How The New York Times Went Woke
Confirmation bias has distorted the paper’s reporting.
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P.S. Nellie Bowles is also the guest on this Saturday’s edition of The Good Fight!
It’s been a little while now, and it might be hard to remember that it was ever any different, but remember the pandemic and the rage. Remember many of us isolated, on our phones, on our computers, the stock market strangely rising as the government sent money flooding into the country. Remember that during all of this, there was a murder. The death was filmed. It went viral. And in the shadow of that pandemic and that murder and that money, American politics went berserk. Liberal intelligentsia, in particular, became wild, wild with rage and optimism, and fresh ideas from academia that began to reshape every part of society. The ideology that came shrieking in would go on to reshape America in some ways that are interesting and even good, and in other ways that are appalling, but mostly in ways that are—I hate to say it—funny.
It was a new era. Liberals—those weak, wishy-washy compromisers, the hemmers and hawers—were out. Washing them away was the New Progressive. They came with politics built on the idea that people are profoundly good, denatured only by capitalism, by colonialism and whiteness and heteronormativity. It was a heady, beautiful philosophy.
I was, in those days, a successful young reporter at The New York Times, a New Progressive doing the only job she had ever wanted. Donald J. Trump was the president when I joined. Subscriptions were surging, and subscribers wanted something specific for their money: The Times would be the heart of resistance. My stories—fun riffs from Silicon Valley, send-ups of conservative figures—fit right in. My work was cited in all-company meetings. I wrote big stories. I would go into the bureau on Sunday, and I never missed a happy hour.
Most of the new guard had come there for that revolution. They entered the building on a mission. They weren’t there to tell dry news factoids so much as wield the pen for justice. It was a more beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time, more compelling for the writer and for the reader. Yes, it was a little confusing to do reporting for a place that was so sure everyone was good, except, of course, conservatives, who were very very bad and whose politics only come from hate. Asking for coherence is white supremacy. I figured it out. I loved my job.
Reflecting back now, a little chagrined, the newspaper leaders admit it got maybe a little out of hand. “I think that the early days of Trump in particular, were, ‘join us for the mission.’ I think it went too far,” said the paper’s top editor this week. “It was overly simplistic. And I think the big push that you’re seeing us make and reestablish our norms and emphasize independent journalism and build a more resilient culture comes out of some of the excesses of that period.”
I wish them luck course-correcting. And in the meantime, it’s not exactly been bad business: Subscriptions are through the roof. People want their biases confirmed. They want to be cocooned in feedback that they were always right. Anyway, it’s worth understanding how it worked, exactly, briefly.
The main group of in-house Narrative Enforcers at The New York Times were the Disinformation Experts, and, in due course, they clocked me as a problem. One day I was writing a profile of PragerU, a conservative viral-video production studio that had perfected trolling college campuses with funny student-on-the-street videos. After I’d done most of my reporting, I was told that I needed to meet with the in-house Disinformation Expert, a special person who would discuss how to incorporate disinformation analysis into my piece.
I’ll call him Todd. He’s cool, a prolific Slack presence.
Todd and I chat. He tells me that I need to more fully emphasize the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) “Hatewatch’s” assessment of PragerU.
The Hatewatch file was based on the work of a sociologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill named Francesca Tripodi. She had “analyzed scriptural inference in conservative news practices,” the SPLC explains:
Tripodi spent extensive time with a conservative women’s group and a college Republican group for her study. “It was through these groups that I started learning about PragerU and how much it is a beloved source of news and information amongst most people I spoke with,” she tells Hatewatch. “[PragerU] gets people questioning and looking for more information, and if nothing else, it is very blatantly algorithmically connected” to the extreme right content found on YouTube, Tripodi explains.
In other words, this sociologist was accusing PragerU of hate because it was connected, via an algorithm, to other things that were worse.
I needed to chide PragerU for the sin of getting people questioning and for the fact that when you search for Republicans on YouTube, you can also eventually find yourself being recommended videos from people further to the right.
I said OK. So I added more SPLC into the story.
In the meantime, I became fascinated by Todd and the movement he was leading inside the paper.
He spent a lot of time in the NYT Slack posting in the #Disinformation channel, which, when I was in it, had some hundred members who posted a stream of conservative news links as a sort of group disinformation watch. Sometimes people would ask about whether something is Bad, like a picture of some people holding three fingers up—Hey, is this white supremacy? (It wasn’t.) He’d post TikToks that were apparently disinformation—like a video made by some nurses making fun of Covid restrictions. He’d drop in tweets calling out right-wing internet activity from accounts with names like @socialistdogmom.
Todd was there in Slack to remind everyone that the idea Covid might have come from a lab was a conspiracy theory. He was the authority on these things.
Anyway, this is also not a story about my heroism, pushing back on the disinfo complex. The opposite. In the end, I wanted the hit of that byline. I needed a byline like I needed dinner, and they needed more on PragerU’s disinfo.
So I called up someone at Berkeley who I knew would give me the quotes that were needed. And I added to the story:
Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he notices an impact from PragerU’s content, which he describes as close to the edge of conspiratorial disinformation but not quite there.
“It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.
The piece ran. I got the praise I needed. Good placement too (A1, thank you very much). And I didn’t think much more about it.
Eventually, though, the compromises drove me too crazy. Eventually I didn’t want to say that everything slightly off message was “disinformation.” And so, eventually, I quit that dream job. And I started reporting for myself and for this book (what you’re reading now is an excerpt from the very start). Over the years of reporting this, of going to Antifa rallies and DSA-chic homeless encampments, I got to see the arc of the movement. First from the inside and then later, with somewhat more jaded eyes, from without.
Nellie Bowles writes the TGIF column for The Free Press, a new media company she started with her wife (or, technically, her wife started and Nellie joined when it seemed like things were going well). Previously, she was a reporter at The New York Times.
Adapted from Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles, published by Thesis, a division of Penguin Publishing Group, on May 14, 2024.
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Since I am a paid subscriber to all three: Persuasion, The Free Press and the NYT, I am a somewhat believable critic. In one word: "OH MY &*^%,7%!!! God!" It hurts to read the NYT! And I do every single morning. They are some of the most smarmy self-convinced maliciously sarcastic meanies I have ever read. And if Trump wins I fully blame them. Thank you for letting me say this in a safe place.
"Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies"
I thought: NFW does this exist! So I looked it up: Rosenthal is Chair of the "Institute of Societal Studies" and editor of the "Journal for Right Wing Studies."
They claim: "The Center and JRWS are nonideological and seek to promote research, dialogue, and debate on all aspects of right-wing politics, past and present, in the West and around the globe."
but if you look a little further, you find this:
"Perhaps not since the 1930s and 1940s have concerned citizens been so acutely aware of the threats facing liberal democracy. "
And of course, every article is written by a lefty, who either approaches viewpoints to the right of them through a patronizing pith-helmet "studying the primates" lens or with a "this is Weimar Germany and it's time to panic because the Nazis are nearly upon us" screed.
Yeah right, this journal is "non-ideological."