Jay Rosen shows me that Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, really loves that line about the paper not being part of the resistance. It’s not clear if he is the editor who used it in that recent company meeting but he did use it in an interview with CNN.
What Baquet is certain about is that The Times should not serve as a publication of the left. “Our role is not to be the leader of the resistance,” he said, adding that “one of the problems” that would come about if the paper took that role is that “inevitably the resistance in America wins.” Baquet further explained, “Inevitably the people outside power gain power again. And at that point, what are you? You’re just a chump of the people who won. Our role is to hold everybody who has power to account.”
The chump here, of course, in reality is Baquet himself, who can’t distinguish between the normal back-and-forth, up-and-down pendulum of two-party partisan politics and the threat to the republic of creeping fascism, which perfectly describes exactly what the problem is at The New York Times.