Fiddling while the journalistic Rome burns

Cognitive drudge, journalistic inside baseball and water-cooler gossip from Times Change In the Trump years, the New York Times became less dispassionate and more crusading, sparking a raw debate over the paper’s future. by Reeves Wiedeman.  It appears, without the irony noted, in New York Magazine, another publication suffering most the same issues as The New York Times.  The disease being Brooklyn-in-a-bubbleitis.  

Wiedeman assumes into existence a Trumpian evil which is nowhere argued.  He know his audience whose world view is the "view from the Upper West Side and Montclair, New Jersey."  Not having to establish the validity of his predicate assumptions is to assume an ideological homogeneity which most the rest of us never experience.  

His piece is a nearly 7,000 word dog's breakfast but with a couple of great lines.  The argument basically comes down to - The New York Times used to strive for independent and accurate reporting and now it is a political action communication platform and they can't reconcile the executives striving for the former with their woke rabble reporters pursuing the latter.  

Or as Wiedeman relates of one middle-school sophomoric squabble:

The conversation turned into what more than one Times employee described to me as a “food fight.” During the mêlée, “Opinion” columnist Elizabeth Bruenig uploaded a PDF of John Rawls’s treatise on public reason, in an attempt to elevate the discussion. “What we’re having is really a philosophical conversation, and it concerns the unfinished business of liberalism,” Bruenig wrote. “I think that all human beings are born philosophers, that is, that we all have an innate desire to understand what our world means and what we owe to one another and how to live good lives.”

“Philosophy schmosiphy,” wrote a researcher at the Times whose Slack avatar was the logo for the hamburger chain Jack in the Box. “We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?”

Philosophy be damned.  We're Woke and we want mob power.

The lines that caught my eye:

The Times has a fitful relationship to self-examination. 

And

Abe Rosenthal, a legendary Timesman, had the words HE KEPT THE PAPER STRAIGHT carved on his tombstone.

He bled ink as they used to say of traditional journalists.  

But even in this anecdote, the fall from journalistic standards is evident.  The epitaph was not carved on his tombstone.  It was carved on his grave marker.  

At that point, perhaps a quarter of the way in to the piece with a lot of predictable wittering and only a couple interesting lines to show for it, I pulled the plug.