The Lullaby of a Sleeping World

The best propaganda doesn’t lie. The best propaganda shows you the parts of the truth that its creators find useful.

That is how The New York Times operates. As a liberal reading an ostensibly liberal newspaper, I started noticing that The New York Times and I had different priorities about what mattered. Publishing a bunch of lies about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program back in 2003 was embarrassing, but at least it would have been news if it were true. The drumbeat of frantic headlines about Hillary Clinton’s email server in the summer of 2016 definitely wasn’t news.

Having helped elect Trump, The Times sat back, let the subscriptions from concerned liberals roll in, and promptly began sanewashing the new President. One of the more noticeable things about Trump is how he rambles while speaking, rolling from topic to topic without connecting logic, making elementary errors in fact and language, and generally deploying words without ever saying anything. The Times would chop a paragraph of gibberish into a logical sentence and cut out all the hesitations and jumps. It was weird. Just print what the man is saying and he’ll look like an idiot. Why put in the work to make him look good?

I started paying more attention to how The New York Times wrote about things. How they are masters of the past exonerative tense whenever an officer-involved shooting happened. How social programs have to justify their costs and benefits, but tax cuts don’t need to meet that burden. How a few dozen conservatives waving signs on a street corner get above the fold coverage, but hundreds of thousands of liberals and leftists and non-political people marching in alliance is page seven. Or how trans people existing is a major question that needs to be debated while Israel using American bombs to level Gaza doesn’t.

Neutral objectivity is the idolatry of post-war journalism. My framing isn’t neutral. I’m up front about that. Objectivity is what people call it when a frame matches all of their biases. Instead of a false neutrality, we can have honesty about our values, curiosity about what we’re drawn towards, and awareness of what our eyes are passing over. Similarly, I’m realistic rather than objective. Reality exists and there are facts on the ground, but journalism is about more than the facts. Journalism is about the creation of context. And like all human works, journalism is made out of choices: what to write about and how, who to talk to, how to frame an issue.

I do not have a crystal ball to peer into the hearts of publisher and chairman A.G. Sulzberger, executive editor Joseph Kahn, Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, or the rest of the senior editors, reporters, and columnists who make up the people of The New York Times. I only know their choices of what to publish, and in a word, those choices are Vichy.

Vichy is not about being a fascist. Vichy is about accepting that the goal of fascism won’t intersect your own life in any way, and it’s more prudent to reap the benefits of collaboration than it is to have principles. Vichy means publishing official lies as half of a “balanced” story is acceptable because it maintains your access. Vichy is taking the arguments of open regime propagandists as legitimate concerns rather than cultural wedge issues. Vichy is the unspoken assumption that certain people deserve to rule, and other people who do not have any actual power should still be held to account for the state of the world. Vichy is cowardice. Vichy is ignorance. Vichy is knowing Niemöller’s poem (“First they came for the Communists…”) and believing that you are not on the list.

Vichy matters, because The New York Times has a unique role in our media ecosystem. It’s been a tough couple of decades for newspapers, and The New York Times is the last paper standing not owned by a private equity vulture or billionaire ghoul. They’re still profitable thanks to lifestyle content like Games and Cooking. Being published in The New York Times is validation, that an issue is important or a perspective is true. And conversely if it isn’t in The Times, people won’t be thinking about it. My goal in chronicling and criticizing the alleged journalism of The Vichy New York Times is to pierce the veil of objectivity they deploy around their choices.

This is personal for me. I managed to get many of my family members to cancel their New York Times subscriptions back during Trump 1 and watched them drift back. So in the fine tradition of using a public forum to make personal remarks:

Dad, you’ve put your name on 34 letters against Trump, which is a lot more than most people do. You are a lifelong New York Times subscriber. You call those letters your legacy, but honestly, they are something The Times prints to demonstrate its independence before the staff goes to dinner with the very people ensuring your grandchildren will live in a poorer, sicker, stupider, and more unjust country than the one you were raised in. You know all about trying to change systems from within. Symbolic space for dissent is what power offers when it isn’t going to make any real reforms.

Mom, you do such amazing work protecting communities from wildfire. You are always informed, always prepared, and know which political fights matter and which ones are distractions. It kills me to watch you scroll through the slick professional comfort of The Times on your tablet to manage your anxiety and boredom. I know, because I do the exact same thing. You should have an intellectual community as adventurous as you are.

Dick, Nat, you are the best people I know. I’m so grateful that you’re family, and so impressed that you live your lives according to your values, even when it is a more difficult path. I don’t believe that you have to start your day with the Wordle or are best served by the recipes they recommend.

And to everyone else reading this, we don’t have a lot of power, but we can vote with our wallets and cancel our subscriptions. We can vote with our eyes and stop clicking their links, or at least pay attention to people doing real journalism. And we can make it clear that working for The New York Times is incredibly uncool and that Times affiliates have neither respectability nor credibility. America deserves a newspaper that stands for the people, not the bosses, and certainly not the fanatics who have control of all three branches of government right now.

Welcome to The Vichy New York Times. The occupation will end; the record of who collaborated will not

— Editor in Chief Michael Burnam-Fink