A deep dive indictment by the Economists’s Lexington columnist, James Bennet, of the New York Times paints a damning picture of an American institution that has lost its way. 

Mr. Bennet had a front-row seat to the spectacle of institutional capture as the Gray Lady’s editorial page editor between 2016 and 2020. He resigned — forced out by the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger  — after the publication of an op-ed from Senator Cotton that prompted an internal revolt at the Times. 

The editor-turned-columnist’s call for the “moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonizes for fear they will harm its cause” comes after his experience at 242 West 41st Street disclosed those qualities to be in vanishingly short supply. He accuses the Times of “embracing illiberalism.”

Mr. Bennet declares that the “leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles” and that “top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle, and business,” which in turn “made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.”

One of the root causes of that corrosion, Mr. Bennet argues, is that the paper “has lost faith in Americans,” becoming in the process the “publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.” He likens his return to the Times after a stint at the Atlantic to a GI who “parachuted onto one of those Pacific islands still held by Japanese soldiers who didn’t know that the world beyond the waves had changed.”

What was that island like? The “old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.” Conservative voices were “despised.” Mr. Bennet describes a state of affairs at the Times where the “views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation.” 

The publication of letters from readers supportive of President Trump left Mr. Bennet “facing an angry internal town hall” and a “convulsed” newsroom as it became apparent that the Times “could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump.” The result was a culture of “enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper” that cowed even liberal scribes.

The Times not only failed to reckon with Mr. Trump’s presidency. It failed to see the possibility of his victory. Mr. Bennet reports that the paper’s executive editor at the time, Dean Baquet, “acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters.”

A column by Jim Rutenberg issued three months before that election noted that in order to effectively cover Mr. Trump, reporters would be required to “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.” Mr. Baquet concluded that Mr. Rutenberg “nailed it.”

After the election, Messrs. Baquet and Sulzberger allowed — or rather, apologized —  that the “sheer unconventionality” of Mr. Trump had led “us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters.” They pledged  “to report America and the world honestly.” Trust in the press has nosedived since Mr. Trump took office. 

Mr. Bennet details how that promise rang hollow by tracking how even “columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.” One editor, he relates, recommended that he attach trigger warnings to pieces authored by conservative columnists. A culture of fear was pervasive. 

One remarkable interaction telegraphs that this ideological purity was enforced from the top. Mr. Bennet writes that he approached Mr. Sulzberger about a conservative columnist’s complaints of being held to a double standard at the Times. The publisher “lost his patience” and told Mr. Bennet to “inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard, and he should get used to it.” 

 Mr. Bennet, rummaging through his archive of allusions, also likens himself to that signature sleeper, Rip Van Winkle, observing that he “left one newspaper, had a pleasant dream for ten years” and returned to a place I barely recognised.” The paper, he observes, could “learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise.”  

The Lexington columnist observes that for “any counter-revolution to succeed, the leadership will need to show courage worthy of the paper’s bravest reporters and opinion columnists, the ones who work in war zones or explore ideas that make illiberal staff members shudder.” It appears there is little hope for that as long as the Gray Lady’s leaders remain “out of sync” with the “ascendant, illiberal values within it.”

The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment by press time.