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A 2006 Harvard Business Review paper by Boris Groysberg, Andrew N. McLean, and Nitin Nohria studied a group of GE executives who had gone on to run other companies. GE at the time was a big, diverse company, which meant that different executives worked in very different industries. It was also a premier training ground for corporate CEOs

t an analysis by the scholars Dovev Lavie, Thomas Kiel, and Stevo Pavićević of nearly 1,300 CEO appointments from 2001 to 2014 reached a similar conclusion: The biggest factor in determining whether a new CEO coming from outside would fail was “a misfit between the CEO’s corporate background and the company’s organizational characteristics.

Precisely such a misfit might involve a CEO going from running companies whose success depends on technology and engineering to running a company whose success depends on creating a welcoming environment for social interaction and satisfying the particular concerns of corporate advertisers.

“If we compare that with the general population, I think it’s fair to conclude that hikikomori noticeably have no relation to crimes. They are a group with a low crime rate.”

the most pressing problem is that those with the condition, like others in Japan, rarely seek help for their mental health problems. Hikikomori may be affected by schizophrenia, depression or anxiety, or they may be on the autism spectrum.

A looming crisis, experts say, is that a large cohort of hikikomori are getting older, with little indication that they will ever be able to reintegrate into society. Their parents, as they grow older, worry about who will look after these disconnected adults

According to the government survey, an estimated 613,000 people between age 40 and 64 identify as hikikomori, outnumbering the 540,000 between age 15 and 39. The vast majority of them are men.

he was often approached by aging parents — mostly mothers — who asked how they could continue providing for their grown children. “If I die, what should he do?” the mothers commonly asked, he said.

According to a government survey released in March, there are nearly 1.2 million people who identify as hikikomori — about one in every 60 Japanese age 15 to 64. But experts say that figure most likely undercounts the full scope of the problem.

Japan’s educational system, which emphasizes shame in its pursuit of conformity and can undermine personal confidence, may seed reclusive tendencies

“In the U.S., a child is encouraged to do things and self-esteem is high,” he said. “In Japanese culture and the educational system, children are not encouraged to develop high self-esteem.”

hikikomori initially started appearing in large numbers after Japan’s property-based bubble burst in the 1990s and many people were put out of work.

Even now that unemployment is low, some recluses may not want to take part in Japan’s rigid and hierarchical work culture, where employees are expected to work long hours and promotions are mostly based on seniority

the phenomenon is more prevalent in Japan because the nuclear family is still so central to society and parents are reluctant to kick their children out of the house.

“With a strong Japanese value of having to take full responsibility for your actions, family issues must be solved within a family,

the more hikikomori are demonized, or at least categorized as damaged or strange, the harder it is for them to be accepted in society or offered a job.

Political scientists have observed that American politics has deteriorated into an unstable combination of weak parties and strong partisanship — dry brush for the likes of Trump and Blankenship to ignite.

The 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform restricted party fundraising, and the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in 2010 essentially destroyed parties by giving everybody else freedom to spend unlimited sums to buy politicians. The moderating influence of parties was replaced by the radicalizing influence of dark money.

Related to this, partisanship in Washington escalated, aggravated by partisan redistricting that puts almost all House members in safe seats where the only threat comes from primaries. Primary voters tend to favor extreme candidates — who, once in Congress, turn politics into warfare.

the problem is most severe among Republicans, and it’s no small irony that the man who arguably did the most to create the current system is now under attack by it. McConnell, who championed unlimited dark money, cheered Citizens United and dramatically accelerated the partisan revenge cycle on the Senate floor, is now the victim of extremists his own actions created.

this much we already know: McConnell unleashed the forces now shredding his party. Blankenship, like Trump, exploited those forces. And nobody controls them.

It might also take some of the edge off the hatred many people feel for Trump. Seeing him for what he is—a terribly damaged soul, a broken man, a person with a disordered mind—should not lessen our revulsion at how Trump mistreats others, at his cruelty and dehumanizing actions.

Even now, almost a thousand days into his presidency, the latest Trump outrage elicits shock and disbelief in people. The reaction is, “Can you believe he said that and did this?”To which my response is, “Why are you surprised?” It’s a shock only if the assumption is that we’re dealing with a psychologically normal human being. We’re not. Trump is profoundly compromised, acting just as you would imagine a person with a disordered personality would. Many Americans haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that we elected as president a man who is deeply damaged, an emotional misfit

n analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car.

above all, accepting the truth about Trump’s mental state will cause us to take more seriously than we have our democratic duty, which is to prevent a psychologically and morally unfit person from becoming president.

They killed their trainers and fought their way into Seoul before blowing themselves up

South Korea is again targeting the North’s leadership

the South Korean defense minister, Song Young-moo, told lawmakers in Seoul that a special forces brigade he described as a “decapitation unit” would be established by the end of the year

The unit, officially known as the Spartan 3000, has not been assigned to literally decapitate North Korean leaders. But that is clearly the menacing message South Korea is trying to send.

Rarely does a government announce a strategy to assassinate a head of state, but South Korea wants to keep the North on edge and nervous about the consequences of further developing its nuclear arsenal

meant to help push North Korea into accepting President Moon Jae-in’s offer of talks

How can a country without nuclear weapons deter a dictator who has them?

“The best deterrence we can have, next to having our own nukes, is to make Kim Jong-un fear for his life,”

I have seen technology take jobs from people more than immigrants. It is a terrible feeling. Most of my peers and I are now working freelance jobs. Sometimes its voluntary but often times it is because we can't find full time jobs with benefits. For those of us over 60 it is the only work available. If you have never been independent you are in for a shock at how hard it can be to run a small sole proprietor business from scratch.

Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.

the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.

have any of the individuals commenting ever met or talked to the uneducated trailer dwellers referred to in this article. I think not. This poor pitiful underclass that we must now fix as true liberals has been making poor decisions for decades. Serial children withe serial mothers and resulting large child support payments. Job hopping and laying around the house all winter when laid off while waiting for the Wife to get home from work and make dinner. Gun purchases for thousands of dollars and 45,000 dollar trucks on an annual income of 35,000. Cashing in 401ks. To buy the latest 4 Wheeler. Oh and don't forget the biannual trips to Disney world or to hunt out west on credit cards. I sprang from uneducated people of another generation and the men by and large did not engage in self destructive behavior like this. sorry you make your bed and don't expect me to cry about it.

I think at least half of the American political class, the republican half, wants Americans to be ignorant. The ignorant are easily duped and manipulated. The GOP establishment clearly knows that, but they never expected someone like Trump to beat them at their own game. That explains why the GOP is generally unwilling to adequately fund public education and is content to punish the non-rich who seek higher education by burying them in debt.

Until now I had deceived myself into believing that I am a college educated hard working East coast Caucasian with moderate views and a penchant for reading a multi-faceted world class newspaper. However, the continued biased reports concerning Mr. Trump and his campaign are quite distasteful and have completely lost objectivity.Now, the journalistic attacks have moved toward his supporters and potential voters. Well, as with many of my fellow unintelligent white trash friends this only cements my unwavering support for the Trump campaign.

in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.

Enormous advances in technology have made the trans-oceanic distances disappear. Foreign-based administrative jobs are now transparent, meaning that "back-room" corporate jobs such as payroll, accounting and corporate management can be off-shored. Jobs in this category also include computer software development and computer system help-line support. The concept of the "virtual corporation", which maintains low levels of "project managers" can scale up or down, and only a small "corporate core" needs to be physically in the USA.

Trump has said that he hires people from other countries over American citizens and thinks Americans are already overpaid. So, why is he so popular with the angry voters who are living from paycheck to paycheck or were forced to retire? Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. The working class voters need wage insurance or a living wage solution and they need the government to step in and help them. Remember the WPA programs from the 30s? My guess is that Trump's supporters don't want to be the takers after years of thinking they were above that and were the makers. Surprise, we are all in the same boat.

there is a much bigger issue than creating jobs for these people. It is figuring out why so many are incapable of learning at a college level and beyond. I refuse to believe that it is nature dictating such a limitation. My money is on nurture; therefore, my money is on being able to solve that problem too.

Until we as a country stop treating intelligence as a disease and take steps to improve education across the board, this is what the fall-out will be. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out they could get to the White House by courting the angry white people vote.

among high school or less, 40% some college, but 33% among college graduates, and 19% among the post-graduates. In no election did Trump get the vote of the majority of college graduates or postgraduates. The education gap is consistent and steady. The gender gap is equally consistent.

The jobs engine the drove the US to its post war boom was the manufacturing sector. That has been gutted - by US consumer decisions.FDR did not practice racial identity politics.

Racism lurks - always - near the surface for ALL human beings. Don't believe me? Go take Harvard's Project Implicit tests (free) and learn about your own racist proclivities!By nature, all human beings tend toward tribalism; we are *wired* to notice and react to "difference". Civilization is the mass awareness of that proclivity towards shunning or rejecting "the other" and creating laws to stop it from becoming reality.When people become stressed, the veneer of civilization starts to break down - our more primitive, wired behaviors take over. That's what is happening now.We also have a huge propensity - as a species - towards cooperation. We have to somehow keep pursuing that "Better Angel of Our Nature" to keep the tide from turning permanently ugly.

As I read this article I began to confront an uncomfortable reality. We, as a society are to blame for Mr. Trump's support. Apparently we have ignored or overlooked the tragic plight faced by a sizable minority. Imagine the unemployed coal minor in West Virgina. His financial life is probably a shambles and he has no realistic prospect of recovering. He feels hopeless and abandoned. He sees publicized efforts to address problems of ethnic minorities and immigrants, yet he sits cold and jobless without anyone clamoring to address his situation. He starts getting angry and frustrated.Then, out of nowhere someone comes who appears to want to fight for him. Finally, someone who might champion his cause. Bring back jobs. Stop cheap labor from coming in.

Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.

Don't people realize that technology, computers, automation and especially robots have replaced more manufacturing and more factories than all the illegal immigrants ever have? On many factory floors you hardly see any human beings at all. Every product is whisked along conveyor belts and assembled (or cooked), and then inspected, labeled, packaged and shipped with a minimum of human intervention. That's today's world. What are we to do? Protest against computers and robots.Also, American corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their loyalty is to their bottom line. They take advantage of every tax loophole they can; and if their product is labor intensive they would much rather pay 5000 workers a dollar a day with no benefits rather than stay in America and have to pay someone $18 an hour will vacation time, holiday time off, Soc Sec taxes and Medicare taxes.

This is the Party of Stupid the Republican carefully constructed through painstaking racism, defunding of public education, defunding of infrastructure, hate radio, Fox-Henhouse News and trickle-down poverty.Donald Trump's supporters are the direct result of the Republican's decades-long efforts at dumbing down a large swath of Americans.The Republican Party needs to take a giant proud bow as their electorate walks down the runway of nationally-assisted-suicide.

The irony of all this is that, yes, the world is shifting out from under the feet of the less-educated poor, but none of us face a really BIG or YUGE problem like slavery, Civil War, total war, a Great Depression, or even a gold/silver conflict. Yet Ken Lay and others can seriously muse over the possibility of secession from the union.The goals that so many of T's supporters are crying for are already in the process of being achieved -- the debt is too high but the national deficit has been cut in half under Obama. Millions now have health care that they didn't have before. "Taxed Enough Already" couldn't be more of an inept slogan.I wonder sometimes if the collapse of the USSR was such a good thing. Having a common enemy provided a kind of glue that held us together. Now some of us seem -- recklessly., hysterically, feverishly -- anxious to find an equally powerful enemy in our own ranks.

Whether Trump can appeal to enough independent or even blue collar Democrats is problematic absent some sensational catastrophe in the economy or in government. But you never know. Recall the charge of "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" late in the 1884 election. It changed history

Oh, and about the "myth" that opposition to Islam is only is by simplistic Islamophobes. Let me suggest for those who didn't get to it, this article about about the premier public intellectual of France: "Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France" It said that he has concluded that Islam is not comparable with 'Western enlightenment values."

It's obvious that the changing economy has structurally disadvantaged many less educated people across America. But, it is also true that economically distressed whites enjoy access to exactly the same programs that assist minorities. They just don't "feel" like this is true.

Truth be told, Trump is supported by numerous highly educated people who choose not to support known liars and/or socialists. These same people are tired of candidates who are bought and paid for by secret and evil Super PACs-- Trump is not controlled by these groups. Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and C;inton are.

The counties where Trump is most popular also have the lowest employment participation rates. Ordinarily, those folks would be expected to vote Democratic, which is more likely to continue the government spending that sustains them. Trump followers are willing to support him even though it is probably against their economic interest.So how to explain this? The strong correlation to previous support for George Wallace suggests it's about identity. A certain segment of the population does not accept diversity and change. They cling to white supremacy. The irony, as the article notes, is that these are the same folks who self-identify their heritage as "American," rather than, say "English" or "German." However, to me, they seem very un-American.

If policy hadn't been influenced by campaign funding, perhaps we would be in a better situation. Maybe congress would have paid more attention to improving the education system. It's a shame that most people don't understand that their only true weapon is voting for someone that isn't in debt to an industry. If we don't change our campaign finance system, nothing will change. Our voices will never be heard, our needs will never be met and policy will continue to favor profit, not people.

You are misinterpreting the analysis. This is a correlation analysis and what it says is that there is a moderately strong positive correlation between the % of people in a county that are white and have no high school and the % of people that support Trump. The 61 number is the correlation coefficient. The analysis does NOT show that folks in mobile homes vote for Trump.

There is only one interesting question regarding Trump: can he win Ohio and Florida in the national elections? Otherwise his campaign will turn into a footnote in American history like the campaign of many other unsuccessful candidates (Dukakis someone?). His voters, then, will be forgotten, as they usually are, until the next elections. That's the only time America's, winner takes it all culture, remembers those people exist.

However crude his message, on trade Trump has a legitimate point, which is that the US (not US companies, which don't care about international boundaries, but US workers) has got the short end of trade deals for decades. Whatever benefits the US has gleaned from these deals, they are minuscule compared to their utterly transformative effects on India, Mexico and especially China, which begs the question of why we couldn't have negotiated a better deal, one less devastating to old-line manufacturing. It often seems US negotiators are driven more by a religious belief in and devotion to free-trade principles, than by national self-interest. Trump may be unfit to be president, but I don't doubt he would have driven a harder bargain and come out with a better deal, if only because, unlike US negotiators, he'd be fully prepared to walk away from a deal he didn't like.

It's high time we re-engage in our communities with love and empathy. We need less talk of the theoretical economics underpinning trade deals and the credibility of climate science. It's not because these things are unimportant or irrelevant to governing in a complex world, but because our neighbors are afraid we've forgotten them in all our sophistication. They need to hear and see that we care about them. Our ideas about common efforts to improve their lives need to be less about class and more about community. We need to be clear that even the least among us are important to our common future

So many of the comments on this piece seem to fall into the category of subliminal rationales for long held prejudices that many of us have but don't understand.

this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.

There's a very powerful stigma associated with being poor in this country. Frankly, it makes it nearly impossible for an elite institution like the Times to write about poor populations without those same people perceiving a condescending tone. At the first mention of trailer parks--even if that is an apt descriptor for a type of housing--the words begin to cut and defenses rise. When spoken by a rich person, those words demean, even if they're not meant to by the speaker

The problem is that "Thug Trump," just so happens to touch on some truths, and existing bi-partisan defects that we ignore. Funny, as different as they are, Ralph Nader made the same point, that the major defects of our country are supported by both parties and thus untouchable. I guess the nature of a revolutionary is part misfit but also sensing the time is ripe for a drastic change. It may be better to look less at the person, and more that the endemic defects that he promises to change. From Huey Long to Norman Thomas, outsiders have had positive effects.

These relatives, who are very pleasant to talk to on a one-to-one basis, are the same people who send us rabid chain emails about how Obama hates America, how we need to "take back our country," etc. "The blacks" are "parasites and takers" and the real reason they invariably vote Republican. They see no relationship between their own "taking" and the "taking" by blacks and Hispanics.

I can't count the number of my husband's uneducated white southern relations who have taken extensive advantage, repeatedly, of both state and federal programs, including unemployment, food stamps, occasional welfare, and (sometimes specious) "disability." (My husband's mother was one of 11 born to poor sharecroppers, and the only one to leave her subculture

I bought into that "it's the fault of freeloaders" shtick for years, until i was laid off at age 50. Suddenly, I was one of those "freeloaders" with a 30 year impeccable work history and it changed my mind drastically. I've run into people like me from all walks of life; people with degrees and skills who lost jobs and are cut out of returning to the world of employment. I found something eventually, but at half the pay with no benefits. I don't support Trump but he's tapped into the lives of people like me. Globalization has showed us that for those at the very top, the elites, our country and it's workers don't matter much as long as the money keeps flowing. Unfortunately, I can't see that Trump would do much to change that

racism in the US is complicated. Some people who say the right things do the worst things, and vice versa. What gets you in trouble is saying blue-collar stuff like "nappy-headed ho's" White liberals are the most politically correct and the most critical of crude speech. But white liberals often have less contact with blacks than any other whites. Bigotry is not easily identified.

One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.

The point is that now, the entire middle class and working class have been fleeced by the Repubs AND the Dems, elected representatives who have shirked their duties and spent their time helping their billionaire puppetmasters.

Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have something big in common: their basic grievance, which is that the economy is rigged for the 1%. It's helpful to understand our differences, but then we should be finding common ground, not calling each other names. We're all people; we all deserve dignity and respect.

We are in the early throes of another revolution now, and this one will even more dramatically favor those with superior cognitive abilities and education over those with average or below average cognitive abilities and education. Yet all people at all levels need to eat, have shelter, and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. It remains unclear what kind of society will emerge from the current disruptions, but it is increasingly obvious that the transition will not be pretty.

49 percent of Americans referred explicitly to family relationships in their definition of happiness, while Southern Europeans and Latin Americans generally conceived of it in terms of oneself: Just 22 percent of Portuguese, 18 percent of Mexicans, and 10 percent of Argentines talked about their families in their happiness definitions.

Writing in the International Journal of Wellbeing in 2012, two Japanese scholars surfaced an important cultural difference in the definition of happiness between Western and Asian cultures. In the West, they found happiness to be defined as “a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement.” Meanwhile, in Asia, “happiness is defined in terms of experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness.”

In large countries, even comparing people within the same borders can be difficult to accomplish accurately. Happiness is defined very differently in northern versus southern India,

research shows that the United States is home to significant regional differences in personality characteristics. For example, people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions tend to display more attachment anxiety (“When will you call?”), while the western states breed more attachment avoidance (“See you when I see you”).

in Latin-based languages, the term comes from felicitas, which referred in ancient Rome not just to good luck, but also to growth, fertility, and prosperity.

Even the words we use to talk about happiness have different connotations in different tongues. In Germanic languages, happiness is rooted in words related to fortune or positive fate. In fact, happiness comes from the Middle English hap, which means “luck.”

cultures vary widely in their definitions of happiness. Therefore, it is impossible to say that one country is happier than another in some absolute sense, and a single index of “the happiest countries in the world” is not instructive.

Maybe Finland is the happiest country by one definition; it is almost certainly not by another. Countries should be classified more than compared.

handy way to get started on that task is to distinguish between two ways of focusing on happiness. The first is an “inner” or “outer” focus on happiness—that is, on introspection versus interaction with others. The second is a “relation” or “task” focus—people-oriented versus doing-oriented. This gives us four major models for well-being, based on survey research from around the world.

1. Happiness comes from good relationships with the people you love.This is a combination of the “outer” and “relation” foci. In this model, friends and family are who deliver the most happiness. A good example of a country that fits this model based on how the population tends to define happiness is the United States.

2. Happiness comes from a higher consciousness.This is a combination of the “inner” and “relation” foci, and is the model for highly spiritual, philosophical, or religious people, especially those who place a special importance on coming together in community. Southern India has been found to be home to a lot of people who follow this model.

3. Happiness comes from doing what you love, usually with others.This is a combination of the “outer” and “task” foci—that is, a dedication to work or leisure activities that are deeply fulfilling. This is your model if you tend to say “My work is my life” or “I love golfing with my friends.” Look for it in the Nordic countries and Central Europe.

4. Happiness comes from simply feeling good.This is a combination of the “inner” and “task” foci. It is the model for people who prioritize experiences that give them positive feelings, whether alone or with others. It’s a good way to assess your well-being if, when you imagine being happy, you think of watching Netflix or drinking wine. This model is most common in Latin America, the Mediterranean, and South Africa.

Just as different places have different definitions of happiness, so do different people. Understanding that diversity can help you understand yourself—to see whether and why you are a misfit in your home, and what you might do about it, whether that’s moving, joining a new community, or simply making peace with your surroundings.

All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in

In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias

on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether

the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.

far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage:

the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.

leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around

This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered

. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred

This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified.

as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

here have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions

The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole.

It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.

The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact.

It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other.

I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.

Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.

You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world.

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day

They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.

Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas

we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.

I was starting to see some effects of the new campus politics within the Atlantic. A promising new editor had created a digital form for aspiring freelancers to fill out, and she wanted to ask them to disclose their racial and sexual identity. Why? Because, she said, if we were to write about the trans community, for example, we would ask a trans person to write the story

There was a good argument for that, I acknowledged, and it sometimes might be the right answer. But as I thought about the old people, auto workers and abortion opponents I had learned from, I told her there was also an argument for correspondents who brought an outsider’s ignorance, along with curiosity and empathy, to the story.

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.

In the age of the internet it is hard even for a child to sustain an “innocent eye”, but the alternative for journalists remains as dangerous as ever, to become propagandists. America has more than enough of those already.

When I looked around the Opinion department, change was not what I perceived. Excellent writers and editors were doing excellent work. But the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture.

Fairly quickly, though, I realised two things: first, that if I did my job as I thought it should be done, and as the Sulzbergers said they wanted me to do it, I would be too polarising internally ever to lead the newsroom; second, that I did not want that job, though no one but my wife believed me when I said that.

there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were

On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?

The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour

Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.

This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”

As I knew from my time at the Atlantic, this kind of structural transformation can be frightening and even infuriating for those understandably proud of things as they are. It is hard on everyone

experience at the Atlantic also taught me that pursuing new ways of doing journalism in pursuit of venerable institutional principles created enthusiasm for change. I expected that same dynamic to allay concerns at the Times.

If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom.

New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them.

The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor

Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.

Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed

After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times.

Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.

Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation

Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm.

After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally. The Times wound up publishing a cringing editor’s note that hung the writer out to dry and approvingly quoted some of the criticism, including a tweet from a Washington Post opinion editor asking, “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies”?

the Times lacked the confidence to defend its own work

The editor’s note paraded the principle of publishing such pieces, saying it was important to “shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life”. But less light is what the readers got. As a reporter in the newsroom, you’d have to have been an idiot after that explosion to attempt such a profile

Empathetic reporting about Trump supporters became even more rare. It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.

After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting, so I turned over the entire editorial page to the Trump letters.

I wasn’t surprised that we got some criticism on Twitter. But I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision

Didn’t he think other Times readers should understand the sources of Trump’s support? Didn’t he also see it was a wonderful thing that some Trump supporters did not just dismiss the Times as fake news, but still believed in it enough to respond thoughtfully to an invitation to share their views?

And if the Times could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump, why should it be surprised that those voters would not trust it?

Two years later, in 2020, Baquet acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters and understand “the turmoil in the country”. And, he continued, the Times still did not understand the views of many Americans

Speaking four months before we published the Cotton op-ed, he said that to argue that the views of such voters should not appear in the Times was “not journalistic”.

Conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars within the Times. Sometimes I would hear directly from colleagues who had the grace to confront me with their concerns; more often they would take to the company’s Slack channels or Twitter to advertise their distress in front of each other

This environment of enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper, was hard even on liberal opinion writers. One left-of-centre columnist told me that he was reluctant to appear in the New York office for fear of being accosted by colleagues.

An internal survey shortly after I left the paper found that barely half the staff, within an enterprise ostensibly devoted to telling the truth, agreed “there is a free exchange of views in this company” and “people are not afraid to say what they really think”.)

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious

Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias

By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”

sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it.

A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

I began to think of myself not as a benighted veteran on a remote island, but as Rip Van Winkle. I had left one newspaper, had a pleasant dream for ten years, and returned to a place I barely recognised.

The new New York Times was the product of two shocks – sudden collapse, and then sudden success. The paper almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis, and the ensuing panic provoked a crisis of confidence among its leaders. Digital competitors like the HuffPost were gaining readers and winning plaudits within the media industry as innovative. They were the cool kids; Times folk were ink-stained wrinklies.

In its panic, the Times bought out experienced reporters and editors and began hiring journalists from publications like the HuffPost who were considered “digital natives” because they had never worked in print. This hiring quickly became easier, since most digital publications financed by venture capital turned out to be bad businesses

Though they might have lacked deep or varied reporting backgrounds, some of the Times’s new hires brought skills in video and audio; others were practised at marketing themselves – building their brands, as journalists now put it – in social media. Some were brilliant and fiercely honest, in keeping with the old aspirations of the paper.

critically, the Times abandoned its practice of acculturation, including those months-long assignments on Metro covering cops and crime or housing. Many new hires who never spent time in the streets went straight into senior writing and editing roles.

All these recruits arrived with their own notions of the purpose of the Times. To me, publishing conservatives helped fulfil the paper’s mission; to them, I think, it betrayed that mission.

then, to the shock and horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. In his article for Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger cites the Times’s failure to take Trump’s chances seriously as an example of how “prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate” can allow “conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society.

Many Times staff members – scared, angry – assumed the Times was supposed to help lead the resistance. Anxious for growth, the Times’s marketing team implicitly endorsed that idea, too.

As the number of subscribers ballooned, the marketing department tracked their expectations, and came to a nuanced conclusion. More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal

A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become “a selling point”, reported one internal marketing memo. Yet at the same time, the marketers concluded, subscribers wanted to believe that the Times was independent.

As that memo argued, even if the Times was seen as politically to the left, it was critical to its brand also to be seen as broadening its readers’ horizons, and that required “a perception of independence”.

Readers could cancel their subscriptions if the Times challenged their worldview by reporting the truth without regard to politics. As a result, the Times’s long-term civic value was coming into conflict with the paper’s short-term shareholder value

The Times has every right to pursue the commercial strategy that makes it the most money. But leaning into a partisan audience creates a powerful dynamic. Nobody warned the new subscribers to the Times that it might disappoint them by reporting truths that conflicted with their expectations

When your product is “independent journalism”, that commercial strategy is tricky, because too much independence might alienate your audience, while too little can lead to charges of hypocrisy that strike at the heart of the brand.

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism

The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out

The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of  free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it.

They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on

The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be

To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media

The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role.

The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand

What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.

By contrast, the old newsroom ideology seems cynical on its surface. It used to bug me that my editors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any person in power was a lie.

And the pursuit of objectivity can seem reptilian, even nihilistic, in its abjuration of a fixed position in moral contests. But the basis of that old newsroom approach was idealistic: the notion that power ultimately lies in truth and ideas, and that the citizens of a pluralistic democracy, not leaders of any sort, must be trusted to judge both.

Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves.

It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too

over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance,

will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable change, it provokes backlash.

The impatience within the newsroom with such old ways was intensified by the generational failure of the Times to hire and promote women and non-white people

Pay attention if you are white at the Times and you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them

As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock.

Having concluded they had got ahead by working hard, it has been a revelation to them that their skin colour was not just part of the wallpaper of American life, but a source of power, protection and advancement.

I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics.

The digital natives were nevertheless valuable, not only for their skills but also because they were excited for the Times to embrace its future. That made them important allies of the editorial and business leaders as they sought to shift the Times to digital journalism and to replace staff steeped in the ways of print. Partly for that reason, and partly out of fear, the leadership indulged internal attacks on Times journalism, despite pleas from me and others, to them and the company as a whole, that Times folk should treat each other with more respect

My colleagues and I in Opinion came in for a lot of the scorn, but we were not alone. Correspondents in the Washington bureau and political reporters would take a beating, too, when they were seen as committing sins like “false balance” because of the nuance in their stories.

My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher. Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: “Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.” It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.

There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors like Boyd could strike terror in young reporters like me and Purdum. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns. “I miss the old climate of fear,” Baquet used to say with a smile, in another of his barbed jokes.

I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too)

The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism.

Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news

But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases

The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics.

Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion

I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)

The internet rewards opinionated work and, as news editors felt increasing pressure to generate page views, they began not just hiring more opinion writers but also running their own versions of opinionated essays by outside voices – historically, the province of Opinion’s op-ed department.

Yet because the paper continued to honour the letter of its old principles, none of this work could be labelled “opinion” (it still isn’t). After all, it did not come from the Opinion department.

And so a newsroom technology columnist might call for, say, unionisation of the Silicon Valley workforce, as one did, or an outside writer might argue in the business section for reparations for slavery, as one did, and to the average reader their work would appear indistinguishable from Times news articles.

By similarly circular logic, the newsroom’s opinion journalism breaks another of the Times’s commitments to its readers. Because the newsroom officially does not do opinion – even though it openly hires and publishes opinion journalists – it feels free to ignore Opinion’s mandate to provide a diversity of views

When I was editorial-page editor, there were a couple of newsroom columnists whose politics were not obvious. But the other newsroom columnists, and the critics, read as passionate progressives.

I urged Baquet several times to add a conservative to the newsroom roster of cultural critics. That would serve the readers by diversifying the Times’s analysis of culture, where the paper’s left-wing bias had become most blatant, and it would show that the newsroom also believed in restoring the Times’s commitment to taking conservatives seriously. He said this was a good idea, but he never acted on it

I couldn’t help trying the idea out on one of the paper’s top cultural editors, too: he told me he did not think Times readers would be interested in that point of view.

opinion was spreading through the newsroom in other ways. News desks were urging reporters to write in the first person and to use more “voice”, but few newsroom editors had experience in handling that kind of journalism, and no one seemed certain where “voice” stopped and “opinion” began

The Times magazine, meanwhile, became a crusading progressive publication

Baquet liked to say the magazine was Switzerland, by which he meant that it sat between the newsroom and Opinion. But it reported only to the news side. Its work was not labelled as opinion and it was free to omit conservative viewpoints.

his creep of politics into the newsroom’s journalism helped the Times beat back some of its new challengers, at least those on the left

Competitors like Vox and the HuffPost were blending leftish politics with reporting and writing it up conversationally in the first person. Imitating their approach, along with hiring some of their staff, helped the Times repel them. But it came at a cost. The rise of opinion journalism over the past 15 years changed the newsroom’s coverage and its culture

The tiny redoubt of never-Trump conservatives in Opinion is swamped daily not only by the many progressives in that department but their reinforcements among the critics, columnists and magazine writers in the newsroom

They are generally excellent, but their homogeneity means Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics.

And because the critics, newsroom columnists and magazine writers are the newsroom’s most celebrated journalists, they have disproportionate influence over the paper’s culture.

By saying that it still holds itself to the old standard of strictly separating its news and opinion journalists, the paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial – and this misleads them about their country’s centre of political and cultural gravity.

And yet the Times insists to the public that nothing has changed.

“Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices, we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet,” Sulzberger wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review. “For that reason, we’ve long kept the Opinion department intentionally small – it represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff – and ensured that its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom.”

When I was editorial-page editor, Sulzberger, who declined to be interviewed on the record for this article, worried a great deal about the breakdown in the boundaries between news and opinion

He told me once that he would like to restructure the paper to have one editor oversee all its news reporters, another all its opinion journalists and a third all its service journalists, the ones who supply guidance on buying gizmos or travelling abroad. Each of these editors would report to him

That is the kind of action the Times needs to take now to confront its hypocrisy and begin restoring its independence.

The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise

It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work.

After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.

Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be

The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority

The paradox is that in previous generations the Sulzbergers’ control was the bulwark of the paper’s independence.

if he is going to instil the principles he believes in, he needs to stop worrying so much about his powers of persuasion, and start using the power he is so lucky to have.

Shortly after we published the op-ed that Wednesday afternoon, some reporters tweeted their opposition to Cotton’s argument. But the real action was in the Times’s Slack channels, where reporters and other staff began not just venting but organising. They turned to the union to draw up a workplace complaint about the op-ed.

The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.

This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s

Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”

That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest. The Times did not publish a correction or any note acknowledging the story had been changed.

Seeking to influence the outcome of a story you cover, particularly without disclosing that to the reader, violates basic principles I was raised on at the Times

s Rhoades Ha disputes my characterisation of the after-the-fact editing of the story about my resignation. She said the editors changed the story after it was published on the website in order to “refine” it and “add context”, and so the story did not merit a correction disclosing to the reader that changes had been made.

In retrospect what seems almost comical is that as the conflict over Cotton’s op-ed unfolded within the Times I acted as though it was on the level, as though the staff of the Times would have a good-faith debate about Cotton’s piece and the decision to publish it

Instead, people wanted to vent and achieve what they considered to be justice, whether through Twitter, Slack, the union or the news pages themselves

My colleagues in Opinion, together with the PR team, put together a series of connected tweets describing the purpose behind publishing Cotton’s op-ed. Rather than publish these tweets from the generic Times Opinion Twitter account, Sulzberger encouraged me to do it from my personal one, on the theory that this would humanise our defence. I doubted that would make any difference, but it was certainly my job to take responsibility. So I sent out the tweets, sticking my head in a Twitter bucket that clangs, occasionally, to this day

What is worth recalling now from the bedlam of the next two days? I suppose there might be lessons for someone interested in how not to manage a corporate crisis. I began making my own mistakes that Thursday. The union condemned our publication of Cotton, for supposedly putting journalists in danger, claiming that he had called on the military “to ‘detain’ and ‘subdue’ Americans protesting racism and police brutality” – again, a misrepresentation of his argument. The publisher called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history; people were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting. He had been expecting for some time that the union would seek a voice in editorial decision-making; he said he thought this was the moment the union was making its move. He had clearly changed his own mind about the value of publishing the Cotton op-ed.

I asked Dao to have our fact-checkers review the union’s claims. But then I went a step further: at the publisher’s request, I urged him to review the editing of the piece itself and come back to me with a list of steps we could have taken to make it better. Dao’s reflex – the correct one – was to defend the piece as published. He and three other editors of varying ages, genders and races had helped edit it; it had been fact-checked, as is all our work

This was my last failed attempt to have the debate within the Times that I had been seeking for four years, about why it was important to present Times readers with arguments like Cotton’s. The staff at the paper never wanted to have that debate. The Cotton uproar was the most extreme version of the internal reaction we faced whenever we published conservative arguments that were not simply anti-Trump. Yes, yes, of course we believe in the principle of publishing diverse views, my Times colleagues would say, but why this conservative? Why this argument?

I doubt these changes would have mattered, and to extract this list from Dao was to engage in precisely the hypocrisy I claimed to despise – that, in fact, I do despise. If Cotton needed to be held to such standards of politesse, so did everyone else. Headlines such as “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-ed”, the headline of a subsequent piece, should also have been tranquillised.

As that miserable Thursday wore on, Sulzberger, Baquet and I held a series of Zoom meetings with reporters and editors from the newsroom who wanted to discuss the op-ed. Though a handful of the participants were there to posture, these were generally constructive conversations. A couple of people, including Baquet, even had the guts to speak up in favour of publishing the op-ed

Two moments stick out. At one point, in answer to a question, Sulzberger and Baquet both said they thought the op-ed – as the Times union and many journalists were saying – had in fact put journalists in danger. That was the first time I realised I might be coming to the end of the road.

The other was when a pop-culture reporter asked if I had read the op-ed before it was published. I said I had not. He immediately put his head down and started typing, and I should have paid attention rather than moving on to the next question. He was evidently sharing the news with the company over Slack.

Every job review I had at the Times urged me to step back from the daily coverage to focus on the long term. (Hilariously, one review, urging me to move faster in upending the Opinion department, instructed me to take risks and “ask for forgiveness not permission”.)

I learned when these meetings were over that there had been a new eruption in Slack. Times staff were saying that Rubenstein had been the sole editor of the op-ed. In response, Dao had gone into Slack to clarify to the entire company that he had also edited it himself. But when the Times posted the news article that evening, it reported, “The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein” and made no mention of Dao’s statement

Early that morning, I got an email from Sam Dolnick, a Sulzberger cousin and a top editor at the paper, who said he felt “we” – he could have only meant me – owed the whole staff “an apology for appearing to place an abstract idea like open debate over the value of our colleagues’ lives, and their safety”. He was worried that I and my colleagues had unintentionally sent a message to other people at the Times that: “We don’t care about their full humanity and their security as much as we care about our ideas.”

“I know you don’t like it when I talk about principles at a moment like this,” I began. But I viewed the journalism I had been doing, at the Times and before that at the Atlantic, in very different terms from the ones Dolnick presumed. “I don’t think of our work as an abstraction without meaning for people’s lives – quite the opposite,” I continued. “The whole point – the reason I do this – is to have an impact on their lives to the good. I have always believed that putting ideas, including potentially dangerous one[s], out in the public is vital to ensuring they are debated and, if dangerous, discarded.” It was, I argued, in “edge cases like this that principles are tested”, and if my position was judged wrong then “I am out of step with the times.” But, I concluded, “I don’t think of us as some kind of debating society without implications for the real world and I’ve never been unmindful of my colleagues’ humanity.”

in the end, one thing he and I surely agree on is that I was, in fact, out of step with the Times. It may have raised me as a journalist – and invested so much in educating me to what were once its standards – but I did not belong there any more.

Finally, I came up with something that felt true. I told the meeting that I was sorry for the pain that my leadership of Opinion had caused. What a pathetic thing to say. I did not think to add, because I’d lost track of this truth myself by then, that opinion journalism that never causes pain is not journalism. It can’t hope to move society forward

As I look back at my notes of that awful day, I don’t regret what I said. Even during that meeting, I was still hoping the blow-up might at last give me the chance either to win support for what I had been asked to do, or to clarify once and for all that the rules for journalism had changed at the Times.

But no one wanted to talk about that. Nor did they want to hear about all the voices of vulnerable or underprivileged people we had been showcasing in Opinion, or the ambitious new journalism we were doing. Instead, my Times colleagues demanded to know things such as the names of every editor who had had a role in the Cotton piece. Having seen what happened to Rubenstein I refused to tell them. A Slack channel had been set up to solicit feedback in real time during the meeting, and it was filling with hate. The meeting ran long, and finally came to a close after 90 minutes.

I tried to insist, as did Dao, that the note make clear the Cotton piece was within our editorial bounds. Sulzberger said he felt the Times could afford to be “silent” on that question. In the end the note went far further in repudiating the piece than I anticipated, saying it should never have been published at all. The next morning I was told to resign.

It was a terrible moment for the country. By the traditional – and perverse – logic of journalism, that should also have made it an inspiring time to be a reporter, writer or editor. Journalists are supposed to run towards scenes that others are fleeing, towards hard truths others need to know, towards consequential ideas they would prefer to ignore.

But fear got all mixed up with anger inside the Times, too, along with a desire to act locally in solidarity with the national movement. That energy found a focus in the Cotton op-ed

the Times is not good at acknowledging mistakes. Indeed, one of my own, within the Times culture, was to take responsibility for any mistakes my department made, and even some it didn’t

To Sulzberger, the meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed and my departure in disgrace are explained and justified by a failure of editorial “process”. As he put it in an interview with the New Yorker this summer, after publishing his piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, Cotton’s piece was not “perfectly fact-checked” and the editors had not “thought about the headline and presentation”. He contrasted the execution of Cotton’s opinion piece with that of a months-long investigation the newsroom did of Donald Trump’s taxes (which was not “perfectly fact-checked”, as it happens – it required a correction). He did not explain why, if the Times was an independent publication, an op-ed making a mainstream conservative argument should have to meet such different standards from an op-ed making any other kind of argument, such as for the abolition of the police

“It’s not enough just to have the principle and wave it around,” he said. “You also have to execute on it.”

To me, extolling the virtue of independent journalism in the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review is how you wave a principle around. Publishing a piece like Cotton’s is how you execute on it.

As Sulzberger also wrote in the Review, “Independent journalism, especially in a pluralistic democracy, should err on the side of treating areas of serious political contest as open, unsettled, and in need of further inquiry.

If Sulzberger must insist on comparing the execution of the Cotton op-ed with that of the most ambitious of newsroom projects, let him compare it with something really important, the 1619 Project, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia.

Like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was fact-checked and copy-edited (most of the Times newsroom does not fact-check or copy-edit articles, but the magazine does). But it nevertheless contained mistakes, as journalism often does. Some of these mistakes ignited a firestorm among historians and other readers.

And, like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was presented in a way the Times later judged to be too provocative.

The Times declared that the 1619 Project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding”. That bold statement – a declaration of Times fact, not opinion, since it came from the newsroom – outraged many Americans who venerated 1776 as the founding. The Times later stealthily erased it from the digital version of the project, but was caught doing so by a writer for the publication Quillette. Sulzberger told me during the initial uproar that the top editors in the newsroom – not just Baquet but his deputy – had not reviewed the audacious statement of purpose, one of the biggest editorial claims the paper has ever made. They also, of course, did not edit all the pieces themselves, trusting the magazine’s editors to do that work.

If the 1619 Project and the Cotton op-ed shared the same supposed flaws and excited similar outrage, how come that one is lauded as a landmark success and the other is a sackable offence?

I am comparing them only to meet Sulzberger on his terms, in order to illuminate what he is trying to elide. What distinguished the Cotton piece was not an error, or strong language, or that I didn’t edit it personally. What distinguished that op-ed was not process. It was politics.

It is one thing for the Times to aggravate historians, or conservatives, or even old-school liberals who believe in open debate. It has become quite another for the Times to challenge some members of its own staff with ideas that might contradict their view of the world.

The lessons of the incident are not about how to write a headline but about how much the Times has changed – how digital technology, the paper’s new business model and the rise of new ideals among its staff have altered its understanding of the boundary between news and opinion, and of the relationship between truth and justice

Ejecting me was one way to avoid confronting the question of which values the Times is committed to. Waving around the word “process” is another.

As he asserts the independence of Times journalism, Sulzberger is finding it necessary to reach back several years to another piece I chose to run, for proof that the Times remains willing to publish views that might offend its staff. “We’ve published a column by the head of the part of the Taliban that kidnapped one of our own journalists,” he told the New Yorker. He is missing the real lesson of that piece, as well.

The case against that piece is that Haqqani, who remains on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist list, may have killed Americans. It’s puzzling: in what moral universe can it be a point of pride to publish a piece by an enemy who may have American blood on his hands, and a matter of shame to publish a piece by an American senator arguing for American troops to protect Americans?

As Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, said on the Senate floor about the Times’s panic over the Cotton op-ed, listing some other debatable op-ed choices, “Vladimir Putin? No problem. Iranian propaganda? Sure. But nothing, nothing could have prepared them for 800 words from the junior senator from Arkansas.”

The Times’s staff members are not often troubled by obnoxious views when they are held by foreigners. This is an important reason the paper’s foreign coverage, at least of some regions, remains exceptional.

What seems most important and least understood about that episode is that it demonstrated in real time the value of the ideals that I poorly defended in the moment, ideals that not just the Times’s staff but many other college-educated Americans are abandoning.

After all, we ran the experiment; we published the piece. Was any Times journalist hurt? No. Nobody in the country was. In fact, though it is impossible to know the op-ed’s precise effect, polling showed that support for a military option dropped after the Times published the essay, as the Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has written

If anything, in other words, publishing the piece stimulated debate that made it less likely Cotton’s position would prevail. The liberal, journalistic principle of open debate was vindicated in the very moment the Times was fleeing from it.