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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2. The kids today don't remember him but Abe Rosenthal was a big editor at the New York Times whose main job in the 1970s was to make sure Seymour Hersh didn't put too much truth into the newspaper.
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3. It was the time of Watergate, so the Times needed Hersh to compete with Woodward & Bernstein. They let Hersh publish some truths about Nixon & Kissinger, but not too much. Rosenthal was the guy who held the line. His gravestone reads: “He kept the paper straight."
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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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Replying to @HeerJeet
I always wondered how NYT missed the Watergate story so badly. The story is told in Rosenthal's biography. Nixon sent a man to talk to Rosenthal about the story. The man was a former school chum and former colleague of Rosenthal's; same background, breeding, perspective.
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Replying to @cturner3rd @HeerJeet
The man said, "Abe, there's no story here. Anyone who says so will look foolish." Based on his friend's advice - knowing he was sent by Nixon - Rosenthal declined to assign anyone to it. R. expressed remorse, not because he missed the story but because his friend betrayed him.
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Replying to @cturner3rd @HeerJeet
I've never seen a better description of how class operates in politics and newsroom to maintain political narrative.
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Never mind, I found the biography.
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