NYT Editor Dean Baquet Defends His Paper's Reviled Op-Ed Section
In an interview Thursday at a Financial Times event on the future of media, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet said he agreed with the direction of the paper’s much-criticized opinion section.
Times Editorial Page Editor James Bennet, who reports to publisher A.G. Sulzberger rather than Baquet, has made it his public mission to expand the intellectual diversity of the Times’ opinion pages. But that effort has most notably veered toward ham-fisted trolling and a parade of never-Trump conservative voices with an outsize focus on campus protest and what they see as the excesses of liberalism that supposedly heralded Trump’s ascension. Shorter shrift has been given to both the left and pro-Trump right, and the opinion staff continues to display a woeful lack of racial diversity. Bennet has in turn drawn furious criticism, including from inside the newsroom.