Goodbye to all that
I finally break up with The New York Times
I did it.
I cancelled my subscription to The New York Times.
Why did it take so long?
Much of its journalism is excellent. Many people I respect write for them. I myself have written for them, on and off but steadily, for decades, and have always been proud to appear there. There’s no publication I have read for as long.
I loved so much of what I’ve read in the Times.
Even when I hated it, I hated passionately, the way you can only hate someone who is close to your heart.
I cancelled when I realized I no longer cared.
The final straw:
When Israel attacked Iran, I spent the day reading the news.
Here was a cataclysm on top of all the other disasters and horrors that will echo down through the rest of my life, and for generations thereafter.
For me and for millions of others, the genocide in Gaza is the most important event of our lifetimes. It was the moment when the ultimate taboo—the taboo on genocide—the one thing that everyone agreed on—the one thing that, after Auschwitz, defined civilization—was broken.
Mocked. Spat upon. Shattered.
Nearly every mainstream political party in every country in the Western world supported ethnic cleansing, race war, mass starvation, infanticide.
It was—and is, since it is still going on—a moment that revealed what our societies were. Who our politicians were. Who our media were. Who our friends were.
It’s a revelation I would have rather been spared.
On the day Israel launched its latest unprovoked attack, I spent the day reading the news.
And as I was going to bed, I realized something shocking.
In all those hours, I hadn’t so much as clicked on the Times.
Not because I was “mad” at them.
Not because I was “boycotting” them.
But over the years, my trust had been so steadily undermined—drip, drip, drip—that it didn’t cross my mind.
Not only could I do without it: I already was.
The next day they published a long editorial about “Antisemitism.”
I’m putting it in quotes because over the last few years this word has been vacuumed of any meaning. The Jewish establishment, which very much includes The New York Times, have been whipping up hysteria in order to scare us into justifying the genocide. This has been transparently obvious from the beginning.
So it’s enough to see that word, in this newspaper, to know where we’re going.
And sure enough: we get taken on a leisurely stroll through “ancient Greece” (!) and the Spanish Inquisition (!!) before arriving, in the eleventh paragraph, at the word “Israel”—when the word only appears in the context of the “Israel-Hamas war.”
This phrase alone insults the reader’s intelligence.
Then we get into tedious tone-policing, telling us just what we are allowed to say and what we are not allowed to say, and giving us helpful pointers to let us know exactly when we have crossed the line.
Any reader over the age of six will feel talked down to.
And he might, also, notice all the things that aren’t mentioned—other things we’re not allowed to say.
We’re not allowed to wonder about the sincerity of fighters against “antisemitism” who refuse to see that they themselves might be the main cause of that hatred.
We’re not allowed to wonder whether the spectacle of a Jewish army in a Jewish state massacring helpless, starving civilians, day after unbearable day, makes people like Jews, or dislike Jews.
Whether bombing and destroying every surrounding country makes those neighbors like Jews, or dislike Jews.
Whether the sight of a famous Jewish-owned newspaper, in the largest Jewish city in the world, constantly, doggedly, daily tone-policing and both-sidesing a genocide—does that make people like Jews more, or less?
Still, it’s not the specifics of this article that made me finally decide to wash my hands of this paper.
It comes down to the tone—to the language.
What wore me down ultimately was having to read through language, having to read despite language.
Everyone who has worked at the Times knows how heavily, relentlessly, this language is policed.
One story of the hundreds I could tell:
A prominent writer—Jewish, not that it should matter—spent months on a Palestine piece. They expressed their worries, and their editor—Jewish, not that it should matter—reassured them: “Kershner won’t see it.”
Isabel Kershner is an Englishwoman, a Middle East reporter at the Times. She did not go to Jerusalem merely as a journalist. She “made aliyah” — Manchester and Marylebone having presumably become too oppressive for Jews — adopting the settler colony’s citizenship and allowing her son to serve in the occupation army. Everyone at the Times who covers the Middle East has had a run-in with this person.
Only by sluicing the piece through backchannels did the editor manage to publish it.
(Other “Middle East” reporters also have kids in the IDF: David Brooks, Ethan Bronner, for example, just off the top of my head.)
The result of constantly having to jump through these hoops is prose that only people with strong stomachs can stand.
If you want an endless stream of examples of this language, as well as an example of a woman with a strong stomach, I refer you to Dr. Assal Rad, who translates the Times into legible English—into words that have some meaning.
For so long, reading the Times made me feel smart.
How much of what I know about the world did I learn through reading the paper every day for forty years?
How many books did I read, how many places did I go, how many people did I learn existed in the pages of this newspaper?
It was an education for me and for so many others.
For a long time now, it’s made me feel dumb.
A specific kind of dumb.
It’s not dumb in the way someone truly superior—in knowledge or achievement or moral commitment—can make you feel inferior. All my life, I have endeavored to surround myself with those people, who have inspired me to know more, do more, be more.
It’s not dumb in the way you feel while thumbing through a magazine at the dentist’s. In Style or Hello! are not lying to you. They’re entertainment. They’re not there to make you feel like a genius.
It’s not dumb in a tedious way, like being stuck in traffic with a cab driver who believes in aliens.
It’s a different kind of dumb.
It the kind of dumb you feel when you say hello to someone you know will only say stupid things.
Your annoyance is partially because you know it’s your own fault: Why did you engage in the first place?
The Times makes me feel dumb in the way that the word “mansplaining” captures.
Dumb in the way you feel when someone who is dumber than you are condescends to you.
Dumb in a way that makes you despise the person talking to you.
Reading The New York Times makes me angry.
It makes me feel the way I feel when Kamala Harris says “I’m speaking.”
Stupidity is always injuring, said Susan Sontag.
The thing is: there are more smart people working at The New York Times than at any other place that I have ever been associated with.
Why do people put up with it?
Because—believe me—they are very much aware of everything I am saying here.
I know dozens there now. Hundreds who have worked there at some point.
And I can tell you: They’re not stupid. They never were.
The difference between when I was a young writer and now is not brains or commitment.
The difference is that I don’t know anyone who is genuinely proud to work there.
When I was at the beginning of my career, a job at the Times was the ultimate prize. For a lot of people, working there was their whole identity. Now, they are ashamed to have to work there.
The Times pays, they tell themselves.
It’s prestigious.
Your stuff gets read.
Your emails get returned.
Many people don’t have a choice. One in seven journalism jobs in the United States is at a single newspaper.
So its administration can mock its own employees and its own readers because of the question that’s always hanging in the air: Where else are you going to go?
This question has kept it afloat, as it kept the Democratic Party afloat.
The implicit question—You’re voting for Trump?—was the one Kamala Harris made explicit when she told the Palestine protestors to sit down and shut up.
By the way: Where is Kamala Harris these days?
How are things going with the Democratic Party?
It gives me no—zero—pleasure to see the death of our liberal institutions.
We need our great universities.
We need our great newspapers.
We even, God help us, need the Democratic Party.
Their collapse is a menace to us all: a menace to our very lives.
Their collapse has opened the way to fascism.
The fascism we see in Palestine and the fascism we see on the streets of Los Angeles.
We need institutions that can stop it.
We need alternatives.
But for me, genocide is a red line.
To say that The New York Times has failed to report this most seismic event of my lifetime with anything like equanimity is to use the same fake language that is so brain-rotting when encountered in its pages.
In fact—no language can describe its sheer breathtaking dishonesty.
Every click on the app forces us all into the ‘bad faith’ of which Sartre wrote, the bad faith that forces people to be untrue to themselves—to abandon their values, to abdicate their freedom.
Maybe I could just quietly unsubscribe. Not write this. Or write it and not hit send. Maybe that is the smart thing to do.
Like every American writer, I always thought I quote-unquote needed The New York Times.
Now, though?
I’ll be fifty next year.
I feel precarious—all writers always do—but the fact is I’m as established as any writer ever gets to be.
And at this point, being careful not to say anything about the Times feels a bit like not smoking weed because it might fuck up my chances of getting into a good college.
I already got into a good college.
I am lucky to have a voice and a readership—and I have always felt that people who have a voice have an obligation to use it on behalf of those who don’t. Nothing is more boring, more embarrassing, than a writer who’s too careful.
So I’ll just say: it feels gross to support the Times.
Am I “supporting the Times”? No. It’s a gigantic corporation that won’t miss my $30 a month.
Yet I’d rather send it to an animal shelter in Lebanon.
I’d rather send it to Jewish Voice for Peace or Jewish Currents.
I’d rather send it to students in Gaza.
I’d rather keep it for myself.
Because that money costs me more than the number on my credit card bill.
And there’s no price you can put on a little self-respect.
Is this a final farewell?
Am I saying I’ll never write for it again, never read it again, never speak to it again?
No, in the same way I’m not saying I would never vote for a Democrat again.
Nothing would give me more pleasure than to be able to have a candidate to vote for— like Zohran Mamdani, object of a ridiculous hit piece, sourced to a white supremacist, that just appeared yesterday—or a newspaper I could trust.
But before I do, the corporation will need to undertake the kind of painful self-criticism that the Democrats refuse.
It will need to put a failed, corrupt generation out to pasture.
After ethnic cleansing, it will need some ethical cleansing .
Can they?
Never say never. But I’m not holding my breath.
And so for now:
Enough.
Goodbye.
I can this a lot. We will never know how many lives could have been saved - and still be saved - in Gaza had the NYT not decided to support the genocide with every fibre of its being
This was an antidote to our daily gaslighting. Thank you.