Mike Jurney: What I think we saw during and after 2016 was the Times re-understanding itself as An Institution first. Institutions have different priorities around risk and survival, and that perspective explains a lot of otherwise baffling and out of character behavior.

I need to write the whole piece about this, but the thing to understand is that the NYT is now just Facebook. The platform dictates narrative to normies, is totally gamed by the right, and is still so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable even by those who see how broken it is. It's just Facebook.

What I think we saw during and after 2016 was the Times re-understanding itself as An Institution first. Institutions have different priorities around risk and survival, and that perspective explains a lot of otherwise baffling and out of character behavior.

Yep, they’re an institution that is about propping up legacy institutions in general.

And not just propping them up, but (in the case of higher ed) returning them to a pre-1950’s version of themselves.

Funny; you’d think they might give more of a shit about bog standard democracy then

Democracy, in this reading, isn't an Institution - It's an Ideal, and those are impractical to support too hard when you're an Important Institution like the NYT.

It does tend to come in handy when considering an unfettered tyrant has already targeted your news outlet as “enemy of the people” in rather bluntly concrete ways. OH WELL if nothing else, the leopards will feast well and mightily.

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