Judge the Times the Way It Judges Others
Let's admit that most of us speculating about what caused this to happen don't know all the details. But while there is an element to this story for other journalists that seems like a car wreck that we know we should turn away from but can't help staring at, what we have learned about what preceded Sulzberger's decision is highly suspicious. If, as Ken Auletta informs us in the New Yorker, Abramson made some loud complaints to her boss about not getting paid as much as her predecessor Bill Keller, then the paper has a lot of explaining to do about the decision. The implications of the public statements about Abramson by her successor Dean Baquet - in which he gave her a backhanded compliment about teaching him "the value of great ambition" and then followed it by praising another former colleague for teaching about how "great editors can be humane editors" - leads observers to the obvious conclusion that he and his audience of Times staffers thought she was a horror.
But this piling on Abramson will naturally lead others to wonder whether this new sensitivity about her obnoxiousness is an attempt to distract us from the real reason she was fired. Were this kind of thing going on anywhere else, it's easy to imagine the New York Times editorial page speculating about whether what we are watching is just another instance of an old boys club closing ranks against a "bossy" - to use a term that some feminists are now saying is a key indicator of sexism - female who annoyed the powerful men around her. And that is the most important point to be made about this episode.Also read:
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