“You Correct Them”

To its credit, the New York Times published Ben Smith’s dive into the firing of Donald McNeil, its “singular” journalistic importance and journalistic self-importance, and many of the fun details surrounding the Times’ new revenue stream of ridiculously expensive résumé road trips for entitled 17-year-old prep school darlings who will be deeply sensitive about the plight of the oppressed throughout their four years of Ivy undergrad and however many years of grad school are suffered before getting a gig at daddy’s investment bank.

While the story is replete with interesting views about the New York Times’ confused identity and purpose, which is part navel gazing and part desperate plea for relevance.

The Times’s media ambitions have also intensified its status as a cultural lightning rod. It is no longer just a source of information. It seeks to be the voice whispering in your ear in the morning, the curriculum in your child’s history class and the instructions on caramelizing shallots for the pasta you’re making for dinner.

But the future of the Times is digital subscriptions, and digital subscriptions are bought by digital natives, and digital natives are young. What the Times can’t afford to do is neglect the sensibilities of its readers, current and future, and Ben Smith caught a piece of that future.

“I’m very used to people — my grandparents or people’s parents — saying things they don’t mean that are insensitive,” another student, who was then 17 and is now attending an Ivy League college, told me. “You correct them, you tell them, ‘You’re not supposed to talk like that,’ and usually people are pretty apologetic and responsive to being corrected. And he was not.”

The “he” referred to in the above paragraph was long-time NYT reporter Donald McNeil, and the correction came from another 17-year-old, a student who had just graduated from Phillips Academy Andover, who was of the view that it was her place to determine the propriety of McNeil’s words and thoughts.

At lunch that day, she said she sat down the table from Mr. McNeil at a cafe overlooking the town’s narrow streets, where he was talking to another student when he uttered the N-word, and used the word in the context of a discussion of racism. Some of the teenagers responded almost reflexively, she said, to object to his use of the word in any context.

Ms. Shepherd said she thought the word was inappropriate but hardly the worst thing that happened on the trip, which she documented in a diary that she referred to in describing details to me. She also felt sorry for Mr. McNeil. “There was this atmosphere where people didn’t like him,” she said. “He was kind of a grumpy old guy.”

Maybe McNeil was just a generally “grumpy old guy,” or maybe he was grumpy because he was forced to be the “hook” correspondent for this trip by an employer seeking to find new revenue streams for its then declining business, and was grumpy because he had to spend his time babysitting these insipid children.

As fascinating as they might view themselves, they aren’t necessarily fascinating to a grown up. That Shepard felt sorry for McNeil because “people didn’t like him” reflects her perspective that McNeil wanted children to like him, cared whether these 17-year-olds liked him. To a teen, being liked by other teens is pretty important. Does an adult feel the need to be liked by teens? Does a teen grasp that an adult might not need or care about their approval?

Shepard, who kept a diary of the trip, tells more of the story.

On the walk over, she said, she talked about her favorite class at Andover, a history of American education that covered racial discrimination. He responded, she recalled, that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.”

McNeil said he would not respond publicly until he was official gone from the Times, but “I’m sure we’ll have different memories of conversations that took place that long ago.”

Ms. Shepherd said she tried to argue, but he talked over her whenever she interjected, their voices getting louder and attracting the attention of other students, two of whom confirmed her account of the conversation.

It’s curious what’s meant when Smith writes “he talked over her whenever she interjected,” as this seems to be a backward way of saying she tried to interrupt him, and yet he’s the one “talking over” her interjections. But it’s worth noting that this is a NYT correspondent talking to a 17-year-old, who feels entitled to argue with him. This isn’t to say she can’t disagree with him, but that it’s her place to argue. Or to be more precise, to “correct” him.

Those complaints could have been dismissed as the whining of entitled teenagers, or as an episode in the rolling national sitcom of aging baby boomers trying to reckon with fearless Zoomers. There’s obviously some truth to both.

Baked into Smith’s facile use of “obviously” is the presumption that Shepard and McNeil are peers. McNeil, a 65-year-old New York Times correspondent.

A kind of Times-made man who was married for a time to a third-generation Times woman, he started at the newspaper in 1976. He had risen through the ranks from copy boy to become a night rewrite man, a theater columnist and a correspondent in Paris.

To some, he embodied the swagger of the mid-20th century Times man, whose very presence rendered a story news. He could be a generous colleague, and blunt honesty is welcome in a newsroom, but he also sometimes alienated his bosses and colleagues.

Shepard, in contrast, was a 17-year-old prep school grad. McNeil had a long history of accomplishment,  which Smith calls the “swagger of the mid-20th century Times man,” as relic of the olden days when reporters reported, men swaggered and people earned the right to their opinions through experience and attained credibility.

Shepard tried to correct him, but he just wouldn’t apologize and wasn’t responsive to her correction. The grumpy old man refused to be corrected by the sensitive 17-year-old Shepard.
H/T Maggie McNeil

This left the New York Times with a difficult choice.

The Times will have to navigate its identity in tandem with the next generation of its audience — people like Ms. Shepherd, who said that she was most surprised by the gap between Mr. McNeil’s views and what she’d read in her favorite news outlet.

“That’s not what I would have expected from The Times,” she said. “You have the 1619 Project. You guys do all this amazing reporting on this, and you can say something like that?”

The New York Times didn’t want to disappoint their future digital subscription readers. Sorry, old man McNeil. Take your mid-century swagger and go.