Just a brief note to grumble about the reference to David French. Yes, he is a "fierce supporter of free speech," but he's also an unrelenting advocate of religious freedom, which is something else the NYT could use more of. I hadn't read him much at National Review, but for me he came on like gangbusters at The Dispatch. I'd never really read anything by an evangelical Christian before, and while I'm still a Catholic, I read his Dispatch essays faithfully, including his pretty wonderful Sunday column dedicated to religious issues.
And that's something I hope he can bring to the NYT as well -- some respect for religion.
I've often wondered if one factor was looking at the comments on certain hot button issues and realizing how out of step with their readership they were. Or at least a significant portion of their readership. Often the 2000-upvote top comment would be from someone liberal but not woke, critical of the way the Times was framing the issues.
Funny, I just re-subscribed to the paper a couple of days ago after cancelling it in the beginning of 2021. I was very pleased to see McWhorter. Though I disagree with French's stance on abortion (I'm a fiercely pro-choice woman), I appreciate his intellectual honesty, intelligence, nuance, and general compassion. I enjoyed reading his views on the Dispatch. I was also very pleased about the NY Times free speech editorial and the important opinion piece "Are Women Being Erased" on the rebranding of women as "people with uteruses" or whatever monstrosities. If you take the edges of the left and right, you wind up in the same spot, is what the author noted. Thank god The NY Times is willing to assert this truth.
Well said. As a NY Times subscriber I'm glad to see the opinion pendulum swinging back towards more of an equilibrium. The paper will always be a liberal bastion and I'm fine with that, but its slant towards progressive orthodoxy over the last few years has been transparent and annoying.
These are welcome observations. However, please note that the hiring of John McWhorter in August, 2021, was not the first sign of an ideological thaw. In June it was already possible to write,
"Now, within the past two months and with increasing frequency, The New York Times has run multiple items that, taken together, signal an institutional shift from a preponderance of sympathy with radical advocates to a preponderance of concern about Democrats’ keeping such company. Their unifying theme is the question, sometimes made roughly explicit, “Can the left wing face facts?” The principal facts are that demographic change does not look like delivering power to the left as expected; that hard-left activists’ recent signature issue, defunding the police, lacks a grassroots constituency; that people who make signature issues of such unpopular things pose an electoral liability to their party; and that winning elections is more conducive to progress than walking over hot coals." (http://thefamilyproperty.blogspot.com/2021/07/bad-company.html)
The signs of change came cumulatively, in the content of news analyses and commentaries. It was a largely thankless task to point this out to fellow contrarian progressives, some of whom are still routinely listing The New York Times as an example of an all-in far-left newspaper.
This is good news, indeed. I only wish the same could be said of my hometown paper, the Washington Post. Maybe Mr. Moskowitz can do some analysis of the other bastion of mainstream progressive journalism. Even the Times at its nadir didn't follow the annoyingly racialist practice of capitalizing "white." Anecdotally, at least, I don't see much or any movement at the Post, other than maybe a few more non-progressive pieces on the op-ed pages. And pertinent to the Moskowitz's example, I have yet to see a balanced, nuanced piece in the Post on transgender issues. The implication is usually that anyone who expresses doubts about aspects of "gender affirming care" among young people is a conservative crank motivated by "hate." For that matter, when did "hate" become something that only non-progressives are capable of?
Just a brief note to grumble about the reference to David French. Yes, he is a "fierce supporter of free speech," but he's also an unrelenting advocate of religious freedom, which is something else the NYT could use more of. I hadn't read him much at National Review, but for me he came on like gangbusters at The Dispatch. I'd never really read anything by an evangelical Christian before, and while I'm still a Catholic, I read his Dispatch essays faithfully, including his pretty wonderful Sunday column dedicated to religious issues.
And that's something I hope he can bring to the NYT as well -- some respect for religion.
I agree.
I've often wondered if one factor was looking at the comments on certain hot button issues and realizing how out of step with their readership they were. Or at least a significant portion of their readership. Often the 2000-upvote top comment would be from someone liberal but not woke, critical of the way the Times was framing the issues.
Funny, I just re-subscribed to the paper a couple of days ago after cancelling it in the beginning of 2021. I was very pleased to see McWhorter. Though I disagree with French's stance on abortion (I'm a fiercely pro-choice woman), I appreciate his intellectual honesty, intelligence, nuance, and general compassion. I enjoyed reading his views on the Dispatch. I was also very pleased about the NY Times free speech editorial and the important opinion piece "Are Women Being Erased" on the rebranding of women as "people with uteruses" or whatever monstrosities. If you take the edges of the left and right, you wind up in the same spot, is what the author noted. Thank god The NY Times is willing to assert this truth.
Well said. As a NY Times subscriber I'm glad to see the opinion pendulum swinging back towards more of an equilibrium. The paper will always be a liberal bastion and I'm fine with that, but its slant towards progressive orthodoxy over the last few years has been transparent and annoying.
Abusers know a secret. If they rage extreme abuse on their victims, they only need to return to average abuse to appear normal.
These are welcome observations. However, please note that the hiring of John McWhorter in August, 2021, was not the first sign of an ideological thaw. In June it was already possible to write,
"Now, within the past two months and with increasing frequency, The New York Times has run multiple items that, taken together, signal an institutional shift from a preponderance of sympathy with radical advocates to a preponderance of concern about Democrats’ keeping such company. Their unifying theme is the question, sometimes made roughly explicit, “Can the left wing face facts?” The principal facts are that demographic change does not look like delivering power to the left as expected; that hard-left activists’ recent signature issue, defunding the police, lacks a grassroots constituency; that people who make signature issues of such unpopular things pose an electoral liability to their party; and that winning elections is more conducive to progress than walking over hot coals." (http://thefamilyproperty.blogspot.com/2021/07/bad-company.html)
The signs of change came cumulatively, in the content of news analyses and commentaries. It was a largely thankless task to point this out to fellow contrarian progressives, some of whom are still routinely listing The New York Times as an example of an all-in far-left newspaper.
This is good news, indeed. I only wish the same could be said of my hometown paper, the Washington Post. Maybe Mr. Moskowitz can do some analysis of the other bastion of mainstream progressive journalism. Even the Times at its nadir didn't follow the annoyingly racialist practice of capitalizing "white." Anecdotally, at least, I don't see much or any movement at the Post, other than maybe a few more non-progressive pieces on the op-ed pages. And pertinent to the Moskowitz's example, I have yet to see a balanced, nuanced piece in the Post on transgender issues. The implication is usually that anyone who expresses doubts about aspects of "gender affirming care" among young people is a conservative crank motivated by "hate." For that matter, when did "hate" become something that only non-progressives are capable of?