John F. Harris is editor-in-chief of Politico.

James Bennet, the editor of the New York Times editorial page, lately has been waging his share of battles, which he no doubt would be enjoying more if he did not give a damn about rude things combatants say about him and his publication.

But he does give a damn.


Bennet, whom I’ve known since we were both covering Bill Clinton’s White House, has faced a succession of social media uproars over the past year as he revamps and modernizes the Times opinion section. Even as the page has retained its historically liberal bearings, and regularly lacerates President Donald Trump, it is now regarded with suspicion by some loud voices on the left. There was a backlash to Bennet’s hiring of conservative columnist Bret Stephens (who wrote skeptically about the evidence for manmade climate change), as well as to his abortive attempt to bring on tech writer Quinn Norton (the hiring was quickly reversed after Twitter posters exposed a friendship with a neo-Nazi). These and other moves by Bennet to enliven his pages caused such intense distress by some at the Times that, in recent months, he met with a group of aggrieved colleagues—the transcript of which later leaked—and wrote an all-staff memo that explained his philosophy of debate.

For Bennet, giving a damn is a trap of sorts. His tenure has been about standing strong on behalf of a style of discourse that requires making points with precision, insists on the distinction between honest argument and propaganda, and defaults to an assumption that the other side has a legitimate point of view and is deserving of respect … even when that other side is reveling in its contempt toward people who disagree.

So, do the critics bother him? “Look, I don’t like to be called a Nazi,” Bennet said in a recent interview with Politico Magazine in his Times office.

Then, immediately, he seemed to realize that this sounded too much like the kind of hyperventilating, name-calling language some critics use against him and Times colleagues. “I should subtract that,” he quickly added. “I’ve been told I’ve been called a Nazi; I haven’t seen it. I shouldn’t say that.” (He has been called a Nazi sympathizer on social media.)

“I don’t know that anybody likes to be screamed at,” he continued. “Maybe there are people, but I’m not one of them. And I take it seriously. … Our posture is that we don’t have all the answers.”

That earnest and nuanced answer was in its own way a distillation of the central issue regarding his leadership, since March 2016, of one of the most esteemed editorial spaces in American journalism at a time when the space for polite disagreement seems to be shrinking rapidly. Bennet believes the editorials his team writes, and the op-ed columns he oversees, are about helping to recreate an intellectual and moral center in American public life. His version of the center is by no means a place in which everyone will agree with each other or split the difference on matters of fundamental belief. But it is one in which even people with strong views acknowledge the limits of their wisdom and welcome opposing perspectives, and arguments are intended as instruments of illumination.

There is an alternative view—shared, as recent episodes have shown, even by some journalists within the Times—that sees Bennet’s conception of the center as a place of moral dilution and even surrender. By these lights, in the America of Donald Trump and Fox News, arguments are instruments of power. If demagogues are willing to polarize on behalf of wrong-headed or even intentionally false arguments, it is folly for the Times and other establishment voices to not be equally polarizing on behalf of enlightened ones.

The controversies and Bennet’s views about an editor’s responsibility in an age of ideological and cultural combat were the subjects of our own recent conversation, excerpted below.

We didn’t intend this as a traditional interview, with all the customary journalistic detachment that implies. Bennet and I have been friends for some 20 years. We like many of the same people, laugh at many of the same things. When we met, I was at the Washington Post, before leaving a decade later to start Politico; he was then on his first tour at the Times, before leaving for a decade-long run as editor of the Atlantic.

The social media age has turned many journalists into radical individualists. Writers create their own brands and followings that do not depend so much on the publication they happen to work for. In Bennet’s case, all that upheaval has made him even more emphatically an institutionalist.

“I do feel—like families—institutions transmit values from one generation to another,” he said. “And that is really important. … I think it’s really important that places like the New York Times make this transition. … And I think it’s profoundly relevant to this world, even particularly at a time people don’t want to hear each other out if they disagree with each other.”

And yet Bennet, because he really does give a damn, has a hard time tuning out the haters. “You can’t dismiss it,” he said. “You can’t just say, ‘Oh, they’re all a bunch of jackasses,’ because they’re not. But some of them are jackasses.” —John F. Harris



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This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

John F. Harris: People know there is a big fuss about your leadership of the New York Times editorial page and its op-ed pages. From your vantage point, what is the fuss about?

James Bennet: You’re probably in a better position to evaluate it than I am. I can tell you what we’re trying to do, which is to deliver on the core proposition of what Times opinion is supposed to be and has been supposed to be from the beginning, which I happen to think is particularly important and relevant in this day and age. Which is not to pretend that we’re in possession of the whole truth, and we all agree on what that truth is and about the way the world should be and what the right answers are to all of these huge questions that we’re facing, whether it’s on trade or immigration or how we all live together. But instead, we give people an honest struggle, an open debate from a lot of different points of view and show that you can do that kind of work respectfully, that you can actually engage across these different ideological divides and your—even now, these days—tribal divides.

Why is there such a fuss about it? We exist in an incredibly hyperpartisan environment where the media is increasingly niche-ified and increasingly partisan and picking a side and shooting back and forth at each other between media organizations. And also because Donald Trump is president of the United States, and that makes a lot of people feel really, really vulnerable and afraid. And I get that. It makes it harder for people to hear an opposing point of view or a challenging point of view and with the same sense of security. I don’t know, what would you say? Also, we’ve made some mistakes that have pissed people off, so [laughs], but I think—

Harris: You wrote the memo to staff that was then widely circulated. Why did you write that? Why did you feel it was necessary to write that? What was the set of assumptions or perceptions that you were trying to address?

Bennet: I have not done a good job of communicating inside or outside the Times about what our overall goals are and our ambitions. And that was an effort to improve on the communication. And I think there’s a lot of confusion and a lot of concern, including from colleagues at the New York Times and certainly outside the building. And there are people, you know, they encounter an opinion piece that they disagree with and it upsets them and they don’t understand how it fits into a larger conversation and debate, a kind of running debate in our pages. And I just felt I needed—it was a moment where I needed to begin going on offense a little bit about what we’re trying to accomplish.

NOT AGREEING TO DISAGREE During the Trump administration, a familiar online pattern has emerged: a provocative, (usually) right-of-center New York Times op-ed followed by liberal anger setting social media and blogs aflame. Here are some of the biggest dust-ups.

Harris: And to that person that doesn’t understand, he or she might say, “This all sounds very reasonable, James, but the world is not reasonable, and the opponents of belief in facts, belief in fair-mindedness, belief in science, belief in rule of law, they’re not reasonable; they’re not treating the game like it’s on the level. And here comes the New York Times editorial page pretending these are normal, reasonable, on-the-level times.” It’s like, “So you’re a sucker by playing the game as though the old rules exist. Which side are you on?” I think it’s something like that. That’s maybe a fair paraphrase of what people would say?

Bennet: What you’re describing is kind of the maximalist politics of the moment: “The other side is always going to make the maximalist demand, and if you’re talking about bipartisanship and compromise and so forth, you’re just going to get rolled, and the only way to win is to go in and fight that fight the same way.” OK, that’s fine. But that’s a political argument, you know? That is not remotely a vision for a journalism that cares about the truth. Because the truth is almost definitionally, I don’t think, in the possession of partisans who are doing what you describe, making maximalist demands. The truth is something none of us is in possession of. None of us has all the right answers. And just as reporters go out there every day struggling to set their own assumptions aside and try to figure out what the facts are, the journalistic approach to opinion is to let people engage and argue things out. And that’s what I was trying to say in that email to colleagues.

Harris: There is not, as you describe it, a big gulf between traditional newsroom reporting values as opposed to editorial-page opinion values; they’re both governed by a belief that we’re not in possession of all the facts and that there should be an ethos of kind of fair-mindedness and skepticism.

Bennet: Yes, in both places. I think there are basic principles that pertain in both worlds, right? We care about fact first and foremost, getting it right. That’s kind of the basic commitment of all New York Times journalism. That means a high degree—tremendous value placed on intellectual honesty and [being] willing to contend with reality. My kind of rough formula for the distinction is that the newsroom helps people see the world as it is, and opinion gets to help people imagine the world as it could be, how it could be made better, how you get to—you know, that’s kind of the fun part of our work: We get to try to help figure out how to make the world a better place. So, there’s a degree of advocacy in opinion that differentiates it.

And there’s tons of overlap in all sorts of respects, obviously, because we’re reporting, the news side is reporting; they do analysis, we do analysis. But at its core what differentiates us is our ability to advocate about what the right answers are. You’ve got to be humble about that—particularly now. It is a hyperpartisan moment, but at the same time our politics is really quite fluid. And you look at the Democrats and the Republicans—you tell me what the Democrats’ foreign policy is or their trade policy. Or tell me the same on the Republican side. And there are a lot of big ideas, for example about trade, that are kind of up in the air right now, or, you know, should the tech companies be regulated? How should they be regulated? How do the parties think about it?

James Bennet (left) and John Harris (right) at the New York Times headquarters in Manhattan. | Ben Baker for Politico Magazine

We all kind of actually need to grope our way to the right answers to those questions. To pretend we know what they are now just seems ridiculous to me, but we need to figure them out. And our politics right now is not capable, does not feel—I mean, you know better than me, but it sure doesn’t feel like they’re making a lot of progress toward answering those questions. And as opinion journalists, we owe it to our readers to try to help them figure it out, particularly at a moment when our politicians are not.

Harris: I think some people would argue that once you’ve established facts and truth, the point of the spear should be pretty sharp, that this is not an environment that calls for soft arguments; it calls for sharp and maybe even unyielding arguments because the other side is so unyielding. Paul Krugman would say, “Come on. The reasonable folks have been trumped by the unreasonable folks, so we should be—we’re confident in our views. We should be just—not unreasonable, but we should be unyielding, sharp, combative, defiant in our expression of them.” And maybe you’d say that’s exactly what you’re trying to do with the page. Historically, editorials have had a kind of a certain judicious quality to them. Can that judiciousness be heard in the modern environment?

Bennet: Once you have a high degree of conviction and you feel like the facts are on your side and you want to make a strong argument, I’ve got no problem with that. I do think that even as you’re doing that you need to be—again, with intellectual honesty as one of our core values, we have to be open-minded about hearing arguments on the other side and acknowledging it when the other side has a point on a given subject. So, I guess you can hear me talking out of both sides of my mouth on this one. Look, opinion writing is often pugilistic, and hopefully it’s entertaining and it’s fun and personable, because you’re hearing an individual’s voice. But yeah, I do worry a little bit that in this environment, particularly now, punching is not always the best way to get heard. It is the best way to rally the folks on your side often, but it’s not always the best way to reach people who aren’t immediately inclined to agree with you.

Harris: Is there a generational signature to this? You see it to some extent on campuses. People sometimes assert the right to be protected from viewpoints they find offensive.

Bennet: Yeah, there clearly is an element of that. I guess I’m not panicked about that. I mean, obviously I’m not happy about the people getting shouted down and not allowed to speak on campus. But I think—and that concerns me because freedom of thought, freedom of expression is absolutely essential to what we care about here—a lot of the campus stuff seems actually pretty positive, in the sense that part of it is about more speech and is about people who haven’t really had their voices heard or been part of the debate or conversation coming into that conversation.

Harris: Many younger journalists at the Times or elsewhere are not that far removed from that campus environment. Do those people sort of fundamentally share the same journalistic values as you, or do they come from a different orientation?

Bennet: I think all this stuff comes down to the person. Are there some journalists here or elsewhere, young journalists, who sort of think that the role of journalism in the Trump era is to be part of the Resistance? Yeah, there probably are. And does that conflict with how I see the role of journalism? Absolutely. So, I guess that is a clash of values, and I do worry about that a little bit. It’s just something we have to work out over time.

Harris: Does it bother you when people with whom you would assume you’re fundamentally of like minds and like values are really mad at you?

Bennet: Oh, yeah.

Harris: It does? Or do you just brush it off? “It goes with the territory.” How much does it weigh on you?

Bennet: Look, I don’t like to be called a Nazi, you know? No, yeah, it—

Harris: Who called you that?

Bennet: Actually, I don’t know that I’ve been—I should subtract that. I’ve been told I’ve been called a Nazi; I have not seen it. I shouldn’t say that. That sounds ridiculous. I don’t know that anybody likes to be screamed at. Maybe there are people, but I’m not one of them. And I take it seriously. Like, I take it to heart. Our posture is that we don’t have all the answers. And maybe I’m wrong about what I’m doing, and I have to hear the criticism. So, I take it seriously, and particularly when it comes from colleagues inside of the building. And to the extent that the criticism is constructive—and a lot of it is—it’s going to make us better over time if we hear it and act on it. But the hate—the social media phenomenon where people aren’t actually even reading the piece or engaging with the argument but they’re reacting to the tweet about the tweet about the tweet about the piece—that sort of stuff makes me a little bit crazy. And, you know, I think our only option is you just kind of push through it.

Harris: Yeah. Maybe that’s an argument for not taking it that seriously. “Today’s shitstorm will be replaced by tomorrow’s shitstorm and another the day after that, and it’s folly to really follow it too closely or care very much.”

Bennet: Again, you have to pay attention because there may be some grains of real legitimate criticism or concern in there. But, yeah, it does feel like the outrage machine is chewing its way day by day through one offense or another. And it’s really hard, I find, in this environment to sort out the signal and the noise. What is the important reaction, response, counterargument that we should be hearing? And are those readers, you know, real readers, or are they just people performing for each other on social media? And, again, I don’t want to sound like I’m—you can’t dismiss it. You can’t just say, “Oh, they’re all a bunch of jackasses,” because they’re not. But some of them are jackasses. [Laughs.]

Harris: You’ve got to be discriminating.

Bennet: Right, I guess. And it’s hard. It’s a challenge probably to all of us as we do any of this work not to become—not to retreat into a shell and become hugely defensive.

Harris: How much do you personally become indignant and get your blood boiling over some outrage or another?

Bennet: Like all of us, it probably depends on the outrage.

Harris: Does Trump outrage you?

Bennet: I run a little bit cool on some of the stuff. It outrages me when the president of the United States says something that is simply not true and takes pride in it. That does outrage me. And the bullying and the treating people cruelly and that stuff really is upsetting to me, and so I find it outrageous.

Harris: Trump’s attack on the legitimacy of institutions including the free press—how seriously should we take it? There seem to be two schools of thought. One is that this is one of those historic moments where core values are under attack and that we’re going to be judged historically by how well we defend and vindicate those values, and that the Trump threat is serious. I think the other school is, “It’s just so much bluster and bullshit that’s not even meant by him to be taken seriously, and it really pales in comparison to places around the world where journalists actually are executed or opposition politicians are executed or jailed over these issues. So we shouldn’t delude ourselves that we’re really on the barricades of the front lines of freedom here in the United States.” How seriously do you take it?

Bennet: I’m much more of the first camp than the second camp. And even if the second camp turns out to be right, all the work we’re doing to try to protect against the dangers that those of us in the first camp fear is good work that will serve the democracy well over the long haul. It’s like the debate over free speech on campus, you know? “Great. This is the whole point of debate.” This is the basic thing about engaging with people who disagree with you. It goes back to John Stuart Mill and arguments about liberty: You need to hear another point of view because you might be wrong or you might be right, but your ideas will get brittle if they’re not tested and you don’t have the argument. I think that’s what’s happening with free speech now; the people who are advocates of free speech are having to remember why it’s so important and articulate that again. That’s a good argument to have. [Plus,] in most cases, you’re probably only partly right or you’re mostly right and need to absorb other points.

I do worry that our institutions generally have been losing altitude for quite some time, and in the Trump era that brittleness is being exposed. And the press is under assault, partly by our politics and partly by what’s happened in social media. Congress is just increasingly kind of consumed by stupid fights and doesn’t seem capable of [fulfilling] its responsibility. The courts are under stress.

It’s a little like what Tom Friedman says about the climate change, though: “OK, let’s say it’s not a problem. Let’s say everything we would be doing today to protect ourselves against it is stuff we should be doing anyway.” It’s good over the long haul to develop alternative sources of energy, clean sources of energy. So, having the conversation about what the role of the free press should be, what the checks on executive power should be—having that debate out in the public square is a really good thing.

Harris: Last question. In the 20-some years that we’ve known each other and been covering many of the same topics, these trends that we’re talking about—the instinct for partisanship, the disregard for traditional customs of discourse, the flamboyance and the outrageousness of politics—those have been progressing pretty steadily for 20 years. The aberrance of this moment didn’t just arrive. Where does it end? Or does it? Maybe we just happen to be here at the end of Rome. Do we return to something more recognizable to people of our generation, like normal?

Bennet: I don’t know the answer to that one. I really don’t know the answer to that. I do want to be part of the project of clawing our way back to that. And I honestly think that most people want that. Most people don’t pick all their politics and all their positions from one side of the menu. They don’t get up every morning looking to go have a big political fight with somebody on the other—people are reasonable and people are smart, in my experience. And a lot of this shouting and cable stuff and all the rest of it, and the notion that your role as journalists is to occupy your particular seat on a CNN panel—I don’t think that makes sense to most people. Maybe they find it entertaining, which is great, but I don’t think that’s how they think about reality. So, I don’t know.

What do you think? How do you answer the “Which camp are you in?” question? Is this a real assault on democracy, or is it just a bunch of noise and we can ride it out and not worry too much about it?

Harris: In the news media context, I don’t think it’s an assault on democracy. Personally, I feel like Trump’s bombast is not meant to be taken seriously and not intended to be taken seriously even by him.

Bennet: You mean he doesn’t intend it to be an assault on journalism?

Harris: That’s right. And I don’t think journalists in this country face any real obstacles to our task of getting information and telling the truth as best we can ascertain it. I think it seems especially frivolous compared to lots of countries where there are real genuine obstacles—there’s government surveillance; there’s government censorship; there’s government punishment for challenging authority. And so, I think it makes us seem a little frivolous to be portraying ourselves on the front lines as though we’re freedom fighters. That’s in the press context.

In the citizenship context, I think democracy is really challenged at the moment. It is supposed to be about the task of identifying the pressing problems of the day and finding remedies to them. And it seems to me, [the purpose of politics] has become secondary to a sort of vehicle for attacking those we disagree with, expressing our identity, denouncing identities of people we don’t agree with. I think it’s broken. I don’t think we are solving problems. There’s plenty of problems that demand remedy. Our politics isn’t producing credible answers to those. I think it could well be the damn end of the empire.

Bennet: So, but is the press helping struggle against that, or is it contributing to the problem, in your view?

Harris: Press is a big term.

Bennet: OK.

Harris: I do think the media industry has gotten taken over by a noise industry in which the enormous financial incentives, ego incentives reward the discourse that doesn’t have much to do with getting to the truth or much to do with solving problems. It has everything to do with scoring points.

Bennet: So, you see the threat less as Trump than what the industry is basically doing to itself?

Harris: Yes.

Bennet: In terms of the press piece? Well, I agree with that. I think that makes sense.

Harris: I think Trump is a byproduct of that, of that complex, a political-media complex. Trump is a byproduct of that rather than a cause.

Bennet: I think he’s making it all worse, and I think he’s contributing to suspicions that we’re all fake news and all the rest of that. He’s definitely very deliberately, I think, trying to diminish the standing of the press. But I also think the press has been doing it to itself probably for a long time by picking sides and becoming more partisan, yeah.

Harris: To me, I guess it depends on what side of the bed I get up on. I think at some points you could say, “It’s just one last binge before one last hangover, and then we’re going to really get sober.”

Bennet: Do you think so?

Harris: Maybe. I agree with you; it’s no way to live long term, in a state of constant agitation, constant mistrust, constant noise. I think most people don’t want to live in such circumstances, so there’s going to be a corrective to it.

Bennet: That’s interesting to hear you being so optimistic. We’re usually on the opposite sides of these sorts of questions.

Harris: There’s a duality, I think, to American culture. We go to Vegas and run wild, and then we fly home and resume our domesticated, churchgoing, responsible lives.

Bennet: Speak for yourself.

Harris: I think Trump, maybe he’s our trip to Vegas. But it’s been a long trip, right?

Bennet: It’s been a long trip.