new york times if your interest is in depicting Chinese Communism as failed, flawed, and ultimately a false veneer in front of a corrupt capitalist heart, maybe don’t publish an opinion article titled “Xi Jinping Is the Second Coming of Mao Zedong”
“hey you know that guy whose brand of communism was so powerful that it went on to influence black and brown revolutionary politics across the pacific and the americas? well, china's got another one of those now”
i don’t read NYT opinion pieces (i do read their journalism because i get it for free with my job) but the app shows me the headlines sometimes and i have never read one which didn’t sound like it was written by a massive sellout writing for an audience of people with absolutely zero skin in any imaginable game
actually this is a lie, there was one piece by a professor who was like “actually large protests don’t mean shit if they aren’t either built upon or used as the base for resilient organizing” and that was like, pretty obvious imo but at least mildly impassioned
i find this funny because in the 2010’s i was actually pretty into opinion writing and i’m trying to figure out if • it has gotten worse, • the NYT is especially bad, or • it was always kinda shite and i am just more politically conscious than i used to be
my guess is a bit of all three
the secret of opinion writing is that the best stuff lives in news orgs who don’t have the money for actual investigative journalism (so good analysis is the only selling point they might have) and it’s written primarily by underpaid people in their late 20’s with a high rate of burnout
the exception is whenever judith butler deigns to write a column
