Study Hall Digest 2/19/2018

The Why of The New York Times

When a eugenicist like Charles Murray (he wrote a book arguing that People of Color are naturally less smart than white people) praises your op-ed page, you know you’re doing something right! The New York Times continues to confound the world with the stupidity of its op-ed hires, but no one has really been able to figure out why they’ve gone in such a reactionary, right-wing direction. If they truly wanted to provoke thought, it makes some sense that they’d want contrarian, non-orthodox thinkers like Quinn Norton. And for what it’s worth, I think Norton was a less-bad choice than Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens. Yes, she’s still not great, but she’s also smarter, and an actual contrarian thinker who harbors unorthodox beliefs, not a right-wing troll who couches their language in contrarianism in order to make their blandly conservative viewpoints more palatable. Justin Charity at The Ringer posited that the Times, worried about readership and clicks, is finally coming around to the Slate Pitch strategy of just saying shit that will make everyone angry.

I think the answer is more depressing: the Times keeps publishing these people because the Times is an extremely timid organization that has always been afraid of challenging power, and always places itself at the center of it, rather than risk being called out by those it relies on for access, and readership. Remember that the paper supported the invasion of Iraq, remember it was essentially a propaganda arm for the Obama White House. So why hire Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens? For the same reason that the Washington Post just hired Megan Mcardle, and Politico just published a story about why it’s cool to own slaves: as the country turns right, so does the mainstream media. If the country ever takes a liberal turn again, so will the media.

The one place the mainstream media will never go is truly left, because leftism is concerned with destroying the power of elites, and organizations like the Times exist by upholding that power, which can either happen in (neo)liberal or conservative contexts. I’d argue even the Times’ good news coverage exists as a way to place undue importance on the machinations of electoral politics, helping provide an illusion that the people and institutions it covers are necessary (and therefore the illusion that the paper itself is necessary), and that our only choice for change is to operate within that framework of our current politics. The paper’s recent hires prove it is agnostic to which context it exists in, as long as that context allows it to exist.

Here, I made a handy chart:

In other news….

If you read anything that casts the CIA in a favorable light, maybe it was written by the CIA.

News publishers talked about the possibility of pressuring the government to regulate Facebook like it regulates Big Tobacco. It’s about time! Any industry with a monopoly on a commodity (in this case, ads) needs oversight.

Salon has come up with a novel way of making money instead of using ads: breaking your computer.

Some inspiration for your job search: