Times, I finally quit you

[mme_hardy]

I started being a New York Times subscriber in 1983. I continued to subscribe, everywhere I could get delivery, up until today. It's been a long slow slide for me, from the disgraceful coverage of the Iraq war onward, as the Times became, drip by drip, more up its own nose, more elitist, and more concerned with ingratiating itself to power than with exposing it. I don't have to call out the incidents; they're notorious, and I've raved about them here. In the last year, though, they've gone from minimizing white supremacism -- including refusing to use the actual phrase, far less "neo-Nazi" -- to reaching out to the white supremacists and running their letters as a full-page issue.

And let us be clear. If you're okay with Donald Trump in 2018, you support white supremacy. You may be doing it with a wink and a nudge, but you've chosen your side.

What finally made me do it? This headline and subhead:

Supporters Fear Trump's Speech Will Lack The Edge They Love

As President Trump prepares for his first State of the Union address on Tuesday, hard-line nationalists worry that he will reach for bipartisanship rather than ideological purity.

"Hard-line nationalists". Yup. That's the phrase.

To unsubscribe from the Times you can't use a webform; you have to "chat". Here's my chat. Note the cut-and-paste responses, which show that the Times is seeing a lot of reactions like mine.

Alexis:
Hi there! Thank you for contacting the The New York Times! How may I help you today?

Mme. Hardy: I have had it with the Times's sympathetic coverage of white nationalism and neo-Nazis. I want to cancel my subscription.
Alexis: I am sorry if we have offended you and disappointed you.
Alexis:
We only hope to spark debate when it comes to critical issues as such.
Have you tried commenting on articles? Be a voice of change! We would love your feedback on anything that you agree or disagree with

Alexis:
Would you be interested in 50% off your delivery?
Yes, because the solution to white supremacy is cheaper white supremacy.

Mme. Hardy: You have deeply disappointed me. I've been a subscriber, one way and another, for over thirty years.
Alexis:
Everyone has their own views on these issues and I do understand the frustration as I can agree with some of it, but when I am frustrated, I voice my feelings. Why not stay and do the same? If no one voiced their opposition, there would be no debate.

Alexis:
We would hate to lose a loyal and dedicated subscriber such as yourself.

Mme. Hardy: I have *been* voicing my opposition in comments for years.
Mme. Hardy: The Times responded by firing the Public Editor.
Mme. Hardy: The Times has stopped listening to my comments.
Mme. Hardy: And no, I don't want a discount. I don't want this stuff coming into my home, electronically or physically, any more.
Alexis:
Well we are sad to see you go and hopefully you will come back to us in the future when we aren't disappointing you anymore.
I find the above bit of mailmerge completely hilarious.
Alexis:
Please give me a moment to cancel your subscription.

And that's it.

Comments

[conuly]

Ugh, and you know they only do it in that roundabout way to make the whole process as awkward as possible. How unfortunate for the poor customer service person who has to follow the script even when it's futile!

The workaround if this ever comes up again is to just switch your credit card info to something invalid. Unless you really like chatting with unfortunate Alexis over there. There's somebody who isn't paid enough for this job.

[mme_hardy]

Ah, but I'm keeping the crosswords subscription until they start using white supremacist clues. And as my husband says, "Given that Will Shortz is a gay Jew, I'm not expecting that."

[sovay]

hard-line nationalists worry that he will reach for bipartisanship rather than ideological purity.

Ergh.

I am sorry. For all sorts of reasons.

[mme_hardy]

I felt sad all evening. In my childhood, each Sunday we drove to the small-town-Indiana bookstore to see which sections had made it onto the truck from Dayton. If this week's delivery didn't include the magazine and the book review, we passed. When I started my own subscription in adulthood, it felt like a link to the sophistication and education of the big city.

Cutting touch with that set of memories is hard.

[sovay]

Cutting touch with that set of memories is hard.

It is a shame that the newspaper could not remain the sophistication and education that you remember.

[edit] I jut ran into this Twitter thread, which is pertinent.

"In an obvious fight between good and evil, you expect all your readers to side with good, and so you provide 'balance' - and show your journalistic integrity - by showing the side of evil.

"Which, if everyone were actually on the side of good, might make some sense. But if you combine this with the profound blindness to real people's lives which comes from the factors @avflox discusses, it has the opposite effect.

"Rather than being a rare chance for a unified population to peer into the minds of villains, you end up producing nothing but PR for the villains, not understanding that they're real, the stakes are real, and your articles are in fact convincing people that evil is good."

[mme_hardy]

I love Yonatan a lot. I was fortunate enough to work with him.

[sovay]

I was fortunate enough to work with him.

Cool! May I ask where? (I have little to no idea of your professional history, since it is not what you talk about on Dreamwidth.)

[mme_hardy]

A Very Large Search Company.

[nineveh_uk]

That Twitter thread makes a very good point. "both sides-ism" is a real problem in modern journalism. When one side is neo-Nazism, then no, it is not something to which equal time should be given!

[sovay]

When one side is neo-Nazism, then no, it is not something to which equal time should be given!

This Karl Popper cartoon understandably keeps coming around on my friendlist.

[nineveh_uk]

I hadn't seen that cartoon before, it's excellent.

[kore]

Oh wow, I remember avflox from Livejournal and Open Diary even. A very lively fun highly intelligent person.

[mme_hardy]

Gosh, I don't remember Open Diary. Outgeeked, in my own home!

[kore]

Ahahaha I was barely there, but avflox and thesibylqueen and Cat Valente were all part of a Montparnasse-inspired writing group, and most of them moved to LJ and so did the writing/reading group, and I was a member of that, and friends with them there. I found Open Diary really hard to parse.

Oh wow, it looks like all the ones I remember maybe got wiped. https://www.opendiary.com/

[kore]

Argh, my bad, DIARYLAND, not Open Diary. But that's gone too, it's just "Unable to connect to database."

[sovay]

Oh wow, I remember avflox from Livejournal and Open Diary even.

I'm so glad they kept a trackable username!

(Oh, man, Open Diary. From the dawn of social media. When my then LJ-using friends were trying to persuade me to open an account, some of them described it as "like Open Diary but people leave comments." And then they all decamped to Facebook!)

[mme_hardy]

I remember how late I was to migrate to LJ because the main thing I knew about it was that my friends' blogs there took forever to load.

[sovay]

I remember how late I was to migrate to LJ because the main thing I knew about it was that my friends' blogs there took forever to load.

LJ was my first and really only form of social media (when I got a Dreamwidth account, for a long time it was just a mirror and a means of keeping track of friends who had already moved over) and I hung on to it until the change in terms of service last April made it impossible for me to stick around. I'm on Facebook, but I can't use it much. Twitter, Tumblr, no. Dreamwidth is what I've got.

[movingfinger]

My favorite response in the set is the suggestion that you should stick around and argue in the comments. Because being continually enraged and insulted is the subscriber's burden, I guess! (Does anyone read comments *anywhere* any more? I block them all.)

(frozen)

[mme_hardy]

I read (past-tense) Times comments, largely because I made them. But it has been made so fucking clear that even when you get feedback to the Times higher-ups (nowadays requiring a Twitterstorm led by pundits), the answer is always "We were right, we are right, and we're sorry you don't understand how right we are."

The thing I cannot in any way comprehend is that the Sulzberger family, who are Jewish, think their paper's direction is a good idea.

(frozen)

[recessional]

It's possible they're a) oblivious, b) like certain in laws of the Cheeto and some of their community quite sure that They'll Be Okay c) actually believe in both sides ism and think this is important or d) trying very hard to avoid the country at large going "oh ignore the NYT it's owned by commie Jews anyway. Or some uneasy and unstable combination of the above.

(frozen)

[mme_hardy]

I misremembered. They aren't Jewish.

(frozen)

[mme_hardy]

THE SULZBERGERS AREN'T JEWISH. I would edit, but DW doesn't let you edit after a comment's been replied to.

I apologize for the error.

[movingfinger]

Also, "Well we are sad to see you go and hopefully you will come back to us in the future when we aren't disappointing you anymore" deserves a Captain Awkward column. What does this mean, when someone ends a longstanding relationship this way? In black and white, it is a breathtaking work of passive-aggressive condescension. Spoken aloud, it'll depend more on the delivery, I guess.

[sara]

It does look a lot like things my ex-husband has said, which I don't think speaks well for either him or the Times.

[sabotabby]

FWIW, I think this is the right thing to do. They are influential, but their business is profit like any other company, and if they lose enough subscribers, maybe they will stop giving a voice to Nazis.

[mme_hardy]

It does encourage me that they apparently have a canned script for just this situation.

[sovay]

Somewhat off-topic, but you have a really wonderful icon.

[sabotabby]

Thank you! So do you; I used to love that comic.