Written by by Drew Holden at freebeacon.com
In a scathing essay for the Economist published on Thursday, former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet took his old publication to task for the paper’s capitulation to left-leaning “illiberal” opinion.
According to Bennet, the Times and other media have “forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.”
He added:
Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise. 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.
For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. 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.
Many of the Times‘s critics in the media were impressed by Bennet’s comprehensive critique of the self-styled paper of record. But other journalists—like the New York Times Magazine‘s Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose 1619 Project Bennet dinged in his essay—apparently felt attacked.