Prof K: Good move. Indeed, no regrets -- a good aspirational goal in life in general. I had been wondering why you stayed at NYT as long as you did. The Gray Lady has been dead for a long time. Very glad you'll be appearing on The Contrarian from time to time.
As a previous subscriber to both the NYT and WAPO, I am delighted to see two of my favorites, Paul Krugman and Jen Rubin, here on Substack. Unleashed opinions from knowledgeable editorialists work best here. Mr. Krugman is a truly professional economist with valuable insights.
I am not actually "delighted," because I would prefer that papers with a wide distribution have as many as possible brilliant contributors. I am glad to read them here, but sad that they have felt the (justified) need to leave their long-time homes.
I guess I was one of those insensitive frogs who slowly froze while reading WAPO and NYT. I see that my two favorites are now unleashed, Krugman and Rubin. I jumped today and subscribed to Contrarian.
America, led by a wealthy and powerful ruling class, is slip-sliding backwards into 1930's Germany - only with endless financial, media, and political resources. And now, a private militia for Trump and his accomplices.
A return to the Gilded Age! This time the wealthy are vastly more wealthy and can cause worldwide devastation. Let's hope "We The People" can reclaim our democracy with another "French Revolution." United we stand, divided we fall.
For a while now the NYT has felt hesitant, and scared. Every story or opinion piece that is critical of Trump includes a dose of “what-aboutism” for “balance”. The comments section is watered down, and much more pro-Trump. Which is on top of having some very weak writers in the stable. Bret Stephens? Friedman? Douthat? Dowd? How do these people keep their jobs? Their writing is mediocre and predictable, their opinions are insipid and poorly defended. I canceled my WaPo subscription in November. I am debating doing the same with the NYT. In any case, welcome to The Contrarian!
Dowd lost my eyes when she decided the best thing to do after Biden withdrew from the race was to pile on in the cattiest way possible. A clever, articulate, tragically lost soul.
She's been doing that for 30 years. It began with snide remarks about GHW Bush, and later about Dubya, but when the Clintons arrived in DC she went all out. Way beyond snide, or snark, to dishonestly nasty. And she's maintained the irritating voice against Obama and Biden -- but never against a Republican.
Yes. And she never ends a column. It’s as if she had too much snark and not enough space and she just copped off the conclusion. Not how I was taught to write. Oh, then there is the “ Kevin problem.”
Abdicating her column once a year to give her retrograde brother a platform is an awful idea that I've never understood. If the little wingnut wants a column he should get his own. She could still ghost-write it for him. (I understand there's a number of openings at the WaPo… ;) )
Oh, Dowd lost me with her coverage of the run-up to the 2000 election, and absolutely nailed that loss (I would occasionally glance at her columns) with her coverage of Hillary (I swore she had a thing about Bill and was jealous of Hillary) and Obama - who she routinely called "Barry."
Ii have loathed her ever since she went after Hillary Clinton....for no reason I could see except envy. Dowd helped lead us down the path we're on now.
I wrote headlines for a living for many, many years, and continue to run a local news site. I have never understood the weak, often off-point headlines, especially on the main page of nytimes.com I keep thinking that they're trying to write for the grand sweep of history, avoiding conclusions, etc., but they are definitely going down another path these days. It probably doesn't help that they eliminated most of their copy desk operations a few years ago, meaning the standalone operations made up of people whose whole job was to ensure the fairness of stories and headlines.
I think they write them with the assumption that people won't read the article. Very often the headline has implications contrary to the content of the article.
AGreed, though I suspect it's an inability to capture the essence of a story. It's not as easy as people think. Too often the headlines seem as if they're written without having read the story.
I'm glad you wrote this, Terri. It's funny -- I have often read Douthat's column, just because I was a loyal Times op-ed reader and he wasn't a standard water-bearer for the right. But when I think about it, his columns come from such a weird angle. He relates everything in the world to the breakdown of some Catholic moral order that never existed in America and nobody wants. And he sticks to that theme over and over and over again. I recall how he wrote an op-ed piece either right before or early on in Trump's first term, imagining that Trump would be a game-changer for good in America, breaking both left- and right-wing orthodoxies. If he ever had met Trump or paid attention to the world as it was, not the world as he thought it should be, he would have known this was a ridiculous fantasy. But somehow his ability to keep writing these 800-word opinion pieces keeps him employed on the Times editorial page, even though they have no basis in reality.
To save my sanity I haven't been reading the Times or WaPo editorial pages and columns the last three months, which used to be almost a daily habit. Maybe it's time to drop my subscriptions.
The Times has to have the weakest editorial page team of any major publication in the country. Though they generally refuse to publish my comments on the quality of their team, I take a certain pleasure at mocking their tired little conversations with themselves that we are apparently supposed to find amusing and clever. All of them, supposed liberals and whatever the rest are, should leave and be replaced by fresh, intelligent voices.
Like you, Pam, I have writen letters criticizing their misleading headlines & foolish conversations with themselves, that we are supposed to learn something from,
" Their writing is mediocre and predictable, their opinions are insipid and poorly defended." You answered your own question about how these people have kept their jobs. Sadly.
I can’t agree with your criticism of Tom Friedman. His thoughtful analysis of the Middle East tinderbox are brilliant pieces of journalism. The other 3 are a waste of space!
Friedman reminds me of some of my fellow students in the 1970s who somehow always managed to answer every question in the exact way the professor liked. Sometimes by quoting or adapting the language from the professor's textbook, others by waiting till most of the class had responded and then choosing the language he'd seen the professor react favorably to. They always got A's, but -- unlike Friedman -- they never accomplished much in life.
What he does, it seems, is discern the exact line that his favorite sources prefer, then give it wiggle room to accommodate the views of a few other sources, and come down firmly on the side of the status quo as defined by the people with the most power.
You won't miss the Times. I quit it when they went after Obama. Quit WaPo this year. I believe independent journalism will become powerful and widely read in a few years. Not everyone in this country is a dolt.
First my beloved WaPo and now the NYT, now committing ritual harakiri. I'm soldiering on with the Contrarian and MSNBC. A very special "eff you" to that smug SOB Bezos.
I am sure Charles was being stifled at the Times. He really pushes MAGA buttons. He gets so much hate. Now if Pamela Paul would just leave. I can’t stand her!
I am also struggling with my decision. I’ve been a subscriber for many years - and actually, my parents have subscribed for decades. It was delivered every day - so we are going way back. It’s just so unbelievable to me that The NY Times has changed into … this. Sigh.
NY Times and WaPo are to me like a beloved spouse whom you have caught lying. Lying with a straight face. Best to acknowledge the betrayal and move on.
Just want to point out that if you have a home delivery subscription, there is nothing to keep you from an infinite number of successive six-month "Vacation Holds" during which you can read online. I supported "journalism" at the NY Times for forty years but the decisions by the latest Sulzberger failson were just too much, nine years ago.
Yes. You can still play Wordle and Connections and Strands without being a subscriber. Spelling Bee, however, will only let you get to "solid" and then won't let you work your way up to Queen Bee without subscribing. But I find I don't even miss Spelling Bee as long as I have the others.
OK, Mimi, I did it. I cancelled the NYT subscription (at $300 a year). I read what you said about being capped at "solid," and instead subscribed ONLY to the games, for $1.50 per month!!!
Excellent! I don't miss Spelling Bee now that I haven't been doing it anymore. I was a little too obsessive about it to begin with; I cheated by looking up words until I got Queen Bee! ;-)
I'm going through the same quandary. I've quit reading most of the news they report because it seems biased or incomplete. However my husband does the daily wordle with many of our family members and I use the NYT cooking website offered regularly. That's the struggle.
It's a matter of time before WAPO's reporting (which has been very good) goes the way of the opinion section. At this point, if you support them, you're assenting to limitations on freedom of the press.
And by unsubscribing The Times you will cause it to fail and end up with another broligarch owning it. Sorry, I may not like what the two newspapers are doing to try to survive, but I’d rather not end up giving tRUMP another win against his “enemies”.
Well, a broligarch already does own it, essentially, along with his family. When bro’s dad inherited the paper, he at least listened to older, more experienced people on the staff. It was said of him that he “never made the same mistake three times.” Broligarch the younger is making the same mistake ad infinitum.
Understood, Roxanne. But I agree with Robert K on this one. Continuing our subscriptions validates the Times’s sane washing and clean ups of Trump and the Repub’s deliberate destruction of American Democracy. The Times and WaPo have lost their way.
So who owns it now? A non-profit? The owners of the Times are in it for the money and they know which way the wind is blowing. They'll do whatever they must to stay in business, even if it means contributing to the downfall of this country. The very wealthy can simply skip away when the going gets rough.
The Times is currently owned by a broligarch as is WAPO. I canceled my WAPO sub a little over a year ago not long after Bozos turned it over to a Murdoch publisher. It was very difficult but also very necessary. I have finally reached the point where my Times sub will soon be history.
WAPO and the Times are not Trump's "enemies". I came back to reread Krugman's piece to reconfirm the reasons I am going to cancel my NYT sub. Paul hits it on the head and perfectly describes exactly what I have seen at the Times over the last year or so. I'll close with a recent comment I posted on another substack article:
"I am a soon-not-to-be NYT subscriber who would add that one of their most recent scolditorials told the Democrats to "move to the center." Their new front page interview-cast featuring their resident medieval monk, Ross Douthat, gave big airtime to Amy Coney Barrett who along with her like-minded SCOTUS radicals is busily jackhammering away at the foundations of our democracy and Christian theocrat Doug Wilson whose interview's introduction by Douthat began...
"Evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson doesn’t mind if you call him a theocrat. He thinks America began as a Christian nation and should become one again.
He wants a society that acknowledges Jesus’ authority over politics and patriarchal authority in the home."
...and went downhill from there.
The NYT has titled Douthat's column "Interesting Times." No! These are dangerous times and the Times has turned to aiding and abetting those who would chip away at our freedoms. A few years ago the Washington Post adopted the new masthead slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness." I canceled my subscription when they started to turn out the lights.
The Sunday coverage of the "No Kings" protest in the Times consisted of two small photos below the fold and a story on page twenty-three. Another once-great newspaper bites the dust."
Legacy media is entrenched in the past, struggling to be relevsnt in an era of extreme political correctness based on fear and the pursuit of profit. I suspect that in addition to fear of backlash from Trump's goons, they mostly fear losing their legacy advertisers. It's a loss for the nation, as the print press has sustained our democracy for over two centuries. But times have changed and, sadly, the stakes are higher. Welcome, and long live the independent voices on Substack which now accounts for almost all of my news and information budget.
I wondered what was going on when the newsletter suddenly and rather abruptly ended. Plus, some of the later columns seemed to be a bit "off" from previous years.
As someone who among other things did a stint as a senior strategic analyst in DOD, longtime news junkie dating back to high school. The Krugman columns at the time of the Gulf War were spot on, very much reflecting the sort of quite unpopular analysis that I was providing to the leadership -- which would apparently lead to my retirement from the Army in mid-2003.
The recent shifts at NYT and WaPo have not inspired much in the way of confidence that the God Emperor Trump and the MAGAts will get much in the way of pushback from either one of the papers. That so many established voices are being kicked to the curb from these two papers suggests that guts are indeed in short supply -- so much for the now mythology of Watergate and speaking up to power...
Really interesting and thank you for your personal experience/insight into what has happened to this paper that has declined so precipitously. NYT supported re-election of trump more by what it did not say than by what it did...by shoving pieces on Biden or Harris to the outback, putting trump on front page for better or worse. Always. It was editorially cunning, totally shocking to me. I've been reading the Times everyday my whole adult life. Today, I suspended delivery, baby steps on breaking a long habit. Who can face this much wanton destruction first thing in the morning? Substacks will inform me. I just read in de Tocqueville's Democracy in America what happens when barbarians conquer civilizations. Page 401 in the Bantam paperback.
I was hoping the NYT would avoid this kind of oppression of free expression from a superbly informed economist opinion writer - sad. But we could see over this past year during the election campaign how the NYT jumped all over Biden for every slurred word or gaffe while giving Trump a pass on some of his most egregious statements and actions - all toned down or not even confronted. The legacy media is partly responsible for helping Trump regain power - and they'll pay for it dearly as we all will - that is those of us who give a hot damn about our democracy - or what's left of it. Glad you're here on The Contrarian, Prof Krugman!!
I left WAPO the day Bezos changed the policy of endorsing candidates. I left NYT (as much as I miss the crosswords) when they watered down the Trump pieces. 🖕 to them both.
Good to hear the background. And good for you for leaving. Its not the same paper I’ve been reading for decades. Your word is your truth.
Prof K: Good move. Indeed, no regrets -- a good aspirational goal in life in general. I had been wondering why you stayed at NYT as long as you did. The Gray Lady has been dead for a long time. Very glad you'll be appearing on The Contrarian from time to time.
As a previous subscriber to both the NYT and WAPO, I am delighted to see two of my favorites, Paul Krugman and Jen Rubin, here on Substack. Unleashed opinions from knowledgeable editorialists work best here. Mr. Krugman is a truly professional economist with valuable insights.
My reasons for the same decision, precisely.
I unsubscribed from NYT after 30 years and WaPo after several too. I am now a paid subscribe to The Contrarian.
I am not actually "delighted," because I would prefer that papers with a wide distribution have as many as possible brilliant contributors. I am glad to read them here, but sad that they have felt the (justified) need to leave their long-time homes.
Me too. Thanks
I guess I was one of those insensitive frogs who slowly froze while reading WAPO and NYT. I see that my two favorites are now unleashed, Krugman and Rubin. I jumped today and subscribed to Contrarian.
America, led by a wealthy and powerful ruling class, is slip-sliding backwards into 1930's Germany - only with endless financial, media, and political resources. And now, a private militia for Trump and his accomplices.
A return to the Gilded Age! This time the wealthy are vastly more wealthy and can cause worldwide devastation. Let's hope "We The People" can reclaim our democracy with another "French Revolution." United we stand, divided we fall.
And you can bet these new Robber Barons aren’t endowing libraries, universities, and art museums….
A goodly proportion of “We the people” are woefully uninformed/misinformed. ☹️
Willful ignorance
In part, but also a Commercial Media Industrial Complex that prioritizes profits over seeking out and reporting truth that matters for our “Republic”.
For a while now the NYT has felt hesitant, and scared. Every story or opinion piece that is critical of Trump includes a dose of “what-aboutism” for “balance”. The comments section is watered down, and much more pro-Trump. Which is on top of having some very weak writers in the stable. Bret Stephens? Friedman? Douthat? Dowd? How do these people keep their jobs? Their writing is mediocre and predictable, their opinions are insipid and poorly defended. I canceled my WaPo subscription in November. I am debating doing the same with the NYT. In any case, welcome to The Contrarian!
Dowd lost my eyes when she decided the best thing to do after Biden withdrew from the race was to pile on in the cattiest way possible. A clever, articulate, tragically lost soul.
Dowd’s only device is snark. If she ever was insightful, or relevant, she’s lost that. Just snarls and claws now…
💯💯💯
She's been doing that for 30 years. It began with snide remarks about GHW Bush, and later about Dubya, but when the Clintons arrived in DC she went all out. Way beyond snide, or snark, to dishonestly nasty. And she's maintained the irritating voice against Obama and Biden -- but never against a Republican.
Yes. And she never ends a column. It’s as if she had too much snark and not enough space and she just copped off the conclusion. Not how I was taught to write. Oh, then there is the “ Kevin problem.”
Abdicating her column once a year to give her retrograde brother a platform is an awful idea that I've never understood. If the little wingnut wants a column he should get his own. She could still ghost-write it for him. (I understand there's a number of openings at the WaPo… ;) )
What you said, Andy!
Oh, Dowd lost me with her coverage of the run-up to the 2000 election, and absolutely nailed that loss (I would occasionally glance at her columns) with her coverage of Hillary (I swore she had a thing about Bill and was jealous of Hillary) and Obama - who she routinely called "Barry."
And still does.
Ii have loathed her ever since she went after Hillary Clinton....for no reason I could see except envy. Dowd helped lead us down the path we're on now.
I wrote headlines for a living for many, many years, and continue to run a local news site. I have never understood the weak, often off-point headlines, especially on the main page of nytimes.com I keep thinking that they're trying to write for the grand sweep of history, avoiding conclusions, etc., but they are definitely going down another path these days. It probably doesn't help that they eliminated most of their copy desk operations a few years ago, meaning the standalone operations made up of people whose whole job was to ensure the fairness of stories and headlines.
I think they write them with the assumption that people won't read the article. Very often the headline has implications contrary to the content of the article.
AGreed, though I suspect it's an inability to capture the essence of a story. It's not as easy as people think. Too often the headlines seem as if they're written without having read the story.
If you want to view deceitful headlines, try the Washington Post.
Stephens is a disgrace.
I am always hoping Gail will smack him hard in their duo column but she never does.
Wouldn’t get through the mamby-pamby editors at the NYT.
Because the *entire point* of their conversation “column” is false equivalence. If she smacks him upside the head, that point is undermined.
The requirement that they both flatter each other constantly also sickens me.
Father Douthat is always good for the weirdest religious takes ever.
I'm glad you wrote this, Terri. It's funny -- I have often read Douthat's column, just because I was a loyal Times op-ed reader and he wasn't a standard water-bearer for the right. But when I think about it, his columns come from such a weird angle. He relates everything in the world to the breakdown of some Catholic moral order that never existed in America and nobody wants. And he sticks to that theme over and over and over again. I recall how he wrote an op-ed piece either right before or early on in Trump's first term, imagining that Trump would be a game-changer for good in America, breaking both left- and right-wing orthodoxies. If he ever had met Trump or paid attention to the world as it was, not the world as he thought it should be, he would have known this was a ridiculous fantasy. But somehow his ability to keep writing these 800-word opinion pieces keeps him employed on the Times editorial page, even though they have no basis in reality.
To save my sanity I haven't been reading the Times or WaPo editorial pages and columns the last three months, which used to be almost a daily habit. Maybe it's time to drop my subscriptions.
The Times has to have the weakest editorial page team of any major publication in the country. Though they generally refuse to publish my comments on the quality of their team, I take a certain pleasure at mocking their tired little conversations with themselves that we are apparently supposed to find amusing and clever. All of them, supposed liberals and whatever the rest are, should leave and be replaced by fresh, intelligent voices.
Like you, Pam, I have writen letters criticizing their misleading headlines & foolish conversations with themselves, that we are supposed to learn something from,
and never had one published.
" Their writing is mediocre and predictable, their opinions are insipid and poorly defended." You answered your own question about how these people have kept their jobs. Sadly.
I can’t agree with your criticism of Tom Friedman. His thoughtful analysis of the Middle East tinderbox are brilliant pieces of journalism. The other 3 are a waste of space!
Friedman is naive and shallow. His breathless, sunny enthusiasm is usually off the mark.
I’ve never forgiven Friedman for backing the Iraq war.
Friedman reminds me of some of my fellow students in the 1970s who somehow always managed to answer every question in the exact way the professor liked. Sometimes by quoting or adapting the language from the professor's textbook, others by waiting till most of the class had responded and then choosing the language he'd seen the professor react favorably to. They always got A's, but -- unlike Friedman -- they never accomplished much in life.
What he does, it seems, is discern the exact line that his favorite sources prefer, then give it wiggle room to accommodate the views of a few other sources, and come down firmly on the side of the status quo as defined by the people with the most power.
Sorry, but Tom Friedman is a remarkable writer, with decades of experience, and the wisdom honed therefrom.
You won't miss the Times. I quit it when they went after Obama. Quit WaPo this year. I believe independent journalism will become powerful and widely read in a few years. Not everyone in this country is a dolt.
First my beloved WaPo and now the NYT, now committing ritual harakiri. I'm soldiering on with the Contrarian and MSNBC. A very special "eff you" to that smug SOB Bezos.
Mr. Krugman not only expresses fact-based opinion, he does so elegantly.
Subscribers, please turn your friends and colleagues on to this Substack.
The Times loss. Charles Blow has also left.
Blow left? Good for him. Where is he now?
I googled Blow. He’s taking a fellowship at Harvard.
I am sure Charles was being stifled at the Times. He really pushes MAGA buttons. He gets so much hate. Now if Pamela Paul would just leave. I can’t stand her!
"an internal memo announced that Pamela Paul and Charles M. Blow would soon stop writing their columns."
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/paul-krugman-leaving-new-york-times-heavy-hand-editing-less-frequent-columns-newsletter.php
She will not be missed. She never had anything original or interesting to say and was drifting ever rightward.
I knew her from the book review podcast. What a drone
I adore Charles Blow! I hope he can be convinced to join this site from time to time.
Ohhhh...Blow left...OMG.
Thank you for this context. More and more of your NY Times readers have found you on SubStack and now in The Contrarian. Word of mouth sells!
Any chance of you joining the Contrarian as a regular columnist?
I think he already did.
I’m struggling to decide to cancel my long held subscription or not. Sigh…I’ve read the NYT’s for many years.
I am also struggling with my decision. I’ve been a subscriber for many years - and actually, my parents have subscribed for decades. It was delivered every day - so we are going way back. It’s just so unbelievable to me that The NY Times has changed into … this. Sigh.
NY Times and WaPo are to me like a beloved spouse whom you have caught lying. Lying with a straight face. Best to acknowledge the betrayal and move on.
Just want to point out that if you have a home delivery subscription, there is nothing to keep you from an infinite number of successive six-month "Vacation Holds" during which you can read online. I supported "journalism" at the NY Times for forty years but the decisions by the latest Sulzberger failson were just too much, nine years ago.
My son saved me that decision: he cancelled the NYT the day after the 1500+ pardon and the NYT‘s mild coverage of it.
I am also trying to decide—mainly because of the games—i gave up on “mainstream” news with the election
I heard you can Google the games and play without subscribing. Is that true?
Yes. You can still play Wordle and Connections and Strands without being a subscriber. Spelling Bee, however, will only let you get to "solid" and then won't let you work your way up to Queen Bee without subscribing. But I find I don't even miss Spelling Bee as long as I have the others.
OK, Mimi, I did it. I cancelled the NYT subscription (at $300 a year). I read what you said about being capped at "solid," and instead subscribed ONLY to the games, for $1.50 per month!!!
Actually, depending on where you look they are charging a lot more. I think I may have to give them all up. ?
Excellent! I don't miss Spelling Bee now that I haven't been doing it anymore. I was a little too obsessive about it to begin with; I cheated by looking up words until I got Queen Bee! ;-)
I still do it. I can swing $1.50 per month, I think!
You are funny. Cheating at Spelling Bee. lolol!!!!
I left when Judith Miller was their star.
I'm going through the same quandary. I've quit reading most of the news they report because it seems biased or incomplete. However my husband does the daily wordle with many of our family members and I use the NYT cooking website offered regularly. That's the struggle.
You can subscribe to the NYT Cooking site separately.
There are Wordle puzzles available elsewhere online. Just do a DuckDuckGo search and pick one.
I left decades ago but I have online access through my library. It’s much less frustrating to read when I’m not supporting them directly.
Ditto. But no more. Losing Crossword has been the hardest thing, actually. Also, Wordle (a little;)
Just purchase a book of crosswords by NYT or the LA Times. You’ll quickly find relief and won’t miss the daily paper at all! 🤗
It's a matter of time before WAPO's reporting (which has been very good) goes the way of the opinion section. At this point, if you support them, you're assenting to limitations on freedom of the press.
You may have to bite off your leg to get out of this trap, but you'll live. Otherwise, those who set the trap will lunch on you.
And by unsubscribing The Times you will cause it to fail and end up with another broligarch owning it. Sorry, I may not like what the two newspapers are doing to try to survive, but I’d rather not end up giving tRUMP another win against his “enemies”.
Well, a broligarch already does own it, essentially, along with his family. When bro’s dad inherited the paper, he at least listened to older, more experienced people on the staff. It was said of him that he “never made the same mistake three times.” Broligarch the younger is making the same mistake ad infinitum.
Understood, Roxanne. But I agree with Robert K on this one. Continuing our subscriptions validates the Times’s sane washing and clean ups of Trump and the Repub’s deliberate destruction of American Democracy. The Times and WaPo have lost their way.
So who owns it now? A non-profit? The owners of the Times are in it for the money and they know which way the wind is blowing. They'll do whatever they must to stay in business, even if it means contributing to the downfall of this country. The very wealthy can simply skip away when the going gets rough.
The Times is currently owned by a broligarch as is WAPO. I canceled my WAPO sub a little over a year ago not long after Bozos turned it over to a Murdoch publisher. It was very difficult but also very necessary. I have finally reached the point where my Times sub will soon be history.
WAPO and the Times are not Trump's "enemies". I came back to reread Krugman's piece to reconfirm the reasons I am going to cancel my NYT sub. Paul hits it on the head and perfectly describes exactly what I have seen at the Times over the last year or so. I'll close with a recent comment I posted on another substack article:
"I am a soon-not-to-be NYT subscriber who would add that one of their most recent scolditorials told the Democrats to "move to the center." Their new front page interview-cast featuring their resident medieval monk, Ross Douthat, gave big airtime to Amy Coney Barrett who along with her like-minded SCOTUS radicals is busily jackhammering away at the foundations of our democracy and Christian theocrat Doug Wilson whose interview's introduction by Douthat began...
"Evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson doesn’t mind if you call him a theocrat. He thinks America began as a Christian nation and should become one again.
He wants a society that acknowledges Jesus’ authority over politics and patriarchal authority in the home."
...and went downhill from there.
The NYT has titled Douthat's column "Interesting Times." No! These are dangerous times and the Times has turned to aiding and abetting those who would chip away at our freedoms. A few years ago the Washington Post adopted the new masthead slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness." I canceled my subscription when they started to turn out the lights.
The Sunday coverage of the "No Kings" protest in the Times consisted of two small photos below the fold and a story on page twenty-three. Another once-great newspaper bites the dust."
Legacy media is entrenched in the past, struggling to be relevsnt in an era of extreme political correctness based on fear and the pursuit of profit. I suspect that in addition to fear of backlash from Trump's goons, they mostly fear losing their legacy advertisers. It's a loss for the nation, as the print press has sustained our democracy for over two centuries. But times have changed and, sadly, the stakes are higher. Welcome, and long live the independent voices on Substack which now accounts for almost all of my news and information budget.
I wondered what was going on when the newsletter suddenly and rather abruptly ended. Plus, some of the later columns seemed to be a bit "off" from previous years.
As someone who among other things did a stint as a senior strategic analyst in DOD, longtime news junkie dating back to high school. The Krugman columns at the time of the Gulf War were spot on, very much reflecting the sort of quite unpopular analysis that I was providing to the leadership -- which would apparently lead to my retirement from the Army in mid-2003.
The recent shifts at NYT and WaPo have not inspired much in the way of confidence that the God Emperor Trump and the MAGAts will get much in the way of pushback from either one of the papers. That so many established voices are being kicked to the curb from these two papers suggests that guts are indeed in short supply -- so much for the now mythology of Watergate and speaking up to power...
Thanks Paul, well done and well stated!
Thank you for your commitment and courage!
Good for you, Paul Krugman! And thank you for continuing to inform and educate the public in these very trying times. Welcome to The Contrarian!
Really interesting and thank you for your personal experience/insight into what has happened to this paper that has declined so precipitously. NYT supported re-election of trump more by what it did not say than by what it did...by shoving pieces on Biden or Harris to the outback, putting trump on front page for better or worse. Always. It was editorially cunning, totally shocking to me. I've been reading the Times everyday my whole adult life. Today, I suspended delivery, baby steps on breaking a long habit. Who can face this much wanton destruction first thing in the morning? Substacks will inform me. I just read in de Tocqueville's Democracy in America what happens when barbarians conquer civilizations. Page 401 in the Bantam paperback.
You just summarized my thoughts! Now we need to have Wordle here too 😉
Yes!!! Lol!!
I was hoping the NYT would avoid this kind of oppression of free expression from a superbly informed economist opinion writer - sad. But we could see over this past year during the election campaign how the NYT jumped all over Biden for every slurred word or gaffe while giving Trump a pass on some of his most egregious statements and actions - all toned down or not even confronted. The legacy media is partly responsible for helping Trump regain power - and they'll pay for it dearly as we all will - that is those of us who give a hot damn about our democracy - or what's left of it. Glad you're here on The Contrarian, Prof Krugman!!
I left WAPO the day Bezos changed the policy of endorsing candidates. I left NYT (as much as I miss the crosswords) when they watered down the Trump pieces. 🖕 to them both.