Joe Klein’s Lament

Joe Klein piles onto the New York Times:

As a native New Yorker and a lifelong journalist, the New York Times has been a lodestar in my life. It is an addiction, a trusted friend, a pain in the ass. I have written for the Times Sunday Book Review. I’ve had six books reviewed in the Times, for good and ill. Most important, I’ve worked alongside Times colleagues—especially overseas, and on political campaigns—and found them to be not just first-rate, but extremely courageous in their pursuit of the truth…and boon companions, besides. This is not about them.

But there has been a sickness to the place, a growing intellectual rot that has been apparent for the past 40 years, a debilitating moral pomposity that has rendered the Times untrustworthy, in subtle ways, on some issues; not on everything, but certainly on the cultural issues that are most divisive in our society right now. This diminution tracks, a bit too perfectly, with the decline of freedom—and the rise of identity politics—on elite college campuses and in the Democratic Party.

Here are some snippets:

This last part cuts to my own beef with the Times: the paper’s frequent inability to be honest about race, crime, welfare, poverty and education. This bias perfectly mirrored the Democratic Party’s recent failure to speak the truth about these issues which, I believe, provided the fuel for Donald Trump’s right-wing populism. It was also a form of racial condescension, an inability to recognize the complexities of the black community, to understand that the “activists” so often quoted in the Times represented only a slice of black opinion. It was also, too often, a form of cowardice, an inability to tell unpleasant truths and stand up to the racial extremists in its own ranks, like those who marketed the 1619 Project.

and:

The academic left is infuriated by wealth in a way most American are not. It has also, foolishly, embraced identity as economics faded as a casus belli, fitting out the rest of society—especially the media and publishing—with the shackles of political correctness, of illiberality, of the excessive DEI nonsense so brilliantly demonstrated by the university presidents last week. Much of Left-thinking has become painfully out-of-date, a boutique ideology.

but especially:

Far more profound is the disservice the Times has done the urban poor. There is a strangled adherence to the mouldy tenets of industrial-age, welfare-state liberalism: more money is always the answer to social programs that don’t work, crime is too often a consequence of deprivation rather than depravity, the police are brutal and racist, racism is immutable and central; there has been no progress toward an integrated, multi-cultural, multi-racial society. All of these are dangerous oversimplifications.

In my experience—a half -century now, starting with an informal tutorial at the feet of Daniel Patrick Moynihan—there are three essential components to a successful anti-poverty agenda: family preservation, neighborhood stability that comes with strict law enforcement and more creative schooling. (Other factors like better housing and mental health facilities certainly don’t hurt.) But you don’t often read about family structure, outrageous street behavior or the collapse of our inner city public schools often in the Times. Which is only the beginning:

Read the whole thing.

As I see it the problem is that Pat Moynihan was a liberal, the Timesmen are progressives, and progressives are not liberals.