There is a great deal of political commentary and social commentary that examines the collapse of trust between institutions and the American people through a static lens. It observes the existence of the breach without much pondering about why it occurred.
Why has there been such a fraying of the bonds of respect, of the capacities for trust between companies and the American people, Between brands and the American people, Between political parties and the American people, Between high political officeholders and the American people. Institution after institution has lost trust.
Now most of the media coverage focuses on a specific dimension of the collapse of trust, a quarter of it, if you will, if you think about it like a pizza round and sliced, And that portion is the collapse of trust between the American people and their government, between the American people and their candidates, between the American people and the Senate, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And all
of that is true, deeply so. But there is also a corresponding collapse of trust, for example, with big tech. Giant tech companies were once deeply admired. Today they are overwhelmingly distrusted and broadly feared. There is a wide consensus understanding the capacity of these companies to reak true havoc while returning little benefit. The days of Google proclaiming itself as doing no evil and Facebook being a happy place and social media being benign are long gone. The American
people know that trust was breached. But it's not just with big media, or the big insurance companies, or big medicine or big agriculture. The list goes on. It includes the Boy Scouts, where there are seventy eight thousand allegations of sexual abuse. It includes the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, the Southern Baptist Convention. Everywhere there is a powerful institution, it seems there is hypocrisy, malfeasance, and wrongdoing everywhere, including
the media. America's media companies have become reviled by the American people. The American people do not believe them because what they see is the daily production of conflict, Its manufacture division for division's sake, for billions in profit. The
American media, of course, is not monolithic. There is a material difference between the Fox News and the New York Times, we're told, and there is in many ways, But there are also similarities that must be talked about because they speak to the corruption of a national spirit and a degradation of the American people and their ability to tell what is real from what is not, what is up from what is down, what is read from blue and
blue from green. On the election evening, Brett Baer was terrified to tell the Fox News audience that, in fact, Donald Trump had lost. It helped set in moment a national crisis. It helped inflame and extremism that threatens the existence of the republic. Fear of the mob can be that powerful, and it can be that degrading to both truth and any sense of journalistic integrity. James Bennett is the former New York Times reporter, opinion page editor, an
editor of The Atlantic magazine. He is a towering figure in the modern era of American journalism. He is a reporter who has traveled to every corner of the world and every inch of America. He has covered every type of issue, from the elderly as he explains, to conflict
and war in the most dangerous places on Earth. He writes about the crisis at the New York Times and a collapse of journalistic integrity and absolute immolation of the time zone standards and a rising tide of dishonesty and intolerance and ends justify the means double standards in the pursuit of ideological conformity and dogma in an institution in the United States that is part of the United States inextricably so that exists because of the First Amendment that
has turned so utterly hostile towards it. With James Bennett shows and demonstrates is that The New York Times has become so broken that it actually takes clear language and distorts its meaning, changes the clear understanding in English of what it says to fit a narrative that conforms to the sensibilities of what is a mob of New York Times journalists who are aggrieved, brittle, and hostile to the expression of any thought, opinion, or idea that does not
conform ideologically to the mean of the mob. It helps me understand some things so much better, such as the years I spent on television, and at the second the camera would go off and we would go to commercial break, how many of the reporters and all of the ones at the New York Times would pick up their phone and look at it. Staring at the Twitter, no doubt reading what is the mob saying? Enforcing? How do I conform? What James Bennett tells is a tale of utter madness.
He tells the tale of what happened when he dared to print an opinion stupid, although it was by United States Senator Tom Cotton. What happened? What happened with the words are violence, crowd that an idea is a physical attack. Let me explain clearly, with this type of smug arrogance and hostility to truth, embrace overtly of double standards, and the despising of any idea, it isn't ideologically rooted in the dogma of identity politics. I'll explain what it has wrought.
There are no people who can claim credit more so than Arthur Salzburg and deemed back At with their access journalism and intolerance and smugness that have been more of a wind beneath the fascist wings of the Trump eagle. Truly, it is amazing, and I encourage everybody to sit down and read read the details about the gravest journalistic scandal of our time, and that is the shattering of the ethic, the ethos, the tolerance and the embrace of Americanism at
the New York Times. Read it, understand it, Appreciate it for what it is. It is a warning about a growling authoritarianism of spirit. It demonstrates a weakness in our democratic fiber. If The New York Times doesn't respect the integrity of dissent and the power of the First Amendment, If The New York Times is filled with brittle children who need trigger warnings to confront the mob, then American journalism stands on a line of near irredeemability. It is
certainly facing a deep crisis. It says a lot that mister Saltzburg decided to directly address mister Bennett's descriptions and journalism, not with participation, not with responsiveness to the questions in the story, but after the fact, denunciations and clarifications. Who else does that remind you of? It looks like the publisher of The New York Times has embraced the fake
news strategy. It's not surprising because in the end he shares something with Donald Trump, just like Deane Baguette, and that is a deep contempt for the American people.