Of course, a skeptic reading the New York Times during the Trump administration and then during the pandemic would not have been surprised to see a slightly altered headline appear more convincingly in another newspaper: “For Democrats, ‘Crisis’ is the Message as the Outrage Machine Ramps Up.” For every Tweet, every syllable, practically every breath that Donald Trump took as president served the media, and especially the Times, as the occasion for predictions of imminent catastrophe. The pandemic only intensified the calculated hysteria. “The Great Depression is Coming,” “The Market Partied Like It Was 1932,” “Trump is Following in Herbert Hoover’s Footsteps,” “The New Great Depression is Coming,” “This Stimulus Bill Will Not Save the Economy From Collapse”—those were just a few of the many pieces in the New York Times during the pandemic that predicted an economic catastrophe that would last for years. Reading the Times over the last four years, you could be forgiven at times for thinking that the paper’s longtime motto, “all the news that’s fit to print,” had been replaced by the Trotskyist slogan: “the worse, the better.” “If it bleeds, it leads” has been the guiding imperative for the news business since its inception, but the combination of fear of being outpaced by social media, sinking profits, and generational conflict in the newsroom taking the form of an ideological putsch transformed the Times from a genial, if sometimes comical Margaret Dumont, reliably huffing in outrage and indignation, into a shrieking Cassandra.