1. This is tangential to the main issues, but I did appreciate the digression in @benyt's piece about the late Abe Rosenthal. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-times-washington-post-protests.html …
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4. For his services, the Times rewarded Rosenthal late in life with a column. He was, hands down, the worst columnist has ever had. Just unbelievably bad.
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5. Spy magazine in 1987 on the heroic badness of Rosenthal's column. (Interesting historical note: pre-twitter people used to share bad Times columns by calling each other on the phone).pic.twitter.com/R9i3LZZzot
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6. Further to Abe Rosenthal as the great gatekeeper of the Times in the 1960s-1980s, it's worth remembering the story of how the Times in that era bungled the Watergate scandal. It's a story told in a biography of Rosenthalpic.twitter.com/LQM2vinNxI
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7. Max Frankel, the Times' chief Washington correspondent when Watergate happened, handled the story by going to Kissinger, who told him there was nothing there. So Frankel left it alone.pic.twitter.com/3nf3DDcGRY
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8. You might think that missing the biggest scandal in USA history because you trusted an obviously interested source would hurt your career. But Frankel in fact did what the Times expected of him. And he was rewarded for it. Eventually became executive editor
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End of conversation
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I still wonder what would have happened if the NYT of that era hadn’t fired Molly Ivins for being an entertaining liberal writer
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This footnote from Hersh’s memoir about that period (the entire chapter on Watergate is great) is one of my favourite anecdotes about him.pic.twitter.com/XdJoWT4ubq
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