Ben Smith
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And that was the one where when James Bennett – there was a controversy that I feel like we don't need to revisit involving the opinion editor.
But people were reacting – you can react with emojis and people were reacting with guillotines.
Like intended ironically perhaps, but not – I would not say that is collegial.
And when I – at some point somebody complained to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, that my being in the Slack made people unsafe.
because I might write about it.
And he, I thought, quite reasonably.
And this is a sense of like, I don't think, it was not a totally homogenous culture.
He told them, that's ridiculous.
This is a slack with 2,000 people in it.
Of course it's going to leak.
But yeah, I mean, I guess I think that, maybe I don't think it was quite that straightforward, but certainly there was the kind of left-wing political waves and social waves swept through there, swept through all of society.
I think the management has spent the last couple of years pushing that back.
I think if you've spent a lot of your career being attacked by strangers on the internet, as I have, you develop a kind of pathologically thick skin to it.
But I don't think you can actually expect other people to act that way.
If your colleagues are being mean to you, probably you hate it and you're going to quit.
I don't think that's an unreasonable reaction.