Dean Baquet, Tom Junod, Mr. Rogers
... one of those things is not like the others
Hello Substackees! There is currently one homemade chocolate-chip cookie on my dining table, left over from a small get together we had at Paloma Media (aka, my pad) on Friday. We were welcoming Sarah Hepola in from Dallas and, because all three Fifth Column boys were in the same zip code at the same time, they hopped into the studio together and recorded an episode.
For those following along, this is just about the last episode the Fifth guys will do over on Patreon, having hopped over in a sweet deal with Substack, which, as we obviously know, is the place to be, and speaking of, Hepola and I made it official and launched our own little dealie over there this week.
There are four episodes up and I’ll drop a fifth later tonight. There will be some paywalled material (…girl’s gotta eat) but we hope to have at least one free podcast a week.
Plus ca change: It was announced last week that Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, would be stepping down. You can read an exhaustive profile about Joe Kahn, who’ll be taking over. I wrote a bit about Baquet’s failings at the Times this morning, about the tenor of the paper these past two years. That’s pasted below.
Speaking of articles: wow, did I read the best piece in recent memory, Tom Junod and Paula Lavigne on “The Most Dangerous College Football Player in History,” though I’m not actually sure that’s the title; doesn’t matter, settle in and read this tremendous and tremendously horrifying piece. Tom Junod is one of the best journalists of any era, I am such a fan. I’ll wager many of you are familiar with his 9/11 story “Falling Man” (paywalled, unfortunately). Junod’s “My Friend Mr. Rogers” is a piece of deep emotion and beauty and I urge you to read it (not paywalled!).
I was on a plane, oh I don’t know, three or four ago. A guy of maybe 30 was sitting in the seat across and one row ahead of me. He was talking on the phone before we took off. I gleaned whoever was on the other end was saying he should watch Won’t You Be My Neighbor? but that he might cry. I then proceeded to watch this man gently weep through the movie. When I watched it sometime later, I did too.
I’ve been asked several times whether I am going back to Ukraine. The answer is: maybe, and if so, it will be in the later part of May. Get in touch with me here or DM on Twitter if there are things you think I should know before I go.
Signing off with love, saving the last cookie for you xx
Donald McNeil Jr. and the State of Play at the New York Times
There are some journalism stories considered insider baseball. While they might get those in the profession apoplectic, they really don't count to the rest of the world.
What happened to Donald McNeil Jr. is not one of the those stories.
McNeil, a 45-year veteran at the New York Times, was the paper's star science reporter in January 2021, reporting on COVID as well as appearing frequently on its breakout podcast, The Daily. He was the person millions listened to for information about the pandemic during a terrifying time, and so, as these things go, the one targeted for destruction.
They came from within the paper, at first not directly, but feeding information - I use the term loosely - to an outside source, the Daily Beast, which decided that a two-year-old incident reported third-hand was just the thing to bring a man down. I tweeted about it day-of:
Much ink and many digital minutes have been devoted to what happened, including this past week, Matt Welch writing for Reason about Times executive editor Dean Baquet stepping down. In a season of what one expects will be many hosannahs for Baquet, he will get few from Welch, including specifically Baquet's utter buckling to the small portion of Times newsroom staff who called for McNeil's head, which Baquet handed over but, as Welch writes:
This was not nearly punishment enough for at least 150 of McNeil's colleagues, who, declaring themselves "outraged and in pain," countered that McNeil's intentions were "irrelevant" and demanded an apology, a reinvestigation, and an organization-wide study about how racial bias informs newsroom decision-making. They also made the damning allegation that McNeil had demonstrated "bias against people of color in his work and in interactions with colleagues over a period of years."
The way Donald McNeil was treated by the Times is disgraceful, absolutely. But the incident is worse than that. I realize I may sound old-fashioned or naive, but I expect news institutions to be insightful, to deliver stories with as much truth as they can and correct themselves when they are wrong. The Times did nothing of the kind when it came to McNeil. From cowardice and the misplaced belief that it was more expedient to sacrifice a man rather than take on a mob, Times brass pretended that a cadre of employees who believed they'd found an unassailable workaround, who believed in the invincibility of the racism accusation, were practicing anything more than a power grab. Consider for a moment how many knots in logic were required for Baquet to state, of an institution whose ostensible responsibility is to report in context, "We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent."
There are I am sure thousands of takes on what happened to Donald McNeil Jr., including from McNeil himself, who, after his dismissal, wrote a four-part series on Medium that did what the New York Times, in its appeasement mission, could not afford to pursue: An account of what actually happened.
McNeil posted another piece yesterday, addressing Baquet's resignation, what it might augur, and when he saw things at the paper going sideways:
When I started in 1976, The Times was run by a former Marine who cared more about the mission — journalism — than about policing the personalities of his troops. Now it’s run by his grandson, a Brown graduate who believes in safe spaces and race-based capitalization. It once dealt calmly with criticism. Now it panics — even over a tabloid piece based on anonymous quotes from very naive teenagers. It hunts for someone to flog into the street, or uses threats to extract apologies it can issue with a groveling press release. (See below.)
To my mind, that shift began during the Jayson Blair/Judy Miller/Rick Bragg fiascos. The company became addicted to self-mortification. A weekly public editor column meant someone had to be hung out to dry every week, guilty or not.
The company has also hired more and more young elitists who sneer at average Americans. And who get their way by running to the teacher and weeping “I feel unsafe!” I found that tactic baffling when it was used against James Bennet in 2020. Who chooses journalism with an expectation of safety? It’s an incredibly exciting life; it’s not always a safe one — you may be sent to cover wars. I loved it.
Those at the Times who came for McNeil, as well as the fire-starters at the Daily Beast, know that the way you hurt a man is to take away the things he loves. Or maybe they don't know that. Maybe that feels too risky. Maybe the public excoriation of others is an easier pleasure. Maybe Baquet walking back "intentions don't matter" was seen as not more than an annoyance, to the victors belong the spoils and all that.
McNeil is generous in his piece about Baquet, stating, "I still like Dean, though of course I’m disappointed at how things worked out." He is less sanguine about Joe Kahn, who is taking over the helm at the Times. Of his own and others' forced departures from the paper, McNeil writes:
[I]f Joe believes — as he just told New York magazine — that the recent abrupt departures “didn’t quite feel like a ‘Maoist struggle session’ … There was nobody being forced into self-confession or that sort of thing,” then Joe is either dissembling, or badly out of touch with how his own newsroom operates.
I am sure there are many ways the Times newsroom operates; the paper, for instance, is doing outstanding reporting on Ukraine. And yet one hopes the annihilation campaigns perpetrated against McNeil and others meet the ignominious ends they deserve, and that those waging these campaigns rinse the taste of ashes from their mouths and get to work.