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No longer fit to print

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Paul Krugman has an essay on why he left the New York Times, and it’s a very sobering read. The short version is that for 25 years Krugman, who is both a Nobel prize-winning economist and an excellent writer for general audiences — this combination of talents, it should be unnecessary to emphasize, is both extremely rare, and, from a journalistic perspective, extraordinarily valuable — was pretty much left alone to write about whatever he wanted in whatever way he wanted to express what he was saying. Then very suddenly everything changed:

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.

Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, “we are being lied into war.”

I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left.

I suspect that on some level Krugman has never really been forgiven for having been right about the Iraq war, or perhaps being right “for the wrong reasons,” which is an even bigger sin against the conventional wisdom than simply being right in the first place. Nevertheless for a quarter century this extraordinarily talented writer was left alone to do his work. Then, quite abruptly, his social criticisms were found by the powers that be to no longer be even minimally acceptable.

I also suspect that this is a story that’s being played out in many other places in many ways at the moment, as America’s elite institutions move to protect themselves in our cowardly new world that has such people in it.

Related: Here’s the CJR piece on all this.

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