Journalists Are “Self-Important, Pompous,” Washington Post Editor Concedes

Plus, Fed Chairman Powell on long-term growth; a Princeton club overreacts to a professor’s visit; Illinois spending surge; Harvard update

The former editor of the New York Times editorial page, James Bennet; the deputy opinion editor of the Washington Post, Charles Lane; a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Chatterton Williams; and the editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon, Eliana Johnson, got together Wednesday night for an event on “The New Illiberalism: The American Media and the Future of Democracy.”

A friend suggested that the American Enterprise Institute event was worth checking out, and he was right, even though I’d already read Bennet’s piece in the Economist on how The New York Times lost its way and wrote about it.

Bennet made working at the New York Times sound pretty terrible, asserting that “the Times had changed radically, culturally” during the ten years between when he’d been a reporter and when he returned to edit the editorial page. (Bennet was editing the Atlantic during that decade before Jeff Goldberg took over.) “The old rewards for being controversial, heterodox, challenging conventional wisdom,” had been “replaced by a desire to conform,” Bennet said. Inside the Times, he said, there was “a sense that you couldn’t publicly voice what you honestly think.”

Johnson said that when she talked recently to a Yale conservative student group, a substantial fraction of the students said they weren’t actually that conservative, they just “reject the monoculture on campus.” Johnson said the Free Beacon attracts some similar staff as reporters, and she said she explains to potential hires that the publication isn’t doctrinaire, beyond, “we are strident Zionists.” Lane quipped, “sounds like the old New Republic.”

Williams said readers might benefit from consuming a variety of news sources. He warned, though, that “that’s a lot to ask of a typical reader.”

“If you are tuned in to a variety of sources, you can kind of triangulate,” Williams said. “You can have a lot of value added by individual substacks.”

Johnson ridiculed what she called “the self-seriousness of the reporters, the idea that they think they’re neutral.”

Lane acknowledged that issue, with what I detected to be a bit of self-deprecating humor, but questioned how new it is. “It’s long been the case that journalists were self-important, pompous people,” he said.

Johnson said the liberal press, by avoiding certain topics, are “ceding huge ground to conservative media.” She offered as an example covering the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. “All you find is glowing profiles of the heads of these foundations,” she said. She also mentioned higher education. “I grew up in a household where it was highly valued to go to an Ivy League school,” she said. “I have no desire to fall over myself to get my kid into such an institution because I don’t think there’s a lot of value going on.”

Lane predicted there would be some continuing need for a press or some sort, so long as it can deliver on a basic mission: “People want to know what is going on.”