{"id":192073,"date":"2026-06-09T16:31:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T00:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=192073"},"modified":"2026-06-12T14:34:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T22:34:09","slug":"the-institutionalist-dean-baquet-and-the-remaking-of-american-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=192073","title":{"rendered":"The Institutionalist: Dean Baquet and the Remaking of American Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

As executive editor of The New York Times<\/a><\/i> from 2014 to 2022, Dean P. Baquet (b. 1956)<\/a> becomes the first Black journalist to run the newsroom of the most influential paper in the United States, and he presides over its transformation from a print institution in financial peril to a digital subscription business with global reach. His career spans the collapse of the metropolitan newspaper, the rise of the internet, and the political and cultural convulsions that remake American journalism in the first decades of the twenty-first century. At every stage he finds himself at the center of the profession’s defining fights: over corporate cost-cutting, over technology, over objectivity, and over what a newsroom owes its readers, its staff, and the public.<\/p>\n

Baquet is born on September 21, 1956, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grows up in the Trem\u00e9<\/a> neighborhood, the historic heart of the city’s Black Creole community. His father, Edward Baquet, runs a successful restaurant, and the family business gives the boy an early education in work, management, and the web of relationships that hold a community together. He attends St. Augustine High School, a Black Catholic school with a reputation across the South for academic rigor and discipline, and then enrolls at Columbia University<\/a>. The classroom cannot compete with the newsroom. After an internship at the New Orleans States-Item<\/i>, he leaves Columbia without a degree and takes up reporting full time.<\/p>\n

His apprenticeship unfolds in New Orleans through the 1970s and early 1980s, first at the States-Item<\/i> and then at The Times-Picayune<\/a><\/i>. There he forms the habits that mark the rest of his career: aggressive sourcing, skepticism toward official accounts, and an appetite for the information that institutions work to keep hidden. New Orleans, a city of byzantine politics and entrenched corruption, gives him ample material. The work draws notice, and in 1984 he moves to the Chicago Tribune<\/a><\/i>, where he rises to the front rank of the paper’s investigative staff. In 1988 he shares the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting<\/a> as part of a team that exposes corruption and abuse in Chicago’s city council. The prize confirms him as an investigative reporter of national stature, still in his early thirties.<\/p>\n

In 1990 Baquet joins The New York Times<\/i> as an investigative reporter. He arrives at a moment when investigative journalism turns its attention toward complex financial, governmental, and transnational institutions, and he reports on money laundering, corruption, and public accountability before moving into management. By the mid-1990s he serves as national editor, directing coverage across the United States and shaping the paper’s domestic report. The trajectory from reporter to senior editor takes less than a decade.<\/p>\n

The next turn comes in 2000, when he leaves New York for the Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/i> to serve as managing editor under John S. Carroll (1942-2015)<\/a>. They expand the paper’s investigative ambitions, strengthen its national and foreign coverage, and gather Pulitzer Prizes at a pace few papers have matched. When Carroll departs in 2005, Baquet succeeds him as editor and becomes the first Black editor of a major metropolitan daily in the United States.<\/p>\n

His Los Angeles tenure ends in conflict, and the conflict makes his name as much as the prizes do. As the economics of the newspaper business deteriorate, the paper’s corporate owner, the Tribune Company<\/a>, demands successive rounds of newsroom cuts. Baquet resists. He argues that each reduction weakens the paper’s reporting capacity and degrades the product readers pay for, and he says so in public, an act of defiance almost unheard of among sitting editors. The company dismisses him in 2006. For a generation of journalists, his stand becomes a defining symbol of the fight between newsroom values and corporate cost-cutting during the collapse of the traditional newspaper model. Years before he runs The New York Times<\/i>, he carries a reputation as a defender of reporting resources against the spreadsheet.<\/p>\n

He returns to the Times<\/i> in 2007 as Washington bureau chief and later becomes managing editor. From those posts he helps direct coverage of the Iraq War, the financial crisis of 2008, and the paper’s halting early steps from print toward digital publishing. The problem facing the great newspapers by the early 2010s extends beyond journalism. The papers must build a business that can survive in an online environment where readers expect news without charge, and no one has yet shown how.<\/p>\n

In May 2014 publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. (b. 1951)<\/a> elevates Baquet to executive editor after the abrupt dismissal of Jill Abramson (b. 1954)<\/a>. The handover occurs amid unusual institutional anxiety. At nearly the same moment, the Innovation Report, an internal study of the paper’s digital failings, circulates through the building and then leaks. The report warns that the Times<\/i> remains bound to the rhythms of print while digital-native competitors capture audiences online. Baquet inherits the newsroom and, with it, the burden of steering a venerable institution through a technological transition that has already destroyed much of its industry.<\/p>\n

Over the next eight years he becomes the central editorial figure in that transition. Under his leadership the paper accelerates its shift toward digital publishing, audience development, multimedia storytelling, and subscription growth. Digital subscriptions rise from roughly one million to more than nine million paying customers. The achievement demonstrates that readers will pay for quality journalism if asked, and it stands as a business success few in the industry thought possible. Other news organizations study the Times<\/i> model and attempt to copy it.<\/p>\n

The journalism keeps pace with the business. During his tenure, Times<\/i> reporters expose the pattern of sexual abuse and institutional protection surrounding the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein (b. 1952)<\/a>, work that helps ignite the MeToo movement. The paper publishes major investigations of Donald Trump’s (b. 1946)<\/a> finances and tax records, some of the most consequential political reporting of the era. The newsroom also extends itself into new forms, above all The Daily<\/a><\/i>, a podcast that reaches millions of listeners and proves the paper can command attention beyond the printed and pixelated page.<\/p>\n

His tenure coincides with the most turbulent stretch of American politics in decades. The rise of Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, the protests after the killing of George Floyd (1973-2020)<\/a>, and deepening polarization place enormous pressure on the major news organizations. Baquet navigates competing demands from readers, reporters, activists, and political critics. Conservatives accuse the Times<\/i> of ideological bias. Progressive critics argue the paper clings to outdated notions of neutrality. He absorbs fire from both directions and treats the crossfire as evidence the paper holds its ground.<\/p>\n

Against the current of his profession, Baquet defends traditional reporting values. He argues that reporters should gather verifiable facts rather than function as political activists, and he says this at a moment when many younger journalists regard the distinction as a dodge. He becomes the most prominent editor in American journalism to criticize the influence of Twitter on newsroom culture. The platform, he warns, leads journalists to mistake the opinions of a small, intense online community for public sentiment, and it narrows rather than widens the journalistic field of vision. He eventually restricts how Times<\/i> journalists may use the platform, a policy other newsrooms adopt.<\/p>\n

The internal conflicts of his later years register the transformation of the profession. In 2020 the opinion section publishes an essay by Senator Tom Cotton (b. 1977)<\/a> calling for military intervention during urban unrest. The staff revolts. Hundreds of employees declare the essay puts Black colleagues in danger, and the uproar contributes to the resignation of editorial page editor James Bennet (b. 1966)<\/a>. Baquet does not oversee the opinion section, but the episode exposes deep divisions inside the institution over free expression, journalistic responsibility, and the boundaries of acceptable public argument. It becomes the most discussed newsroom controversy of the era.<\/p>\n

A year later he confronts the case of Donald G. McNeil Jr. (b. 1954)<\/a>, a veteran science reporter whose coverage of the pandemic had made him a public figure. Revelations that McNeil used a racial slur during a student trip years earlier produce mounting internal pressure, and McNeil leaves the paper. Critics inside and outside the building fault the handling of the case from opposite directions. The affair illustrates the position of the modern newsroom leader, who must balance institutional standards, staff expectations, public scrutiny, and shifting cultural norms, and who satisfies no constituency in full.<\/p>\n

His years atop the masthead also include the 1619 Project<\/a>, the most ambitious and contested work of historical journalism the paper has undertaken. Led by Nikole Hannah-Jones (b. 1976)<\/a>, the project places slavery at the center of the American story. Supporters hail it as a necessary reexamination. Critics, including prominent historians, challenge its interpretations and its political implications. The argument over the project shows how far the major news organizations have moved into the center of the nation’s cultural and historical disputes, whether they wish to stand there or not.<\/p>\n

Baquet steps down as executive editor in 2022, at the customary retirement age for the position, and Joseph Kahn (b. 1964)<\/a> succeeds him. He leaves a newsroom larger, richer, more digital, and more global than the one he inherited. He also leaves it facing the conditions that defined his tenure: the pressures of social media, internal ideological conflict, declining public trust, and the difficulty of holding broad legitimacy in a polarized country. The institution thrives. The environment around it does not.<\/p>\n

After leaving the masthead, Baquet turns toward the wreckage of local journalism. He leads a Times<\/i> fellowship program that supports investigative reporting at regional and local news organizations, an effort that answers concerns running through his whole career. He fought newsroom cuts in Los Angeles and watched local papers across the country collapse. The fellowship work attempts to preserve the reporting capacity of institutions that long served as the foundation of American civic life, and it returns him, near the end of his career, to the kind of accountability reporting where he began.<\/p>\n

Baquet occupies a distinctive place in the history of modern journalism. He never becomes a celebrity columnist, an ideological crusher, or a media entrepreneur. He works instead as a newsroom institutionalist who believes rigorous reporting, investigative ambition, and editorial independence remain essential public goods. His career links the metropolitan newspaper culture of the late twentieth century to the subscription-driven digital news organizations of the twenty-first. He rises from a Creole restaurant family in Trem\u00e9 to the top of American journalism without a college degree, on reporting talent and institutional judgment. Few editors exercise greater influence over the profession’s passage into the digital age, and fewer still do so while the political, technological, and cultural ground shifts beneath the building.<\/p>\n

Watergate<\/a> and Cultural Trauma<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) closes his Watergate essay with a sentence that could serve as the epigraph for Dean Baquet’s whole career: scandals are not born, they are made. Facts do not speak. Society must tell them, and the telling depends on consensus, on symbolic work, on ritual occasions that lift events out of the profane world of goals and interests and into the sacred realm of values. Baquet spends fifty years inside the institution that does this telling. He enters journalism during the effervescence that follows one successful democratic ritual, builds his reputation as an agent of the purification process that ritual sanctifies, and ends his career presiding over the central communicative institution of American life at the moment its power to make scandals fails.
\nStart with the timing. Baquet takes his internship at the New Orleans States-Item in the mid-1970s, in the immediate afterglow of Watergate. Alexander describes what that afterglow contains: the founding of investigative reporting organizations, the creation of white-collar crime units, the shift of prosecutorial resources from street criminals to officeholders, the “little Watergates” that follow the symbolic form of the original down to the smallest detail. Post-Watergate morality, the name Americans give to the effervescence flowing from the ritual, sanctifies a particular social role. The investigative reporter becomes a priest of the civil religion, the figure who ferrets out pollution and protects the sacred codes of office. A generation of young people enters newsrooms wanting to be that figure. Baquet stands among them, and his early career follows the script with uncanny fidelity. He uncovers what institutions hide. He spreads pollution onto corrupt officials in New Orleans and then in Chicago, where his 1988 Pulitzer comes from exposing city council corruption, the Watergate form applied at municipal scale: office obligations violated by personal interest, the reporter as the purifying agent who restores the boundary. Alexander writes that after Watergate it became the a priori conviction of prosecutors that officeholders might commit crimes against the public. The same conviction animates the investigative desk. Baquet’s craft is the routinized charisma of 1974.
\nHis 2006 firing from the Los Angeles Times reads as a purification struggle inside the institution. Alexander’s civil discourse runs on a binary code. On one side sit truth, law, the common good, impersonal obligation. On the other sit money, self-interest, personalism, secrecy. When Baquet refuses the Tribune Company’s demand for deeper cuts and says so in public, he codes the conflict. The newsroom stands with the civil sacred: truth-telling, public service, the readers. Corporate ownership stands with the profane and the polluting: spreadsheets, short-term gain, the destruction of a public good for private benefit. The company fires him, and the firing completes the symbolic work. Within the profession he becomes a martyr figure, a man who touched power and chose purity. The episode charges him with the symbolic capital that later legitimates his rise to the top of The New York Times. He arrives in 2014 already sanctified.
\nThen comes the test, and the test is Trump. What happens to Baquet’s Times between 2016 and 2021 is the attempt to run the Watergate script on Donald Trump, and the failure of that attempt exposes everything Alexander says about the contingency of democratic ritual. Recall the structure of the argument. The Watergate break-in produces no outrage for almost a year. Eighty percent of Americans dismiss it; seventy-five percent call it just politics. The facts sit there, inert, because polarization blocks generalization. Only after the election ends, after the 1960s struggles cool, after centrist consensus emerges, can public attention climb from the level of goals to the level of norms and then to the level of sacred values. Five conditions must align: consensus, perceived threat to the center, institutional social control, struggle by autonomous elites, and ritual processes of interpretation. Alexander warns that the successful alignment of these forces is rare.
\nWith Trump, the first condition never arrives. The polarization that delayed Watergate’s generalization for two years never abates; it deepens for five. The Times produces revelations that dwarf the break-in. Baquet’s reporters obtain Trump’s tax records, document the inherited fortune and the dubious schemes behind it, expose the hush money, the foreign entanglements, the pressure on Ukraine. The facts pour out, and the facts do not speak. Half the country accepts the coding; half rejects the coder. Trump’s supporters perform the same interpretive move Nixon’s loyalists performed, the move Alexander finds in the unconvinced eighteen to twenty percent who read Watergate as political vengeance by Nixon’s enemies. They hold a personalized view of authority, a polarized vision of solidarity, a refusal to generalize from political conflict to moral violation. In 1974 that group is a remainder, isolated, without institutions. By 2016 it approaches half the electorate and owns its own communicative apparatus: talk radio, cable news, social platforms. The backlash culture that the Ervin committee bracketed into invisibility now runs a countercenter of its own, with its own binary code, and within that code the Times occupies the polluted side. Enemy of the people. Fake news. The purifying institution gets coded as the source of pollution, and pollution, as Alexander shows with Nixon’s lava, is contagious. No Senate caucus room becomes sacred space. No Sam Ervin (1896-1985) emerges whom both halves accept as the embodiment of transcendent law. Two impeachments produce ritual form without ritual effect, ceremonies performed inside one civil sphere while the other watches a different channel. Scandals are not born, they are made, and the maker has lost its monopoly on making.
\nBaquet understands this, and his much-criticized caution follows from the understanding. His reluctance to deploy the word lie, his insistence that the paper not join the resistance, his statement that the Times should not be the opposition party: critics read these as timidity. Read through Alexander, they are attempts to preserve the conditions of ritual. A successful democratic ritual requires that the interpreting institution stand above the conflict, that it speak from the level of values rather than the level of goals. The Ervin committee worked because its members masked their divisions behind civic universalism, because the hearings existed out of time, severed from the partisan struggles of the 1960s. The moment the Times becomes a combatant, it forfeits the liminal position from which pollution can be credibly assigned. Baquet tries to keep the paper on the sacred side of the line by keeping it out of the fight. The strategy fails, because the other side codes the paper as combatant regardless, but the logic is Alexandrian to the core.
\nThe internal ruptures of 2020 belong to the other Alexander, the theorist of cultural trauma, and here the frame cuts even deeper. Cultural trauma, Alexander writes, occurs when members of a collectivity feel subjected to a horrendous event that marks their consciousness and changes their identity in fundamental ways. Events do not create trauma; the trauma process does, through claims made by carrier groups, broadcast to audiences, within institutional arenas. The killing of George Floyd becomes a cultural trauma in real time, the fastest and most successful trauma process in American history. The claim answers Alexander’s four questions. The nature of the pain: not one death but four hundred years of racial domination. The victim: Black Americans, and through them the nation’s civic ideals. The relation to the audience: the demand that White Americans recognize the suffering as their own, that the circle of the we expand. The perpetrator: institutional racism, located everywhere, including inside the institutions doing the reporting.
\nThat last clause produces the convulsion in Baquet’s newsroom. The trauma process enters the mass media arena, and the Times turns the spiral of signification on itself. The Cotton op-ed revolt follows the grammar of trauma claims exactly. Staff members declare that publishing the senator’s essay puts Black staff in danger. The claim asserts a fundamental injury, the profanation of a sacred value, and demands symbolic reparation. The reparation arrives: an editor’s note, a resignation, a revised process. Whatever one thinks of the episode, its structure is the structure Alexander describes. The newsroom acts as carrier group and audience at once, performing the trauma inside the institution whose historic role was to report on traumas performed elsewhere.
\nThe McNeil affair shows the pollution logic in its purest form. Donald McNeil utters a racial slur in a discussion about the slur, years earlier, on a student trip. Baquet first rules that intent matters and imposes discipline short of expulsion. The staff rejects the ruling, and Baquet reverses. The reversal marks the collision of two incompatible logics. Intent belongs to the normative level, the level of law and rule, where mental states determine culpability. Pollution operates at the level of the sacred, where contact contaminates regardless of intent. Nixon touched the molten lava of sacred impurity by firing Archibald Cox (1912-2004); his motives changed nothing. McNeil touched the impure word, and the word burned through every contextual defense. The newsroom applied ritual logic. Baquet tried to apply legal logic and lost, and his concession that the paper would not tolerate the word regardless of intent announces the victory of the sacred over the normative inside the building he ran.
\nThe 1619 Project completes the picture. Here the Times moves from covering a trauma process to conducting one. Nikole Hannah-Jones operates as the carrier group’s voice, possessed of what Alexander calls particular discursive talents for meaning making. The project constructs a new master narrative of social suffering: the nature of the pain (slavery as foundational violence rather than regional aberration), the victim (Black Americans, and through them the republic’s claim to its own ideals), the relation to the audience (the demand that the national we relocate its origin), the perpetrator (the nation as constituted, 1619 displacing 1776). The fight that follows distributes itself across Alexander’s institutional arenas like a diagram. Historians contest the claims in the scientific arena, with its evidentiary stipulations. The project enters the aesthetic arena through curricula and a podcast. The state arena answers with the 1776 Commission, a counter-commission performing counter-meaning. Trauma processes, Alexander insists, are always contested, and the contest over 1619 is a contest over whether American collective identity will be revised around a new wound.
\nBaquet’s Twitter critique, his most repeated theme in his late tenure, restates Alexander’s caution about audience in different words. The trauma claim must persuade a public that is, in Alexander’s phrase, putatively homogeneous but sociologically fragmented. Twitter presents journalists with a false public, a small, intense, self-selected congregation in a state of permanent effervescence, mistaking its own ritual solidarity for the civil sphere. A newsroom that takes Twitter for the audience will calibrate its meaning work to a sect and lose the wider collectivity. Baquet says the platform narrows journalistic perspective. Alexander supplies the reason: ritual solidarity feels like consensus from inside the circle, and the circle is small.
\nBaquet’s own elevation belongs in the frame. The first Black executive editor of The New York Times, raised in Trem\u00e9, the grandson of the segregated South, ascends to the top of the institution that codes American civil life. His appointment is itself civil repair, an expansion of solidarity of the kind Alexander says successful trauma processes make possible. The civil rights movement constructed slavery and Jim Crow as national trauma; the incorporation of Black Americans into the centers of institutional life flows from that construction. Baquet embodies the repair. The irony of his tenure is that the man who personifies the expanded circle spends his final years resisting the next round of trauma claims, insisting on the older, universalist code of the civil sphere, the code of verifiable fact and impersonal office, against a younger cohort that finds that code complicit in the original wound. He defends the church whose previous reformation made room for him.
\nBaquet’s career was shaped at both ends by the fate of democratic ritual. Baquet rises inside the priesthood that Watergate consecrated, carries its purifying mission through four newsrooms, and reaches the summit just as the conditions for successful ritual dissolve. The civil sphere splits into two spheres, each with its own sacred and profane, each running purification rites on the other, neither able to stage the liminal occasion where the whole society watches one hearing and reaches one judgment. Inside his own building, the trauma process turns inward, and the binary code of pollution and purity, which his profession once applied to presidents, gets applied to colleagues and to the institution’s own past. He leaves a paper richer and larger than the one he inherited, and a country in which scandals can no longer be made, only claimed. Alexander gives the epitaph in advance. Facts do not speak. For two hundred years the Times aspired to be the institution through which society spoke them. Baquet’s tenure is the story of what happens to that institution when society stops speaking with one voice.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Mearsheimer is right, the central drama of Dean Baquet’s editorship reads as a confirmation of his anthropology, and the creed Baquet spent his career defending rests on a false picture of man.
\nStart with objectivity. Baquet inherited and defended the Times’s founding faith: that a trained journalist can stand apart from his attachments, weigh evidence, and follow facts wherever they lead. That faith presumes the atomistic reasoning individual Mearsheimer says does not exist. If socialization and innate sentiment shape moral judgment before reason gets a vote, then a newsroom of 1,700 people produces not a view from nowhere but the view of a tribe, the tribe of credentialed professionals socialized in the same dozen universities, the same cities, the same status hierarchy. Baquet sensed this. After 2016 he admitted the paper did not understand the country that elected Trump. Mearsheimer would say it could not. A group cannot reason its way past its own value infusion, because the values arrived before the reasoning did.
\nThe 2020 crisis follows the same logic. When the Tom Cotton op-ed ran and the staff revolted, Baquet and James Bennet (b. 1966) tried argument. They appealed to the marketplace of ideas, the liberal individualist case for airing views one finds repugnant. The staff answered with group loyalty: the op-ed endangered our colleagues, our people. If Mearsheimer ranks reason below socialization, then Baquet brought the weakest weapon to that fight. The younger cohort arrived with a moral code already installed by family, campus, and peer group. He thought he was in a debate. He was in a contest between two socializations, his and theirs, and theirs had numbers, youth, and the future on its side. Bennet lost his job. Baquet kept his by yielding. The tribe disciplined its chiefs.
\nHis own biography supports the thesis rather than the creed. Baquet’s moral formation came from a Creole family running a restaurant in New Orleans, from Catholic schooling, from the newsroom cultures of the States-Item and the Chicago Tribune. He became a great reporter through apprenticeship and absorption, the way Mearsheimer says all of us become what we are. Nobody reasons himself into news judgment. It gets socialized into you, like an accent.
\nThen there is universalism. Mearsheimer argues that liberalism’s faith in inalienable rights drives liberal states toward ambitious crusades abroad, and that these crusades fail because they collide with nationalism, the political expression of our tribal nature. The Times under Baquet ran a domestic version of the same program. The 1619 Project, the saturation coverage of Trump as a rights emergency, the framing of American politics as a struggle between universal values and atavism: these treat the paper’s moral vocabulary as everyone’s moral vocabulary. Half the country received that coverage the way Iraqis received democracy promotion, as one tribe’s values arriving under a universal flag. The paper’s crusades produced the same blowback abroad produces: deepened loyalty to the opposing group, and a market for rival media that serve the other tribe’s sentiments.
\nOne more implication. If group attachment governs, then the Times’s subscriber model after 2016 socialized the paper a second time. Digital subscribers became the coalition the institution depends on, and coverage drifted toward what sustains that coalition’s attachment. Baquet resisted some of this. He held out against “liar” and “racist” as routine labels longer than his staff wanted. But resistance by one man against a group’s sentiment is exactly the fight Mearsheimer says individuals lose. He retired in 2022 with his reputation intact and his creed in ruins, an editor who believed in the reasoning individual and presided over a decade that proved the tribe runs the show.
\nBaquet was not a failed defender of objectivity. He was a man asked to enforce an ideal that misdescribes the species, including himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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