In a sane world, this would be satire. Instead, Adam Rubenstein's lengthy essay at The Atlantic attempts to inject sanity into a journalism industry that has turned into a partisan cult. 

And when we say cult, we mean it -- all the way to the finger-snapping struggle session Rubenstein, a former Opinion editor at the New York Times, experienced in his orientation meeting at the paper. Charles C.W. Cooke immediately grasped just how ridiculous this introduction to the Gray Lady turned out to be, and how revealing:

"What's your favorite sandwich?"
“The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A.”
"Wrong!" pic.twitter.com/4A72FSL11N

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) February 26, 2024

Rubenstein's dilemma may provoke laughter, especially with the immediate and cultish response from his fellow new-hires, who sound as though they got recruited from an Occupy Wall Street encampment. But consider what this episode demonstrates about the cult at the NYT. This rebuke about Chik-Fil-A came from its human resources department -- the organization that ostensibly works to treat all employees equitably. The corruption of cult-think didn't just exist in the Times' editorial functions, which Rubinstein later attests, but it also permeated its corporate functions as well. 

When Human Resources acts as an enforcer for the partisan and ideological orthodoxy, especially with new recruits, it reflects the cultish nature of the entire organization. 

Rubinstein relates plenty of experience with the cult-think in this piece. As an opinion-section editor, Rubinstein took part in the publication of Tom Cotton's op-ed that infamously prompted a staff rebellion. Ultimately, the Times made Rubinstein and his boss James Bennet the scapegoats, but Rubinstein argues that both of them followed the normal process for publishing outside opinion pieces. However, Rubinstein also describes how the NYT processed op-eds that contradict the progressive viewpoint with much more review and top-down control, even before the issue came to a head with Cotton, which should be read whole rather than excerpted.

All of that might be chalked up to some editorial bureaucracy run amok but for Rubinstein's personal interactions as someone outside of the progressive corral. Rubinstein writes that even being considered conservative made him suspect at the NYT, especially when pointing out clear issues with reporting. This passage gives a very good context for what took place in the meltdown over the Cotton op-ed:

Being a conservative—or at least being considered one—at the Times was a strange experience. I often found myself asking questions like “Doesn’t all of this talk of ‘voter suppression’ on the left sound similar to charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right?” only to realize how unwelcome such questions were. By asking, I’d revealed that I wasn’t on the same team as my colleagues, that I didn’t accept as an article of faith the liberal premise that voter suppression was a grave threat to liberal democracy while voter fraud was entirely fake news.

Or take the Hunter Biden laptop story: Was it truly “unsubstantiated,” as the paper kept saying? At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism. Nor is a vague unease with difficult subjects. “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable,” a colleague once told me. This was something I was used to hearing from young progressives on college campuses, but not at work.

And it infects every bit of the NYT, not just the opinion section. The staff revolt proved that much, but so does its product. How else can one explain why the New York Times ran the unsubstantiated story that Israel had destroyed the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza at the start of the present war and killed 500 people, without waiting for the sun to come up? Within hours, the Hamas claim was proven false as the hospital remained standing, and it became clear within the day that a Palestinian rocket had misfired and landed in the parking lot.

And yet it took the NYT a week to add an "editor's note" to their original report that Hamas had "failed to make [the] case" that the IDF had hit the hospital. As I wrote at the time, the NYT wasn't interested in reporting news but in amplifying propaganda:

Instead, the New York Times gave Hamas — not “Gazan health authorities,” but the terrorist group that had just massacred and butchered at least 1400 Israeli civilians in an invasion — six full days to provide evidence of their “claims.”

And even when Hamas refuses to do so, the NYT can’t just report that Hamas lied and they fell for their propaganda. The Paper of Record won’t correct the record to show that the Israelis and the photographic evidence utterly debunked this complaint of a war crime from a terrorist cult that just beheaded a number of babies in Israel. The most they can muster is a passive-voice headline that proclaims that “Hamas fails to make case.”

So has the New York Times. It has failed to make its case of being an institution of actual journalism. It has become a tool of terrorists and a propaganda amplifier for radicals. And unfortunately, it’s hardly alone in the American media industry.

Nor is this limited to Israel, or even Donald Trump. Nicole Gelinas has a must-read essay at City Journal today titled "Department of Incorrections," in which the Times tried to cover for Mayor Eric Adams and his cash giveaway to migrants. Gelinas had reported on the no-bid deal to disburse $150 million to migrants for food and shelter, but without any safeguards or accountability. Instead of following up and getting answers, the Times went after Gelinas while blaming the criticism on "Republican leaders and conservatives voices." The piece misrepresented what Gelinas had written, and then refused to correct it when Gelinas asked them to do so.

The Times treated Rubinstein the same way, throwing him under the bus when the staffer revolt erupted. They took his Slack messages out of context to make it sound as though he'd approved Cotton's piece with "false equivalences" when that message pertained to specific photographs rather than the essay. And even apart from that, there was nothing all that novel about what Cotton advocated. Rubinstein notes the bitter irony of the opposition to Cotton's suggestion of using the National Guard to quell the George Floyd riots that emerged just a few months later:

On January 6, 2021, few people at The New York Times remarked on the fact that liberals were cheering on the deployment of National Guardsmen to stop rioting at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the very thing Tom Cotton had advocated.

Rubinstein's essay is behind the paywall at The Atlantic, but it's worth at least a trial-period commitment to read it all. No one can expose a cult better than its heretics, and Rubinstein provides a valuable insight into the mainstream-media's progressive cult, one that extends far beyond the New York Times.

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