A promo line for media critic Steve Krakauer’s Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People says, “The fourth estate is supposed to be a conduit to the people and a check on power. Instead, we have a bunch of geographically isolated, introspection-free, cozy-with-power, egomaniacal journalists thirsty for elite approval.”
We’ve known that for some time. But Krakauer, a report on the newly published book says, proves it in spades by disclosing the mass hysteria inside The New York Times after it published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed Send In the Troops. Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, argued that the Floyd Hoax Riots of 2020 should have been answered with National Guard troops.
Krakauer spoke with then-Timesman Shawn McCreesh, who said the op-ed provoked a woke meltdown that had him gulping a glass of wine at noon. The editor who published the piece quit. Another staffer was in tears. The madness was palpable.
The book also discusses the media’s role in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and what happened at CNN after President Donald Trump was elected in 2016.
Twitter Leftists in Charge
The Mediaite rundown of Krakauer’s rendition of the Times debacle shows just how deranged staffers for the nation’s major media outlets have become.
The uprising began when editorial page editor James Bennet published Cotton’s piece. Those who rioted and looted cities were not protesting Floyd’s death, Cotton wrote. Instead, “nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.”
Thus, the National Guard must be deployed:
Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”
This venerable law, nearly as old as our republic itself, doesn’t amount to “martial law” or the end of democracy, as some excitable critics, ignorant of both the law and our history, have comically suggested. In fact, the federal government has a constitutional duty to the states to “protect each of them from domestic violence.” Throughout our history, presidents have exercised this authority on dozens of occasions to protect law-abiding citizens from disorder. Nor does it violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which constrains the military’s role in law enforcement but expressly excepts statutes such as the Insurrection Act.
Cotton was right.
Which is probably what sent the woke mob inside the Times into a foaming-at-the-mouth conniption.
“Many employees tweeted that the publishing of the op-ed endangered Black journalists at the paper of record, and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones said that ‘as a black woman’ and journalist, she was ‘deeply ashamed’ that the Times published the article,” Mediaite noted. And “Bennet, the top editor of the Times opinion pages, eventually resigned under pressure.”
McCreesh told Krakauer that Bennet’s publishing the piece revealed the “bloodthirsty” bent of the mob, Mediaite continued:
The riots, which accompanied peaceful protests of the police murder of George Floyd, an African-American Minnesota man, were enough to spark company and opinion staff meetings about Cotton’s submission.
At the latter, McCreesh said that Charlie Warzel, a White tech writer, started to cry because “none of his friends wanted to talk to him anymore because he worked for this horrible evil newspaper that would print this op-ed.”
“It was just so bizarre what was happening,” said McCreesh. “It was like a Maoist struggle session.”
Of course, the Times’ top managers “completely lost their nerve,” McCreesh said, and surrendered to the “angry backbiting staffers.”
McCreesh to Krakauer:
There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows. And all these angry backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on Slack. And the leadership was so horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve.
But that wasn’t all. The mob included people whom Bennet hired, McCreesh said:
It was like Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate or something. Just this sort of horrible moment, and I remember closing my laptop and pouring a huge glass of wine, even though it was at like noon. Because I was so f**king freaked out by what we had just witnessed.
After it was over, Bennet, who was forced out, told Semafor that the staff treated him like an “incompetent fascist.”
Note Appended
Of course, surrendering to the mob also required appending a note to Cotton’s piece.
“After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process,” the note said:
Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.
Cotton’s claim that Antifa storm troopers were involved in the riots was unproven, the note said. It concluded that the piece was “needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.”
The Times even condemned the headline its own editor wrote.
Bennet quickly understood his big mistake: surrendering and publishing the note. “My regret is that editor’s note,” he said. “My mistake there was trying to mollify people.”
Leftist crackpots control the Times not only from the inside but also from the outside. Said Bennet:
[The Times and its publisher] want to have the applause and the welcome of the left, and now there’s the problem on top of that that they’ve signed up so many new subscribers in the last few years and the expectation of those subscribers is that the Times will be Mother Jones on steroids.
How long the Times will remain “Mother Jones on steroids” we can’t know. But the Times does have a long history of hiring communist apologists who peddle propaganda for America’s enemies, and now disturbed woke leftists control the newsroom. We can surmise that the newspaper’s anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American roid rage won’t subside anytime soon.
