Abstract
The essence of news is surprise. It is telling people something they didn’t know. So to the news reporter, the comment section, the arena for egotists to state the obvious at length, is a matter of tremendous indifference. If news, famously, is something that someone doesn’t want printed, comment is something no one bothers to read. Unless, there is an error, when the news team will gather to howl about the sleepy old shallow end.
That is the caricature, although, as a former comment editor, I can confirm it is often how it felt. This summer, the private office politics of one newspaper became public fare. The Wall Street Journal’s news staff – around 300 of them – took the howling to a new level, complaining to the paper’s publisher that the opinion pages had been running pieces containing assertions of fact contradicted by the paper’s own reporting. The opinion pages, said the complaint, showed a “lack of fact-checking and transparency”.
The publisher went public, explaining that for reasons of “collegiality” it wouldn’t respond in kind to the letter signers. The news team’s anxieties “aren’t our responsibility”, it replied, lamenting that “it was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution”.
But the complaint wasn’t about cancelling anything, it was about facts. The WSJ was rushing to the trenches over the need to confront “growing progressive conformity and intolerance”. Does even as credible an organ as the WSJ not mind about facts, or about how this looks? Is the hostility so intense, that everything is about liberals v conservatives?
A friend, a former comment editor of a national daily, said recently: “Aren’t you delighted to be out of comment journalism? You can’t say anything these days.” It was hard to disagree, and it is hard not to feel for James Bennet, The New York Times’s editorial page editor who resigned in the summer. He had published a piece by Republican senator Tom Cotton saying the army should be sent in as back-up in case police failed to quell protests after the killing of George Floyd. Initially, the paper defended the piece, then buckled.
The left may say such pieces are part of the mainstreaming of illiberal ideas, but Cotton is a senior, if highly controversial, figure in the legislature, a possible presidential candidate in 2024, not some desperate freelance contrarian. Personally, if you’ll forgive the less than Voltairean language, I’d say he was barking, but if that is his view, is that not merely of interest but also newsworthy? The piece – dubbed by one tweeter “a call for even more state-sanctioned killing” - did what the best comment pieces do: provoke, challenge the orthodoxy and, indeed, make the news. Was the piece so inflammatory as to make it irresponsible to publish it?
There seems to be civil war at the NYT, between the young woke and the liberals, and the fashionable thinkers are winning. One recent resigner said having intellectual curiosity was “a liability” for an NYT employee. The NYT will, of course, protect its core readership, but a refusal to accommodate the occasional voice from afar is a bit precious. There are other issues, of course. Bennet admitted he had not read the piece before it was published, which looks pretty bad, and was accused of publishing “clownish” right-wingers, so that may have heated a climate already a Trumpish shade of rich orange.
How new is this? A combination of risk-aversion, laziness and lack of time has long got the better of the comment editor. Play safe, give the readers what they want and, if you must go outside, commission only the performers who know how to stimulate without frightening the horses. And, of course, pander to the editor. Disconcertingly, the NYT publisher AG Sulzberger is reported to have demanded the paper commission fewer pieces by non-staff writers.
There is generally a trade-off between the editor’s prejudices (which tend to roughly resemble the readers’) and the professional standard by which a piece is judged - is it interesting, original, convincing, written by someone whose views carry weight, entertaining, well-written, informative? The best editors try not to use the job as a soapbox, but the temptation is always there. This means that bad pieces have a better chance of being run if they say the right things.
If it’s a topic on which the editor is indifferent, stricter criteria are deployed. And if it expresses a view the editor disagrees with, either it is never even suggested, or the proper tests are used with exaggerated severity. Two of the biggest rows I remember were over excellent thought-provoking articles that I thought the reader was grown-up enough at least to think about. One was removed after just one edition. “People will think it’s the paper’s view,” I was told.
As James Bennet tweeted shortly after the piece appeared: “Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy.” Quite. He was doing his job. But not having read the NYT piece made an OK case impossible to defend. There’s not much coming back from that.
