In the summer of 2020, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet lost his job over an article. Some of the peaceful protests against the murder of George Floyd had devolved into rioting and looting. Arkansas senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece, titled “Send In the Troops,” generated immediate and intense backlash against Cotton, The New York Times, and Bennet in particular. In days, a run-of-the-mill opinion piece, voicing what Bennet has described as a “mainstream conservative argument,” upended a respected journalist’s career. Perhaps it was just the hysteria that prevailed during that summer. Or perhaps it was one step in the downfall of legacy newspapers like The New York Times, and a symptom of the erosion of objectivity and open discourse in journalism.
On February 26, Bennet gave a talk sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Program for Public Thinking, titled “Is There a Mainstream Media?” and largely inspired by his December 2023 critique of The New York Times in The Economist. Currently The Economist’s Lexington columnist, Bennet’s essay exposed the culture of editorialized journalism espoused by many of the editors and reporters of the Times. As an early career writer on the Times’s Metro desk, Bennet explained in his essay, he had gained respect for senior editors who taught him the culture of the Times—one in which all stories were told, even ones that weren’t seen as valuable. Beneath that culture was curiosity and open discourse, and Bennet came to love it.
Bennet would go on to serve as the editor in chief of The Atlantic before returning to the Times in 2016. By then journalism had changed. In a savvy financial decision, The New York Times had hired young writers, many of whom had never had any professional experience in journalism, to stave off digital competition and bring Times coverage into the internet age. When Bennet rejoined the Times, he realized that nobody had bothered to teach these reporters the lessons he had learned on the Metro desk; they were incurious, opposed to any debate or nuance that might offend their political sensibilities. The promise of “intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion” that had colored the Times’s work from the very beginning had fallen out of favor. In his essay, Bennet labeled the values of these new journalists “illiberal,” inspired by “campus politics” that prized whatever the social media mob deemed morally correct. Bennet’s hiring of Bret Stephens, a conservative, as an Opinion columnist was not acceptable in the eyes of the illiberal. It was the Times’s new mission to shape all its coverage to reflect the views of its staff. Open discourse about uncomfortable ideas was no longer welcome.
Though Cotton’s editorial was controversial, it expressed a sentiment held by many conservatives at the time. By publishing it, Bennet thought he was giving space in a liberal newspaper to a basic conservative talking point, promoting the curiosity for and interrogation of others’ ideas. But the editorial was so unpopular with Times staff that many employees called in sick and others quit their jobs. After a series of meetings and town halls trying to mitigate the drama over the editorial, Bennet was ordered to resign.
In his talk at the University of Chicago, Bennet argued—he is hardly the first to do so—that the legacy media (what he calls the “institutional media”) are under attack from figures like Elon Musk, who called for the arrest of a 60 Minutes reporter and claims that many legacy media institutions are mouthpieces for the state, and President Trump, who has banned Associated Press reporters from the Oval Office. In particular, Trump’s ownership of Truth Social, where he makes announcements about his political decisions, troubled Bennet: “The president himself is the largest shareholder in his own influential media company. That’s what a mouthpiece for the state looks like. And it’s a far more partisan and, in my view, less trustworthy means of understanding the world than the legacy media ever was.”
But Bennet was unwilling to let the institutional media off the hook for internal transformations that have eroded their much-repeated aspirations to objectivity. Bennet pointed to a number of major influences that have challenged the “old values of open-minded and fair American journalism.” First was the loss of a valuable training ground in a young journalist’s career—local journalism, which built skills, experience, and a stomach for editors’ authority. Social media, Bennet argued, has meanwhile rewarded independence and personal narrative. Newer news sites, and now legacy news sources, freely mix “news and opinion in their reports because that’s what the internet reward[s].” This not only makes it difficult for journalists to “do the hard work of questioning groupthink,” but actually makes journalists the enforcers of groupthink.
Most importantly, Bennet argued, the internet has destroyed the business model that American journalism had thrived on for the past 150 years. As advertising money fled to digital giants like Google and Facebook, newspapers began to realize that the subscription model was most profitable, and the “easiest way to get someone to subscribe and then to resubscribe was to constantly assure them that you saw the world the same way they did, to affirm them in their assumptions and their opinions.” This, Bennet argued, is why media institutions have become so partisan. Open discourse is not financially viable. (Nor were local newspapers. Each trend in the digital age reinforces another.)
The old kind of journalism—the kind that provided facts, had empathy for the subjects of its stories, and that trusted its readers to make judgments for themselves—does not exist anymore, Bennet said. Instead, today’s journalists “believe it’s the journalist’s proper role—even their moral responsibility—to be the judges themselves.” It is more profitable for newspapers to promote partisanship and contempt for other points of view. Bennet said that while he was at the Times, any sort of nuance towards Trump or his voters was seen as “as morally wrong, ‘platforming’ dangerous people and ideas.” If his colleagues at The New York Times disagreed with an editorial written by a conservative colleague, they went after that colleague on Twitter.
In spite of this depressing reality, Bennet hopes that the institutional media can regain the trust of the American public by recognizing that they “broke faith with mainstream America”—a formidable task considering the extent of the damage. But beyond a diagnosis of the transformation and a prescription for the institutional media to acknowledge its failure, it is not clear what would fix journalism’s current woes—besides the mandatory placement of young journalists in entry-level positions where their egos can be broken and their writing can gain humility, which Bennet was too humble to suggest.
In his talk, Bennet remained defeated and in awe of the changes that led to his firing. “How is it,” he wondered, “that a paper that prided itself for more than a hundred years on doing its work without fear or favor could see it as a point of principle to declare broadly popular conservative ideas too scary to cover?” Does he not believe his own argument? He was also quick to defend the changes the internet wrought on his line of work: “A lot of those consequences, including for journalism, have been good.” Bennet’s assessment, however, is much more critical of social media’s ills than its supposed good. Why try to defend it, considering that there isn’t much good to say about it at all? Why hang on to the utopian dream of an internet that connects all Americans, when the reality is anything but?
The morning after his talk, Bennet joined the editors and friends of The Harper Review for a breakfast and discussion of his critique of The New York Times and journalism as a whole. Editor in chief Noah Glasgow asked Bennet what qualities he thinks a liberal rather than an “illiberal” journalist ought to have. In short: humility. Maintaining the “journalistic posture of always being […] eager and aspirational to challenge your own assumptions and engage with the hardest arguments on the other side,” Bennet said. He added, “It meets people where they are and takes them all seriously as equals and as individuals.” It was clear that Bennet’s creed of humility is the most important aspect of free and open journalism.
Because of several oblique references that Bennet made in both his essay and his talk to “campus politics,” I was personally interested in how Bennet might define campus politics. He was reluctant to do so: “I’ve done some reporting on campuses and watched what has been happening, but I’m over my skis on this one.” He quickly added: “I’ve become a believer in the Chicago Principles. It seems logical that the university would avoid taking positions that would prejudice debate on campus.” Based on the argument in his essay, it seems like Bennet defines campus politics as the kind of inability to hear and process others’ viewpoints that young, digital-first writers and editors have brought with them to the Times directly from college campuses. Even, perhaps, at the University of Chicago, the flagbearer of free speech policy.
Bennet was more interested in hearing from the students at the table about what “the state of the debate” was on our campus. Students spoke about free speech and student journalism, while Bennet gave advice on issues of campus reporting. His “war stories” of reportage were fascinating and harrowing, including a tale of reporting from an active war zone. His only armor against the bombs falling down around him and his colleagues was a car with the words “TV” painted on the top. But Bennet warned that the totemic words of “TV” or “PRESS” may not prevent all danger, especially if students engage in guerilla, up-close reporting.
Bennet seemed to admire the grit of student journalists at the University of Chicago. Hearing stories about the Chicago Maroon reporting nightly on the encampment seemed to give him hope for the next crop of journalists entering the field, countering the nihilism permeating his lecture the night before. These were journalists who cared more about the story they reported than the story they wanted to tell. Bennet said, “Because the traditional pathways, the ones that I came up on, are attenuated, I admire the commitment of people like you”—those who want to go into journalism. “You have really valuable experience and clips of your own … Keep doing your own work, pitch places. For now, continuing to keep your hand in journalism will serve you well.”
Image: James Bennet speaks to members of The Harper Review at the Quadrangle Club. Photo: Evgenia Anastasakos.