Episode 13: The Best Podcast Of All New York Times

Blocked and Reported

Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal

Unknown

4.6 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2020

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In today's episode, the hosts zero in on an obscure, under-covered newspaper known as "The New York Times." Specifically, they discuss an explosion of employee anger over the paper's decision to publish a column by Sen. Tom Cotton, and what it can (maybe) tell everyone about internal dynamics in some media companies at the moment. Then, they shift gears to a Times article about a nonbinary 7-year-old and discuss the ways in which a certain subgenre of storytelling could be obscuring the nature of gender-identity development. In the show's final, patrons-only segment, Katie tells Jesse about an Instagram controversy involving white liberals trying to show how much they care about racial injustice, but digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole as a result.

Show notes and links (* denotes stuff that happened after our episode went up):

"Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops" - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html

* "Senator’s ‘Send In the Troops’ Op-Ed in The Times Draws Online Ire" - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/business/tom-cotton-op-ed.html

* "New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards" - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/business/new-york-times-op-ed-cotton.html

* "The Inside Story of the Tom Cotton Op-Ed that Rocked the New York Times" - https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/tom-cotton-new-york-times-op-ed-inside-story/
(An article in which Cotton's camp strongly denies the idea of an unusual editorial process)

* "Yesterday two dozen of us who make @nytimes publishing tools called out sick in solidarity with our Black colleagues & in protest of the Cotton op-ed. I was harassed on Twitter all day for it." - https://twitter.com/nzle/status/1268906487377801218

* "The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. (Thread.)" - https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1268628680797978625

"The Hardest Part of Having a Nonbinary Kid Is Other People" - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/parenting/non-binary-children-support.html

"What Is Gender Identity?" - https://arcdigital.media/what-is-gender-identity-10ce0da71999

"Attention white people: Your #BLM memes are not enough" - https://www.kuow.org/stories/a-letter-to-her-white-friends-on-their-blm-memes

"Blackout Tuesday posts are drowning out vital information shared under the BLM hashtag" - https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/2/21277852/blackout-tuesday-posts-hiding-information-blm-black-lives-matter-hashtag

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, it's Jesse. I just wanted to jump in before this episode starts to give a quick update.
0:05.5	The first segment of this episode involves a controversy at the New York Times
0:08.8	over a column published by Senator Tom Cotton. After we finished recording the episode,
0:13.3	the Times issued a mea culpa in which a spokeswoman said that the column was a result of,
0:17.5	quote, a rushed editorial process end quote, and that the op-ed quote,
0:21.2	did not mean our standards end quote. Katie and I believe the episode you're about to hear
0:25.4	holds up completely as is. In part because the Times has not produced any examples of anything
0:30.2	that was factually inaccurate in the Cotton column. In part because the Cotton cap is strongly
0:34.9	denying the claim of a rushed or unusual process, and in part because our conversation was just
0:39.7	as much about the internal dynamics of the Times as the content of the column itself.
0:45.0	That said, we'll discuss these more recent developments in an upcoming episode,
0:48.5	as well as the controversy within the controversy over Times' opinion staff or Barry Weiss,
0:53.3	which also took place too late for us to get it into this episode. Reality in short is exhausting
0:58.5	right now. Check out the show notes for some resources that are up to date as of the morning of
1:03.3	Friday, June 5th. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy the episode,
1:07.7	and please forgive my mic issues which will not happen again.
1:13.6	Katie, how's it going? Oh, you know, Jesse, pretty good. Just trying to figure out what's
1:17.3	true today and what's not, you know, as usual. This can be very challenging. There was one issue I was
1:22.8	hoping to address with you about the show if that's all right. Oh, yeah. So I had a really nice
1:26.8	call with my dad today. Hi dad, I hope you're listening. Hi Jesse said. And he said something like
1:32.8	he really likes the show, but he can't help but winse when he hears me swear.
1:38.3	Typical dad, typical dad. Typical dad, but I love him. I don't want to cause him
	...

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