Journalist James Bennet, formerly of the New York Times and once considered the “heir apparent” to run the paper, before being forced out amid a left-wing staff revolt in 2020, recently gave a talk for The Point, a Chicago-based scholarly magazine, titled “Is There a Mainstream Media?”
Bennet garnered the attention of media-bias mavens in 2023 with his 17,000-word essay for his current employers at The Economist magazine. Bennet, who is no conservative, discussed the intolerant illiberalism that has infected his old paper in recent years and that forced him out of his job as Editorial Page Editor in 2020. That came after a staff revolt triggered by Bennet running an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas that called upon President Donald Trump to use troops to quell violence connected to Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s death. Cotton’s offending piece, “Send In the Troops,” was quickly weighed down with an apologetic Editor’s Note.
Bennet’s talk at The Point took a wide-screen view, alluding to various structural and economic explanations for the decline in public trust in what he called the “institutional media," such as the rise of the web, the corresponding decline in ad revenue, and the resulting turn toward maintaining a partisan subscriber base. But Bennet also saw a harmful lurch to the left in the crop of new, young journalists. Recounting his return to the Times in 2016 after a long stint with The Atlantic, he found everything was changing for the worse:
I was brought in to do a version at the Times of what we’d done at the Atlantic: digitize the opinion operation and widen the range of views to better reflect the breadth and richness of American debate. People at the paper were perfectly happy with most of that. I never got an objection from inside the Times to new voices I brought in from the left, but almost every time we hired or even published a conservative, it upset at least some of the staff, starting actually from near the beginning, when I hired Bret Stephens, who was already a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and at the time, one of the most eloquent critics of Donald Trump. But some of his views were just seen as beyond the pale by some of our colleagues, and they felt free to go after him on Twitter.
I lasted four years in that job until we published the Tom Cotton piece. It’s a funny thing to work for an institution you really believed in for nineteen years, and what you’re known for is getting fired from it. But that’s where I am. And you can challenge my view of what happened. But that episode was just one of the more extreme of many clashes within the Times and other newsrooms, which continue to this day, between the old institutional values and the new ascendant ones.
Bennet even suggested that Hamas leaders got more understanding treatment in the newsroom than did the democratically elected Donald Trump.
….I was the bureau chief in Jerusalem. It was during the Second Intifada, and I spent a lot of time in Gaza interviewing Hamas leaders and members of Hamas. It was just a basic part of my job to understand and report on their worldview, to inform Times readers of it, better equip them to deal with it and our governments deal with it. I never got attacked by my colleagues for doing that kind of work. It was seen as a basic part of our job. But after the election of Donald Trump, doing that kind of journalism about our fellow citizens was seen as morally wrong, “platforming” dangerous people and ideas. And that distorted the coverage and therefore readers’ understanding of life in America.
