In the Room: The Times' Latest Woke Kerfuffle

Good evening, I'm Dylan Byers.

Welcome to the weekend, and welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry. In tonight's email, some fresh reporting on The New York Times editorial board's latest controversy.

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The Times' Latest Woke Kerfuffle

How an unsigned editorial upended Twitter, presaged a new Times agenda, and revealed the media company's challenges in the post-Trump era.

DYLAN BYERS

One quirk of living on the West Coast is that, waking up three hours behind New York and Washington, I often arrive at the media fracas du jour from the extremity of its outrage radius, and then have to work my way toward the epicenter. The first thing I read on Friday morning, at 6:15 a.m., was a tweet from Adam Davidson, the podcasting pioneer and journalist, who wrote a much-heralded column for the Times Magazine during the height of the Hugo Lindgren era. “If I still worked at the NYT,” Davidson tweeted, “I would seriously think about quitting today.”

I then noticed that my friend and fellow Puck partner, Peter Hamby, had offered a characteristically savvy macro-view on “the debate over the NYT editorial” (essentially, that it didn't really matter). Finally, after perusing some more tweets from Blue-Check Media, most of them quite critical of whatever apparently egregious crime the New York Times editorial board had just committed, I arrived at the scene of the purported original sin: A lengthy editorial arguing that Americans “are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”

Whatever your views on the state of public discourse these days, the editorial left itself vulnerable to criticism from the outset. On some level, it seemed at times like one of those ambitiously lofty pieces, written by multiple people, which never quite articulated whatever it had been truly intended to posit, and instead pissed off everyone with its facile platitudes that read like a corporate dispatch from the Mount Olympus of hyper-privileged liberal democracy. Its tone occasionally gave off the whiff of annoyed Dalton alums who worry that they can no longer say whatever the hell they want—without proper recognition that many have long been deprived of that right in the first place...

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