NYT editor Dean Baquet makes highly revealing statement about the 1619 Project:

"The project fell fully within our standards as a news organization. " https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1316017794664652800

The declaration is thus inclusive of the following practice https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1315694961808072706?s=20

The historian who took to Politico to air her concerns did so because she shared the goals of the project but felt that factual scrupulosity was necessary to their attainment.

Perhaps she was naive in thinking so and the NYT leadership is correct that you win by bulldozing over such concerns.

The concerns that Stephens wrote about in his column are shared by both black and white historians across the political spectrum https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/nyt-1619-project-criticisms.html

But because he is a white male neocon, his authorship of the piece provides predicate for the Times to not address any of them -- including the most damning ones lodged at them by a black female history professor at Politico -- while taking another victory lap in rhetoric

It is an astonishing performance and signals a new dispensation at the paper and throughout the American elite whose manners and mores it both reflects and dictate

It's my own view that the Times' power and authority derived precisely from its appearance of impartiality. It was always to some degree a polite fiction but one that also served as a constraint.

The mask and the gloves are now off.

The move aligns with the incentive to open partisanship that have maximized engagement, driven subscriber growth, and secured the financial stability of the institution.

In the absence of Trump, though, the institution faces a structural problem: how to manufacture a new series of credible dangers in order to sustain the same degree of engagement and emotional investment? https://www.google.com/search?q=zach+tablet+race&oq=zach+tablet+race&aqs=chrome..69i57.3885j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Have to admit that even when I was tweeting confidently about an ideological succession, I half-doubted it myself and still retained a residual belief that those in power would be too prudent to go all in.

I assumed that there were people who willing to collude with and profit off of the manufactured hysteria without themselves falling emotionally and intellectually prey to it.

I was wrong.