The heart of my objection is the idea that you can change the world by changing the new york times. Especially now, but not even back when newspapers mattered do I think that would work in a lasting way.
The New York Times isn’t/wasn’t the paper-of-record that gets to decide how everybody will get their news. They are/were a paper with certain journalistic standards and practices that rose in the marketplace of ideas to a level of trust and importance. When the NYT changes what it does, in some short run it is likely influential, but in a longer run if the change is not appealing to its audience, the audience loses faith in the NYT. If NYT articles became somewhat consistently one-sided because they were no longer publishing only partially-attributable information, would the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Huff Post, NPR, NBC, etc etc etc follow suit? Or would they instead aggressively market the stories they were able to cover that the NYT could not because of its policy?
We may or may not get the quality of new that we deserve. We absolutely get the quality of news that we are willing to pay attention to. And shifting the tastes of the public is not as simple as an editorial decision.
The heart of my objection is the idea that you can change the world by changing the new york times. Especially now, but not even back when newspapers mattered do I think that would work in a lasting way.
The New York Times isn’t/wasn’t the paper-of-record that gets to decide how everybody will get their news. They are/were a paper with certain journalistic standards and practices that rose in the marketplace of ideas to a level of trust and importance. When the NYT changes what it does, in some short run it is likely influential, but in a longer run if the change is not appealing to its audience, the audience loses faith in the NYT. If NYT articles became somewhat consistently one-sided because they were no longer publishing only partially-attributable information, would the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Huff Post, NPR, NBC, etc etc etc follow suit? Or would they instead aggressively market the stories they were able to cover that the NYT could not because of its policy?
We may or may not get the quality of new that we deserve. We absolutely get the quality of news that we are willing to pay attention to. And shifting the tastes of the public is not as simple as an editorial decision.