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Turmoil at the New York Times

Vanity Fair – Hive: “The Newsroom Feels Embarrassed”: Backfires and Explosions at The New York Times as a Possible Future Chief Re-Invents the Paper’s Opinion Pages – “A yoga-pants refusenik, a climate-science skeptic, and a tech writer with a neo-Nazi pal, among other offenders, have put James Bennet in the crosshairs.”

“Leading the country’s most closely observed Opinion page is an unfathomably complex job, largely because of two interrelated factors: the outrage culture of the Internet in general, and Donald Trump in particular. For the Times, this conundrum often reduces to the question of how hospitable the op-eds should be to illiberal and sometimes unscientific positions—where do facts end and values begin? For many Times readers—and many scientists, for that matter—questioning the science of global warming is not different in kind than, say, not ruling out the possibility that the world may be flat. And many Times readers believe, with some justification, that only one of the political parties is truly a full citizen of the reality-based community. What is the responsibility to provide equal time in such circumstances? These are not at all simple lines to draw.

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