Newspaper editors often have to fend off angry readers, but The New York Times’ James Bennet has found that some of his fiercest critics are his own colleagues. Bennet runs the opinion section, which encompasses the unsigned editorials; op-ed columnists (like Paul Krugman) and contributors; and reader letters. Since 2016, when Bennet joined the paper from The Atlantic and America elected Donald Trump, the op-ed page has featured more conservative voices, enraging both longtime readers and some on the staff. “The newsroom feels embarrassed,” one senior Times staffer recently told Vanity Fair.

The family quarrel at the Times has spilled out into the public, thanks to a campaign of leaks that seem intended to sting Bennet. In leaked Slack chat transcripts, anonymous Times employees complained about opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss, who was criticized recently for a tweet where she mistakenly described U.S.-born Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu as an immigrant—and then argued with those who corrected her. Some staffers alleged that her privileged position at the paper allowed her offenses and errors to go unchecked. In a leaked memo to colleagues and a transcript of a question and answer session with around a dozen Times employees in December, Bennet responded to these accusations by stating that the op-ed page suffered from “sameness” in the past, which he was trying to redress by “diversifying our range of opinion.”

Bennet’s apologia frames the dispute as a battle between those who are intellectually curious and open minded and those who are ideologically homogenous and hidebound. This is at odds with reality. While some criticism has been disproportionate to the offense—Weiss’s tweet was factually wrong, but written with good intentions—the op-ed page hasn’t quite lived up to Bennet’s high-minded call for freshness and diversity.

It’s true that Bennet has brought in new voices, and widened the spectrum of opinion found in the Times. But the paper is far from a model of freewheeling debate. The paper’s worldview remains largely confined to centrist neoliberalism. The paper makes plenty of room for Hillary Clinton supporters and Never Trump Republicans, but little for the wide swath of popular opinion beyond the center-left or center-right.



The problem is not that the Times is reaching out to conservatives, but rather that it is an establishment paper in a period where the establishment consensus is broken. And it’s trying to repair that consensus rather than truly reaching outside of it.

