The Great Big Mistake at Our Great Big Paper
So, let’s start here — the New York Times will not save you.
No matter what they say, the level of damage that will or won’t be done to our country in the next couple of years will be dictated by on-the-ground organizing, hard work, and people who put the fear of god into their representatives.
But the New York Times does matter. The newspaper is often hopelessly out of touch. Its positioning as the savior of liberal democracy has largely been oversold. But at the end of the day, in the Venn diagram of high-quality, widely consumed, and profitable media companies, the Times is still one of the best we’ve got.
The story of the Times hiring Bret Stephens as an opinion writer is part of a larger story about how lies infiltrate our society. I don’t have a ton to say about the hire itself that wasn’t covered here.
What I want to focus on is the process that led us here and why it was such a stupid business decision by the newspaper.
Cleaning Out the Webs
Telling a lie to one person can be tricky. You have to keep your story straight so as not to contradict yourself over time, and you have to prevent them from poking holes in that story, both in the moment and in the future. But because of a variety of factors in our society, telling a lie to many people is actually quite easy.
In this case, the lie starts with misleading, bad faith arguments by people who either have massive financial incentives to make them or have devoted their entire professions to provoking liberals. After enough of those arguments, the lie catches on with a wide swath of the population and gains a constituency.
Once there is a constituency that believes the lie, certain elite institutions married to the most simplistic version of “objectivity” feel called upon to represent that viewpoint. And that is how the NY Times hires someone willing to fight on that lie.
I think it’s worthwhile to hear smart arguments from people you disagree with, even if the Times should feel no obligation to pay people to do so. I believe people who oppose action on climate change by invoking arguments about job losses in certain industries, acknowledging the reality of entrenched industries in our economy, or talking about the burden faced by lower-income people are off-base, and potentially dangerous, but at least worth listening to.
But people who deny climate change is happening or that it‘s being caused by humans are either lying or ignorant.
Is Bret Stephens lying, or ignorant? I’m not totally sure which one is worse.
From Bad to Worse
Stephens argues for a number of abhorrent views that range from getting war boners to straightforward racism that’s as casual as it is disgusting. But his first column was deliberately calculated to maximize outrage from a certain segment of the population: New York Times subscribers.
Now, it seems fairly stupid to spend what was likely a mammoth sum of money to intentionally piss off your customers. It begins to look even worse when you think about how the Times actually makes its money these days.
The primary drivers of the Times revenue are subscriptions and advertising. To that end, a couple of questions:
- Does Stephens serve the current subscribers of the Times? (No — poorly reasoned, simplistic arguments for things that the vast majority of the subscribers disagree with adds basically nothing)
- Does Stephens help them gain new subscribers? (No–Stephens’ ideas don’t have a real constituency outside of the elite, neocon worldview that was routed handily by a 70 year-old conspiracy theorist with the world’s biggest, smelliest diaper in the Republican primary. And as small as that constituency is, why the hell would they pay for the Times to support one person who’s not particularly good at arguing for their worldview?)
- Does Stephens increase the number of page views the Times gets? (After one column, the answer appears to absolutely be yes. I could hear the deafening tap tap tap of hate clicks on this one, which we all HAVE to get better about.)
Making that trade-off is a bad idea. It’s even worse when you look at the direction the Times is heading — away from voluminous clicks that can be sold to advertisers and towards a product that justifies its worth to their customers through a high-quality experience.
The Times has branded itself as the tip of the spear in our new reality and sold subscriptions to thousands of people premised on that idea. If the Times doesn’t uphold its end of the bargain, it doesn’t deserve people’s money. Or, as Alex Pareene put it much better than I can,
What will be really funny to watch is the way the rest of their plan will play out. This was all intentional, and I’m guessing they knew exactly how this would unfold.
The playbook goes like this:
- The Times opinion page wanted a conservative with a decent amount of credibility in conservative circles that also opposes Trump, like they do!
- Most conservatives that were loud during the primary have either acquiesced and become straightforward Trump fans or just shut the fuck up.
- Stephens has vocally opposed Trump before, during, and after the election.
- BUT — they couldn’t have their new prize conservative come right out of the gate and say FDT in his first column.
- So what does he do? Write a piece that he knew would piss off liberals in a way that would achieve maximum impact: Invoke Hillary Clinton and piss on climate change science with a weak shit, Coke Zero argument against established science and facts themselves.
- Here’s what will come next — I’d put money on the fact that Stephens’ next column (or maybe the one after) will be some variety of anti-Trump message that will make a bunch of gullible liberals say “Boy, this guy’s not so bad after all! He’s one of us!”
It’ll be sad to watch, but that’s where we’re all going.
So who cares? Why all of these words?
I’m a subscriber, and I’ll stay a subscriber for now, because I still think the Times is important. The do a lot of great journalism, and it’s tough to match the resources that they can muster for important stories.
But things have been going really well since November for the company, and they did something stupid, and I really think they have no idea why it was so stupid. A bunch of people just gave them a bunch of money and they spent it all on a matador flag to be waved in front of their customers’ faces. I get what they were thinking, but there’s no doubt they fucked this one up. If they don’t understand why, they’ll repeat this mistake, and I doubt people will be so forgiving next time.
