The New York Times is now no more than a forum for identity politics

The way Americans feel about the resignation of Bari Weiss from her job as a comment editor at the New York Times depends very much on their attitude to the role Weiss played as one of the paper’s most senior, and controversial, executives.

Those who believe that in these crisis-filled days what the paper must stand for above all is Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement and the conviction that Donald Trump is by far the worst president in the history of the Republic will not mourn Weiss’s passing. Those, on the other hand, who value diversity of opinion, the importance of free speech and a considered balance in the paper’s political coverage will regard her departure as a call to arms.

Her opponents, convinced she was a troublemaker – a conservative cuckoo in the comment section’s liberal nest – regard her passing as a necessary evil. Supporters prefer to highlight the circumstances of her exit which, according to her resignation letter, involved sustained harassment by colleagues, including the suggestion that Weiss – a Jew and a Zionist – was a “Nazi,” opposed to the “inclusiveness” that is now the paper’s guiding principle.

Either way, no one can dispute that America’s pre-eminent newspaper, long feted for its diligent pursuit of the truth, has become a battleground in the Woke Wars that have dominated the nation’s perception of itself at least since Trump moved into the Oval Office in January, 2017.

Within the company itself a civil war has broken out, with the minority Old School faction pointing to the fact that Weiss was not even the first casualty in a war of attrition that threatens to leave the title as little more than an anti-Trump, identity politics-obsessed pamphlet. They cite the case of James Bennet, formerly editor of the leader page, who resigned (effectively forced out) just weeks after approving an admittedly unhinged article by Republican Senator Tom Cotton that called for the use of troops to restore public order.

Bennet quickly apologised fulsomely for his “error of judgement,” but after a stormy town hall meeting of the editorial staff at which the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, managing editor Mark Thompson and executive editor Joe Kahn each publicly confessed their “sin,” Bennet felt he had no option but to leave.

Outside, beyond the confines of Eighth Avenue, the war continues to rage. On Wednesday, in the wake of Weiss’s resignation, Andrew Sullivan, an English-born commentator, both gay and conservative (who also writes for the UK’s Sunday Times) said that he was leaving New York Magazine after a “mutually agreed” parting of the ways. His editor, David Haskell, regretful of the move, announced that the magazine hoped it could yet find a way for contributors to write from a conservative perspective about some of the most politically charged subjects of American life while still upholding its liberal values.

CNN and MSNC have long ceased to be reliable sources of news, so steeped are they now in their loathing of the President and all he represents. On the opposing side, Fox News never truly believed in its slogan, “Fair and Balanced,” presenting instead a daily diet of unreconstructed right-wing dogma, with Trump, from the White House, as its most regular guest.

On the more thoughtful Right, the Wall Street Journal stands out for the quality and rationality of its debate, but is not exactly in the media mainstream, while the Washington Post (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”), now owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, competes daily with the Times to see which of them is the more woke.

Back in Midtown Manhattan, directly opposite the thronged Port Authority terminal, journalists and executives are hoping profoundly that the Weiss Affair will drop out of the headlines, which it certainly has at the New York Times.

This morning’s online version of the paper leads with the continuing resurgence of the coronavirus (no surprise there), while flagging a column by pundit Gail Collins with the headline “Who can make Trump miserable this Fall?”.

Intriguingly, another prominent story featured on today’s online front page is an attack on the UK – one of a series of such assaults that have helped characterise the paper over the last five years.

“For UK’s Minority Women, Economic Toll of Lockdown Lingers,” is the headline, followed by a standfirst proclaiming “Black and other ethnic minority groups have long faced economic and racial inequality in Britain. As workers return, many are saddled with debt and working longer hours for less pay.”

Now read on. Did ever the pot call the kettle more black – or perhaps more properly, “African-American”? It is nothing less than astonishing the extent to which the New York Times has turned against the country once regarded as America’s closest ally.

Hardly a day passes without knocking copy that represents Britain as a small country of no particular importance, mired in racism and class warfare, with no military worth speaking of, overseen by a ruritanian monarchy and governed not by Parliament, nor even by the “buffoon” Boris Johnson, but by the grasping and antediluvian City of London.

You might think that with Mark Thompson as CEO a more balanced view of the UK might have been struck. But you would be wrong. The “lymies,” as they are increasingly known, are these days almost totally disregarded by the Times which, rightly or wrongly, now sees France and Germany as the countries in Europe which the US should look upon as friends and allies.

With friends like these, who needs enemies? But the real question is, what went wrong, and when did it start?

First published in 1851 the New York Times, with its grand total of 131 Pulitzer prizes, has been an American institution since at least World War II. In 1964, during the darkest days of the civil rights movement, its stalwart defence of a charge that it had libelled an Alabama police commissioner led to a Supreme Court ruling extending press freedom.

Six years later its publication of the Pentagon Papers, revealing previously hidden truths about the conduct of the Vietnam War, was a key factor in turning public opinion against the conflict. More recently, its 2018 revelations about the President’s systemic tax evasion down the years led to renewed demands that he come clean about what he currently owes the Internal Revenue Service – an issue taken forward just last week when the Supreme Court ordered the release of IRS files to a grand jury.

But since the turn of the century the paper has moved steadily not so much to the left ­ as towards unquestioning support for those causes most often featured on Facebook and Twitter. If it senses that there has been movement, however slight, in the liberal zeitgeist, it feels it must tack in the same direction. In that sense, it has lost the sense of itself for which it was once famed, and has become extremely craven.

It has also managed the feat of being boring and predictable. If it has any longer a character, it is that of an anachronistic, well-intentioned but vain Upper East Sider, who earns good money in Wall Street or the media but suspects that to appear well-informed these days you have to take your lead from the late-night television hosts – Stephen Colbert, Seth Myers and Trevor Noah, whose commentary, even if one-sided, is at least sharp and funny, rather than the White House, Congress or – God forbid! – Wall Street.

New York Times prose is leaden, stuck between the dated badinage of the Algonquin in the 1920s and the ever-more pompous Counsel for Foreign Relations. Like the New Yorker magazine, which it increasingly resembles (minus the cartoons) it measures quality by the yard.

Notwithstanding its many failings, including a rich vein of hypocrisy (for many years it discriminated against black employees and only recently began to pay its female staff as much as their male counterparts), the paper has continued to prosper. While its rivals have withered away, the New York Times has, if anything, become more influential and more prestigious.

Today, as the self-proclaimed Voice of Reason, it boasts more than half a million print sales each morning and, having sold some five million online subscriptions, last year recorded digital revenues of more than $800 million. As with the Mail Online, you can’t argue with success.

What is undeniable – though it is often denied – is that the Times has given up its claim to fair play. It has always been a liberal voice. But its boast that it will never withhold the truth for political reasons, and that it will steadfastly hold the line between fact and opinion, has been exposed as a lie.

To quote Bari Weiss – whose high-profile resignation will no doubt turn out to have been a shrewd career move:

“Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing moulded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”