New York Times Previews Left’s Meltdown If Trump Wins

Plus, Harvard moves to prevent professors from fleeing to industry; and more

“Trump Turns to Nonwhite Voters to Extend His Politics of Resentment,” is a news jump headline in today’s New York Times. 

It looks like the paper is preparing for an explanation of a potential Trump election victory: it’ll have been the “politics of resentment.” Not the Biden-Harris administration’s failures to fight inflation, control immigration, or maintain peace and security overseas; rather, Trump’s ability to appeal to the worst in America, the “politics of resentment.”

It’s funny how when Harris talks about how Trump “fights for billionaires and large corporations” and says she, by contrast, is for “working and middle class Americans,” the Times headline-writers don’t describe that as a “politics of resentment.” 

It sure looks like if anyone is resenting anything, it’s the Times newsroom resenting that too many voters, even the “nonwhite” ones, don’t see the choice in the 2024 campaign the way the Times reporters and editors see it.

If Trump does win, expect a formidable level of fury by Times readers at the Times newsroom for having supposedly failed to arouse the public about the threat Trump poses. The Times editors are in a bind, because the more heavy-handed they are in warning of the threat (selectively using “Politics of Resentment,” in headlines, for example), the more damage it does to what is left of the paper’s credibility, and the less likely that such warnings are to have any effect on anyone whose mind isn’t already made up.

New York Times finds “unexpected” “surprise” in something The Editors readers would have known about: The New York Times news article today about the leadership race in the British Conservative Party describes the selection of Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenock as the two final contenders as a “surprise” and “unexpected.”

New York Times is surprised by an outcome that was predicted here a month ago.

Maybe the Times reporters should read The Editors. Our Michael Mosbacher reported here on September 9, “the party’s MPs have started off the process of whittling down the original six to two, who will be put to the membership in October; the final members’ vote is currently looking most likely to pit the former centrist, immigration hardliner Robert Jenrick against the anti-woke, Nigerian-heritage Kemi Badenock.” In other words, what came as a “surprise” and “unexpected” to the New York Times was reported here more than a month ago as the likeliest outcome.

Times reporter boasts about lying while newsgathering: Food reporter and interim restaurant critic Priya Krishna of the New York Times writes, “I ate at a dozen of the top 20 places on this year’s New York Times list of the city’s 100 best, identifying myself as a vegetarian and sometimes bringing along vegetarian companions. (For the record, I am not a vegetarian, though I was for the first 18 years of my life).”

Lying in the course of newsgathering is corrosive, and reporters and editors should almost always avoid it. In this case, it would have been entirely feasible for the reporter to complete the assignment without falsely identifying herself as a vegetarian. She could have said something like, “do you have anything for vegetarians?” or “I’d like to order something vegetarian.” Or she could have consistently brought along a genuine vegetarian and tasted that person’s food. 

I guess you could say the Times food critic is already making a reservation under an alias so the additional level of deception that goes into falsely claiming vegetarianism is not worth being concerned about. 

But when it’s Washington Post executives or possible hires like Will Lewis or Robert Winnett who used to work in London, the Times gets on a high ethical horse about journalists misrepresenting themselves. My view of it is reporters are in the truth-telling business, not the lying business, and that if the Times is going to take a holier-than-thou attitude about it when it comes to the Washington Post or former employees of Rupert Murdoch, than the least the Times can do is avoid sending out a reporter representing herself falsely as a vegetarian.

In the annals of journalistic dishonesty, this case amounts to a misdemeanor, not a felony, and the paper probably gets some credit for being transparent with readers about the deception. But one of the points that stuck with me from Sissela Bok’s book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, which discusses this issue, is that getting in the habit of telling untruths is unhealthy for people whose professional job is to be truth-tellers. The ethical issue isn’t just with the effect on the restaurant waiter or operator who is misled; the issue is the effect on the journalist who now gets used to bending the truth at work. It also affects the public’s image of journalists; they now look like liars rather than truth-tellers, or at least less like purely truth-tellers than is desirable.

Harvard Moves to Prevent Professors From Fleeing to Industry: In “A Nobel for Google,” I noted that there is a market for faculty talent, and that “The worse the conditions become in academia—poisonous faculty politics, cancel culture, performative ‘wokeness,’ the decline of meritocracy in favor of other values such as ‘equity’ or bureaucracy—the greater the relative attraction of choosing to make a career instead at Google or some company that will be the next Google.” 

It turns out that Harvard’s leadership is concerned enough about the possibility of a talent exodus that it is revising its rules to make it easier for professors to work in the private sector without quitting their Harvard positions altogether.

The Harvard provost’s office recently okayed the creation of a new category of academic appointment, to be known as a Catalyst Professor, that will allow faculty members to split their time between Harvard and the private sector. In exchange for being allowed to spend more time on outside-Harvard projects, the faculty members will have to agree to give up tenure and instead accept renewable five-year term appointments. They’d still keep their other faculty privileges, including voting on whether to hire and promote other faculty members. 

Announcements of the first batch of Catalyst Professors are expected soon. They might include Douglas Melton, whose Harvard website identifies him both as the co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and as a research scholar at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where Harvard President Alan Garber is a member of the board of directors. 

Melton announced in 2022 an intention to leave Harvard to join Vertex full time. “In 2016, Vertex acquired Melton’s company, Semma Therapeutics, and its potentially infinite line of insulin-producing cells, for $950 million,” The Juvenile Diabetes Cure Alliance commented then, noting, “It is surprising to see such an esteemed research professor leave behind the status that comes along with a Harvard professorship.” Melton didn’t respond to an email inquiry I sent to his Harvard email address.

The transparent university: Social media has made campuses transparent in ways they didn’t used to be.

It used to be that a student could write something ridiculous in the Crimson and it would be widely ignored, or at least not seen beyond those on campus who got the print newspaper. Now the Crimson has a website and the articles are available for the whole world to mock. So Violet Barron, a Crimson editorial editor and anti-Israel activist, can greet Yom Kippur and the anniversary of October 7 with a piece claiming “Jews don’t need a state of and for Jews” and it gets tweeted out and in a few hours 100,000 people see it, an official spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry denounces it as “completely ignorant” and “malicious,” and, rightly or wrongly, people’s image of Harvard as increasingly intellectually mediocre and hostile to Jews is reinforced. 

Whether this state of affairs is better or worse than the “ivory tower” status of happenings on campus largely remaining confined to campus is open for debate. And sure, Time magazine and other national and international news outlets had stringers on the Harvard campus back in the 1960s and early 1990s. But the technology has certainly changed things. 

The War against the Jews is a war against capitalism: The Brown University Chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine issued a statement celebrating the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. “Al-Aqsa Flood was a historic act of resistance against decades of occupation, apartheid and settler colonial violence,” the statement says, “We, as Brown Students for Justice in Palestine, honor resistance against occupation by any means necessary…We recognize that the struggles against poverty, systemic racism, environmental destruction, and land sovereignty within Turtle Island are bound to the internationalist fight against the forces of global capitalism.”

We’ve been making the case here for a while that the war against Israel and the Jews is also a war against capitalism, compiling evidence of that pattern. As I put it back on March 3, “The takeaway from this is that the defense of the Jews and of free enterprise are intertwined. If the Jews think they can ignore the attacks on capitalism, or if the capitalists think they can ignore the attacks on the Jews, they are mistaken. It’s one fight.”

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