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Tyrone Slothrop · 11-23-2020, 09:59 PM

I missed that Matt Yglesias started his own Substack newsletter. I was just look at something he wrote last week, and learned something, which is that the internal criticism at the NYT about things like the Cotton op-ed wasn't coming from reporters:

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Reeves Wiedeman’s recent article about internal tensions at The New York Times includes this passage, which gets at a dynamic that I think you see across the media landscape. The vast majority of the people who work at any given publication are not professional political journalists, and generally the further you get from the ~~political journalism~~ section of a media organization the more left-wing things get:

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Of all the fronts on which the Times was being pushed to change, the strongest insurrectionary energy was coming from legions of newsroom-adjacent employees in digital jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago. The employees responsible for distributing the Times in the past — typesetters, pressmen, delivery drivers — had never been encouraged to speak up about the ethical questions at the heart of the paper’s journalism. But the app developers and software engineers who deliver the Times’ journalism to the world have held their hands up in just as many Ivy League seminars as their editorial peers. They might be too shy to march over to a masthead editor and complain about a clumsy headline, but #newsroom-feedback had opened a digital door to criticism. Reporters found that suddenly it was the Times’ programmers and developers, rather than their editors, who were critiquing their work. During the town hall about the Cotton op-ed, one data engineer said on Slack, “How many such process failures would be tolerated in tech?”

Many of the techsurrectionists had come from Facebook or Uber or Amazon to join the Times out of a sense of mission, leaving the ethical quandaries of the tech industry for what they thought were more virtuous pastures. “I joined the company for one reason, and it’s because I feel a responsibility to be a part of a mission that I believe in,” a product manager who previously worked at Apple wrote in #newsroom-feedback after the Cotton op-ed. “This feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under us — not just because it feels like that mission [has] been severely compromised by the decision to publish this piece, but even more so because the products we’re building were used to do it.”

“It’s like making telephone poles,” one software engineer added, “and finding out they’re being used as battering rams.”

People who cover politics professionally, for better or worse, end up spending a fair amount of time talking to Republicans and trying to understand what conservatives think about public policy issues. If we’re doing our jobs at all correctly we can do stories that bring a mostly-progressive audience a greater understanding of what is happening on the other side. And when a professional political reporter does a bad job it’s often because he or she is taking a dive to maintain relationships with sources on the right, or bending over too far backwards to be fair.