SHARYL ATTKISSON: The New Woke Times.
As demanded by the mob of staff, the Times adds an editor’s note to Cotton’s column. It says the op-ed had been approved in a “rushed” editorial process that did not meet its standards. Sulzberger emails employees, “Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years.”
Days later, editorial chief Bennet is finished. The Times announces he has resigned. The same newspaper that defended controversial op-eds such as the one signed by Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2013, and even an anti-Trump opinion piece that hadn’t been signed at all and was published anonymously, was now adjudicating the words of a prominent US senator to be just too incendiary.
It is a strange place, indeed, where news reporters can editorialize but op-ed editorials cannot. On June 1, 2020, after President Trump walked through a public Washington, DC, park amid national protests and riots—to a church that had been burned a block away—Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, tweets:
Trump just stands in front of the church and holds up a bible while posing for photos. He does not even go inside for a faux tour of the damage or make a pretense of having any purpose in going there other than to pose for photos.
The latest developments remove any lingering doubt as to how the Times sees its modern mission: serving and pleasing the left-wing activists on its staff and the liberal activists who dominate on the news and social media. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger’s dictum when he fired the newspaper’s public editor in May 2017 had come to pass in a terrible way. Recall that, at the time, he declared that the Times’ followers on social media would “collectively serve as a modern watch- dog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.”
The Times let itself become hopelessly slanted. Captive to organized feedback on social media. Beholden to irredeemably conflicted staff members. Consumed by internal demons.
Make no mistake: other media outlets are taking note. In this way, they are motivated to self-censor news and information, lest they draw the wrath of the mobs. One editorial figure at a major international publication who did not want to be identified recounted numerous pieces he has recently killed for fear of the organized backlash.
“They can bankrupt me,” he tells me. “Facebook, Twitter, Google— they can ruin you in a matter of hours. For somebody like us, they can destroy you. So what do we do? We pull our punches. To raise certain issues is to cut your own throat.” He continues, “The newsman in me says, ‘Tell the truth,’ and that sounds great. But if I do that and destroy [my publication] in the process, what kind of pyrrhic victory is that?”
The information landscape becomes ever narrower, squashing diversity of thought and facts. Pretty soon, we won’t know what we don’t know. And that will be that.
All is happening in accordance with the prophecy:
