Feb 4, 2025 09:29 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 4, 2025 10:16 PM by C C.)
Parody Alcove: Even when the political faithful get tangled up in its tenacious web themselves, they still can't directly acknowledge the ultimate cause of this. It must be danced around.
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Departing the New York Times (Paul Krugman)
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/depart...york-times
EXCERPTS: As many people reading this know, last month I retired from my position as an opinion writer at the New York Times—a job I had done for 25 years. [...] During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote.
[...But...] in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. ... as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.
One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about ... Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. ... I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left.
[...] Newspaper columns should be controversial, rubbing some people the wrong way, because the main point is to get people to rethink their assumptions. I used to say, only half-jokingly, that if a column didn’t generate a large amount of hate mail, that meant that I had wasted the space.
Yet what I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness ... I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section? (MORE - details)
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Departing the New York Times (Paul Krugman)
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/depart...york-times
EXCERPTS: As many people reading this know, last month I retired from my position as an opinion writer at the New York Times—a job I had done for 25 years. [...] During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote.
[...But...] in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. ... as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.
One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about ... Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. ... I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left.
[...] Newspaper columns should be controversial, rubbing some people the wrong way, because the main point is to get people to rethink their assumptions. I used to say, only half-jokingly, that if a column didn’t generate a large amount of hate mail, that meant that I had wasted the space.
Yet what I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness ... I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section? (MORE - details)