.
By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee | June 4, 2020
Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against police violence in American cities.
James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.
And here comes the money line:
“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”
There you have it: Not only are the editors going to ‘expand’ their fact-checking of other people’s opinions, but they are going to reduce the number of outside opinion pieces they publish.
It was a matter of safety, don’t you know!
The new York Times is the most respected newspaper in the country, with a reputation for seriousness, sobriety, and maturity. But by surrendering to the “woke,”¹ the Times is surrendering to silliness, drunkenness and immaturity. The Gray Lady has repainted herself with the rainbow.²
The only way for the Times to regain its seriousness is to get rid of the unserious people. Just fire them all, and hire sensible reporters and writers to replace them. When your staff are significantly composed of people sympathetic with antifa and the crazies who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, they are too far gone and too lacking in sane judgement to be working for you. Let them serve coffee at a Starbucks or something, and hire some of the good reporters out there, some of whom have lost their jobs due to industry downsizing, who have demonstrated some common sense.
A hint for the Times: the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and #CancelCulture aren’t your customers in the first place! Those people get their news from television and internet click bait.
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¹ – From Wikipedia:
Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
² – Yes, by using the rainbow, I am mocking the “LGBT+” movement, which I consider to be scientifically unsound, morally wrong and culturally stupid. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal on earth can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but the LGBTQ+ movement have lost that ability.
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