The contrast is exemplified by two of the papers’ most prominent writers: the Times’ Russian-born columnist Masha Gessen, who just won the Pulitzer for commentary, couldn’t be more different from the Post’s Marc Thiessen, who’s gaining a lot of attention these days as President Trump’s favorite print columnist. Gessen is a cosmopolitan progressive; Thiessen is a conservative Catholic and former Bush administration official. 

The two should be at odds, and in some ways, they are. But when it comes to foreign policy, they sing almost exactly the same hawkish, pro-empire song, albeit in slightly different keys.

Start with Gessen. There’s a pattern of immigrants coming to America, then asking the US government to start wars with their native lands. In 2022, for example, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov called on the West to throw Russia “back into the Stone Age.” Or take Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-born human-rights defender who spent recent years calling for a Western military attack on her homeland — only to retract her endorsement once that happened and produced predictably disastrous outcomes. 

Standing at the summit of this genre is Masha Gessen — or “M. Gessen,” as she now prefers to be called. (Gessen, who was born female, identifies as both non-binary and trans — I won’t explain how that works because I really don’t know.) Her Pulitzer citation this week lauds her for an “illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.”

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Four of Gessen’s seven prize-winning essays compare the Trump administration to Russia and Vladimir Putin. In these “illuminating” essays, Gessen argues that the Supreme Court ruling allowing Trump’s executive order to only list two sexes on US passports is just like a Russian bureaucrat who wouldn’t allow her to reclassify her ethnicity from Jewish. In another, she alleges that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s overzealous targeting of Jimmy Kimmel was parallel to Putin’s seizure of power in Russia. And in still another, she asserts that we are entering a specific authoritarian “moment” in America that recalls Putin’s abolition of elected governorships of oblasts, the war in Georgia, and killing of Alexei Navalny. Finally, Gessen compares Soviet Russia to today’s United States, contending that “it was, apparently, possible to maintain a sense of facts and values — not only not to obey in advance but not to obey at all. If that was possible in the Soviet Union half a century ago, then it is certainly possible in the United States today.”

It is true that Russia is not the most “inclusive” country in the world for LGBT people like Gessen. It’s a society operating on a totally different set of mores — a reminder of the vaunted “cultural differences” respected by liberals in the case of nations they like, and only anathematized for nations they don’t like. Add to this Gessen’s fearmongering that the United States is becoming totalitarian, like Russia, and she is offering classic, 2016-style Trump Derangement Syndrome, rallying the liberal base to fight absolute evil in order to vindicate absolute good. Ironically, this bankrupt, hate-baiting approach comes at a time when there are legitimate and even bipartisan reasons to be disappointed with President Trump — the economy, the war in Iran.

Gessen-ism, then, goes something like this: Russia is terrible because it denies that I’m trans; America and liberal democracy are great because they let me be trans; Trump is turning America into Russia; so we should arm Kiev and send more Ukrainian men into a meat grinder so that I can be trans. 

Such an approach ignores the plentiful evidence of Western provocation of Russia, not to mention a pre-Trump consensus to do so: NATO’s official stance since 2008 that Ukraine will join the alliance; the fact that the late Sen. John McCain traveled to Ukraine during the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution and promised that Ukraine’s future would be with Europe and thus the West; Obama diplomat Victoria Nuland’s infamous leaked phone call boasting that Washington would be in charge of the Ukrainian transition and “fuck the EU.” There has always been a clear Washington objective to turn Ukraine, a neutral buffer state, into an American client. For Gessen, this is not relevant. The world is a big battle between Putin-style authoritarianism and Democratic Party-style social progressivism, and the latter must triumph — popular will and the realities of foreign policy be damned.

Gessen’s is a pro-war flavor that appeals to the progressive, trans-rights absolutist, still woke-ish readership of the Times. But the incredible power of the American media’s system for “manufacturing consent” — if Epstein-obsessives will forgive the Noam Chomsky reference — is that it does so in ways that are appealing to partisan sensibilities, while enforcing the same bottom line: an expansive American empire is good; war is necessary; the economic status quo should go unquestioned and unchallenged. 

Which brings us to The Washington Post — a paper that is now markedly different from The New York Times. Since Bezos took active interest in the paper he bought years ago, and influenced by his alliance with the Trump White House, the Post has become noticeably Right-coded. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Feb. 26, 2025, Bezos announced that “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Since then, the Post has staffed its editorial-page with lots of establishment conservatives, while more progressive-minded staff have quit or been ousted. 

Yet notwithstanding these partisan and ideological differences, the foreign-policy bottom line at the new Washington Post is remarkably similar to the one at the Times.

Behold Marc Thiessen. Unlike Gessen, Thiessen is a native-born American, a devout Catholic, and a rock-ribbed conservative: he served as George W. Bush’s director of speechwriting between 2007 and 2009 and joined the Post as a columnist shortly thereafter. Put another way: while Bezos has made the aims of the publication narrower and more explicit, the Post was pushing a hawkish line even before Bezos’s acquisition in 2013 and his editorial interference beginning in 2025. 

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In 2014, Thiessen argued that the United States should not have pulled out of Iraq. Recently, he went on Fox News to recycle Iraq War talking points for use in Iran, insisting that America should just kill any leaders who don’t want to make a deal. Even more bizarrely, in early March, Thiessen wrote an op-ed stating that the “Trump Doctrine” — expressed via the war in Iran — somehow ends forever wars, perhaps in a vain attempt to sell this war to a New Right that has grown skeptical of foreign entanglements. 

But Thiessen is not against forever wars — he loves them, and he’s even defended torture by the CIA. He’s obviously overjoyed that Trump, who ran on a largely antiwar and populist platform, has ended up reverting to the old ways of the Republican Party and effectively destroyed, at least for the time being, any New Right governing agenda embracing restraint abroad. For instance, Thiessen declared in a Trump-lauding piece that Ukraine was one of the president’s great accomplishments in 2025. He had in mind not Trump’s early attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement to the conflict, mind you, but the president’s willingness to maintain and even expand arms transfers: “He is doing more to help Ukraine than Biden ever did.” 

Browse Thiessen’s Post profile, and you will find that almost every single article is about how Trump took a hawkish stance and why it was so great. While engaged in a journalistic enterprise that looks like the diametrical opposite of Gessen’s — not Trump-bashing, but Trump-praising — he is, in fact, reinforcing the same policy agenda.  Unfortunately, the Thiessens of the world have understood just how well Trump responds to flattery. 

Because of that, Thiessen is now a frequent mention on the president’s Truth Social posts. On April 23, Trump commented on a Thiessen op-ed about how he didn’t need a deal with the Iranians: “Very true!!! President DJT.”

Thiessen and Gessen represent opposing American political ideologies, and wholly different reads on Trump. But to the hawkish uniparty, that doesn’t matter. The goal has always been a Pride Parade, whether in Tehran or Moscow (preferably both). That, we are told, is freedom. It’s why you must shut up about gas prices. Heads they win, tails you lose.

What made this moment so revelatory was not just what was being said, but who was saying it. In a world of “he said, she said”, what she said finally seemed to matter. Women were breaking the silence; women were blowing the whistles; women were telling their stories, and retelling each other’s, in the press. The two New York Times journalists who exposed Weinstein were women. Women owned this narrative…

Until they didn’t.

Men laid claim to the MeToo narrative in the way that Hemingway’s protagonist in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. The shift could be observed first on social media, where men sensing the impending tectonic cultural shift began to seek firmer footing in the form of compulsive privilege-checking. They retweeted, they hashtagged, they made grovelling apologies on behalf of their sex — while also making sure to let you know that they were not among the men who needed to apologise, those troglodytes, those boors. Even the men who rushed to confess their own sins made sure to covertly congratulate themselves in the process for having always known better, been better, than the really bad guys. New York Times essayist George Yancy, suggested in an infamous piece that men atone en masse, online, under the hashtag #IAmSexist, even though “many of us, including me, have not committed vile acts of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse the likes of which Harvey Weinstein has been accused of”.

It’s understandable. The MeToo movement was dividing the men of the world into heroes and villains; most men, naturally, wanted to be on the right side. And in this moment, onto the national stage, the most right-sided of them all emerged: Ronan Farrow.

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Farrow was chasing the Weinstein story at the same time as the New York Times journalists, but his first report, for the New Yorker, didn’t come out until five days later. Still, he is regularly described — here in The Times of London — as “the man who exposed Harvey Weinstein”. The book he wrote about his MeToo reporting, Catch and Kill, was the same in substance if not in scale as all the men proclaiming their intent to #BelieveWomen on social media. Imagine every white-knighting male feminist ally impulse blown up to national (and extraordinarily telegenic) proportions: here was Farrow, vowing to use his position of privilege to speak on behalf of the downtrodden, to uncover injustice, and in doing so, atone for his complicity in the system that had wrecked women’s lives.

Farrow, who is gay, couldn’t claim to be a reformed cad à la the Yancys of the world, but a family connection to a famous sexual assault case — his father, Woody Allen, was accused of molesting his sister Dylan in 1992 — served the same purpose: “I once was one of those guys proximate to a woman with a claim like this saying, ‘why don’t you just shut up about it?’” Farrow said, on PBS NewsHour in 2019.

If MeToo coverage until this moment was by women, about women, Farrow injected a new perspective — and an elevated sense of drama. His reporting was very often described as “explosive”. Even as he claimed to be merely a conduit for the testimonies of courageous women, those women had a way of fading into the background of his stories, eclipsed by the jaw-dropping villainy of whichever man he accused — but also by the presence of Farrow himself, chasing leads. His quest to uncover evidence that Weinstein had hired surveillance operatives in an attempt to stop him from telling the truth is a prominent and thrilling subplot in Catch and Kill. It was all too easy to forget the female victims in the face of such a compelling narrative — one about a dogged, handsome reporter battling a conspiracy of menacing evildoers in America’s glitziest and most elite industry.

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And from this moment, what did we think of when we thought of MeToo? Something dramatic. Something sensational. Something with movie stars in it, maybe, or at least someone who hung out with them. At the beginning, the whole point of this movement — the reason why the hashtag was MeToo and not something else — was its ordinariness. Here was an indignity to which virtually all women could relate: not just the fear of being assaulted, or harassed, or propositioned, but the sense of sex looming like a shadow over their professional lives in a way that was frustrating, and limiting, and invisible to men.

But that ordinary narrative was, well, ordinary. It certainly wasn’t winning the Pulitzer anytime soon. People didn’t want the banal injustice of women’s daily lives; they wanted Harvey Weinstein, panting and whining and banging on doors like the lecherous troll in a Grimm’s fairy tale. They wanted Matt Lauer imprisoning nubile young women in his office using a secret button under his desk, like the bad guy in a James Bond movie. They wanted Brett Kavanaugh lining up to commit high school gang rape like a real-life Gossip Girl episode. They wanted larger-than-life villains committing acts of unfathomable evil — and they wanted a blond, blue-eyed Captain America of a journalist to serve them up on a platter, at great personal risk to himself. The fact that Ronan Farrow claimed to be a victim himself — not of sexual assault but of surveillance, harassment and intimidation by a powerful cabal of men who did not want these stories told — only made it that much more exciting. And the fact that these stories often turned out not to be entirely true? It hardly mattered at all.

In 2020, New York Times reporter Ben Smith wrote what remains the most definitive dissection of the inadequacies in Farrow’s reporting, noting (among other things) that Farrow had cut corners when it came to verifying stories and checking facts, and had sacrificed nuance in his reporting in order to make his stories more straightforwardly dramatic. “The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know,” Smith wrote. “Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.”

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But Farrow’s place as the poster child for MeToo reporting is about more than the siren song of shoddy journalism. It’s about what the movement could have been, and what it eventually became instead — because in hindsight, Farrow hitching his apple wagon to the star of MeToo seems like a harbinger of all the ways in which the movement would eventually fly off the rails.

There was the emergence of grifters and hucksters like the now-disgraced Michael Avenatti, who first rose to prominence as the attorney representing Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against Donald Trump, and later promulgated explosive (and ultimately discredited) allegations of gang rape by a then-teenaged Brett Kavanaugh. He was a darling of the MeToo media — until he went to prison for extortion and embezzlement. There was the way that the everyday sexism faced by working-class women in less glamorous professions vanished from the conversation, replaced by thinly-sourced celebrity gossip and first-person essays from supermodels with books to promote. There was the way that MeToo eventually came to serve as a magnet for the romantically embittered and the professionally jealous, and allegations of sexual misconduct became a magic bullet for relegating a loathed ex or competitive colleague to the fringes of society.

It’s not that Farrow is to blame for these things; it’s that where a male celebrity reporter was able to cast himself as the true protagonist of a story about women, other sorts of opportunism would invariably also find fertile ground. But it’s also telling that today, five years later, it’s hard to think of anyone for whom the MeToo movement was better — or anyone who remains more visibly connected to it — than Ronan Farrow.

Citations of his Pulitzer prize-winning journalism almost invariably fail to note that he shared the honour with the two women who exposed Weinstein in the New York Times, women who broke the story first and yet have always been a distant second to Farrow when it comes to getting famous from it. Their book about uncovering the story, She Said, did not make headlines in Hollywood Reporter for having sold 44,000 copies in its first week, unlike Catch and Kill. Their audiobook didn’t get a Grammy nomination, unlike Farrow’s (he voiced it himself). Farrow is the one being lionised in the Hollywood press as a having “ignited the movement”. He’s the one lingering in the spotlight, long after the villains have gone to prison and the victims have moved on with their lives. The only name more closely associated with the movement, ironically, is Weinstein’s.

And the ordinary women who once saw hope in MeToo, which was supposed to transcend boundaries of industry and geography, education and class? We haven’t just forgotten their names; we never knew them to begin with.

Living in the Gilded Age, there were plenty of poor people for journalists to sympathise with — the streets were teeming with working-class Americans who had been cast out of the comforts enjoyed by the obscenely wealthy industrialists. You might think modern-day America — a new Gilded Age in which the gap between the rich and the poor is wider than it has been in living memory — would provide another such opportunity for American journalists to sympathise with the lower classes. You would be wrong.

Back in 2016, journalists, Democratic politicians and Never Trumpers struggling to comprehend how they lost the election came up with two competing explanations. One camp argued that it was a protest vote stemming from the economic anxiety and despair birthed by globalisation, stagnant working-class wages, and downward mobility for the shrinking middle class. The other camp argued that Trump’s supporters were simply racists.

Hillary Clinton was the rare figure to hold both views, immortalised in her infamous comment that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”. One might have expected that after Clinton lost the election, liberals would question the efficacy, if not the morality, of calling a quarter of the country racist.

Instead, they doubled down: it wasn’t just a quarter; it was half the nation. Everyone who voted for Trump was racist. By 2017, the very term “economic anxiety” had been branded a dog whistle for racism by some of the highest profile journalists in the country. So definitive was the racism explanation that during the 2020 election, the New York Times appears not to have run a single op-ed from a Trump supporter explaining their vote; how could the paper of record publish people who everyone knew were avowed racists?

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How did this happen? How did the journalists, thinkers, influencers and professional Tweeters who too often set the agenda for the nation — people who consider themselves on the liberal and progressive Left — manage to police out of existence the devastating effects of globalisation on the middle and working classes of all races? How did we allow the definition of racism to melt until it covered people — of all races — who found their lots slightly improved over the three years prior to the pandemic, a time when wages for the bottom 25% rose for the first time in a decade?

You have to be pretty far removed from the pinch of economic anxiety to confuse it with bigotry. And indeed, America’s media has undergone a status revolution over the past century.

Writing in the Nineties, Christopher Lasch observed that the Left had begun to portray the nation, the neighbourhood and even the commitment to a common standard as racist, as part of a larger attack on populism and abandonment of the working class. But in truth that shift was a long time coming; throughout the 20^th century, American journalism went from being a working-class trade to a highly educated caste.

As I chronicle in my new book, American journalism was born in the 19^th century of a populist revolution in the form of the penny press, which was explicitly produced by and for the labouring class. At the time, the newspapers in circulation existed solely for the political and business elites: they were prohibitively expensive, and contained shipping schedules, wholesale prices, speeches from Congress and other things that interested few except those whose livings were made in business or politics.

The cheap penny papers filled that gap in the market, and were soon impossible to ignore thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who purchased them every day (catering to the lower classes has the benefit of there being so many of them, after all). From that moment, through the middle of the last century, journalism became a blue-collar job, one in which a journalist was as likely to not have a college degree as to have one.

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This is no longer the case. If a 1937 study found that fewer than half of journalists were college-educated and many hadn’t even finished high school, by 2015, 92% of American journalists had a college degree, a number that’s certainly even higher today. And college itself is no longer enough; to become a journalist today in a rapidly constricting industry, you have to go to the best colleges and take multiple unpaid internships in the most expensive American cities — where the vast majority of journalists remain.

But journalists today are not just more educated and progressive than the country at large; like other highly educated liberals, they have become increasingly affluent. As the local newspaper industry collapsed in the face of the internet, it squeezed those who made it to the top 10%, while dropping everyone else out. The fact that the starting salary of a digital media job is so low is not proof of the industry’s egalitarianism but of its exclusivity; who but the scions of the wealthy can afford to live in New York City or Washington, D.C. on $35,000 a year?

With a few exceptions, journalists along with the rest of America’s highly educated liberals now, by and large, belong to what the French economist Thomas Picketty calls a Brahmin Left. And as journalists became more highly educated and more affluent, they stopped writing for or about the working class. In its place, a moral panic around race and an obsession with causes once confined to academia — open borders, intersectionality, anti-racism, anti-Zionism — provided a convenient alibi for an elite that still sees itself as on the side of the little guy.

It’s not all on individual journalists, though. Journalists have for decades been more liberal than their fellow countrymen. But in the past, this liberalism was checked by their publishers, who were often the owners of large corporations, or Republicans, or both. They wanted their newspapers and their news stations to appeal to the vast American middle, which meant that journalists were not at liberty to indulge their own political preferences.

Then came the internet and with it the collapse of the local newspaper industry and the birth of a business model that was diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. Success is now rated in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue. And the best way to achieve this is to build a niche audience — more often than not, a highly educated, highly affluent, highly liberal niche audience who use the politics of identity to mask their success.

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In other words, the media’s moral panic around race in America and the abandonment of the working class go hand in hand, like a photo of Angela Davis on the cover of the New York Times’s T Magazine and a Cartier ad on the back; like affluent liberals in New York’s most expensive neighbourhoods demanding we defund the police amid a historic rise in murder taking place in neighbourhoods just ten blocks away; like American Express hosting diversity, equity and inclusion training sessions in which the facilitator tells employees that capitalism is racist.

This perfect alignment of journalistic and corporate interests is one of the great ironies of the progressive culture war. It makes individual journalists feel like heroes while making their bosses and shareholders (and themselves) even richer.

Of course, the racism of state actors remains a problem in need of urgent repair; police brutality, for example, remains a scourge on communities of colour. But the racial moral panic obscures — and therefore perpetuates — the real divide separating America into two groups: an economic and cultural one, a giant and ever-growing chasm separating the college educated from those they disdain.

And therein lies the real tragedy: the liberal news media has abandoned the working class, allowing conservative outlets to swoop in and cater to them. The conservative media may not do much to help the economic fortunes of the downwardly mobile, but at least it doesn’t sneer at the working class while abandoning them economically.

That, ultimately, is the story of today’s national media landscape in a nutshell: with few exceptions, it is waging a moral panic around race to disguise the abandonment of the working class — and it’s getting rich off of it.

Today, though, the New York Times would probably be only too happy to oblige Tweed.

The ‘Gray Lady‘ is looking rather yellow, having dismissed the two in-house cartoonists – Patrick Chapatte and Heng Kim Song – from its international edition, and announcing that it will no longer be publishing editorial cartoons. None. This brings the International New York Times into line with the domestic edition, which already eschews the art form. Tweed would have approved.

It was the result of a dust-up in April over a syndicated cartoon by Portugal’s Antonio Moreira Antunes, showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Donald Trump’s guide dog. The cartoon was deemed anti-Semitic in some circles, even likened to Nazi-era propaganda, although many cartoonists thought such assertions were exaggerated.

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If the cartoon was undeniably problematic, the reaction was uberkill. First, the New York Times apologised, disciplined the INYT editor who had selected it, and ceased doing business with the syndicate which had distributed it. It also published a column by Bret Stephens excoriating the paper while also charging it with a history of antagonism towards Israel.

I can’t speak for Israel, but the New York Times has definitely never been a friend to editorial cartoonists. It hasn’t employed one since Harold MacMillan was PM.

It did until a few years ago, publish a weekly cartoon roundup, but mostly shied away from the edgy stuff. Yes, they sometimes ran mine in that roundup, and I was proud and excited about that large and educated audience when they did. But then, over the howling objections of longtime readers and against the advice of Clark Hoyt, the then-Public Editor (the ombudsman who makes sure journalistic ethics are upheld), they dropped the feature altogether. No explanation was offered, but the decision coincided with a general softening of their Week in Review section.

They might as well have re-christened it ‘Weak in Review’ – you’re as likely to find lifestyle essays about sharing housework within marriage or the etiquette of texting as a serious analysis of, say, the long-term wisdom of leaving the European Union, or the impending climate crisis leading to mass extinctions.

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Several factors make this all exceedingly galling. First, as print journalism has struggled over the last decade or two, few US newspapers have felt they had the resources to keep a staff cartoonist. The ranks of full-time practitioners of this venerable art form dwindled from 300 or so in the Seventies to around 100 in 2000 to only a couple of dozen now. So many editors have never even encountered one of our endangered species, let alone worked alongside one of us or been schooled in how to handle the inevitable blowback from our admittedly provocative work. It’s the same at the NYT – even though it has the resources for us. Way to have our backs, paper of record!

The real kicker is that the paper actually won the Pulitzer prize last year for editorial cartoons. This naturally raised a lot of eyebrows. The NYT submitted a long-form series in something approaching a graphic novel format about Syrian refugees settling in the US. It was a collaborative work by writer Jake Halpern and illustrator Michael Sloan.

It didn’t really fit the editorial cartoon category, but was nevertheless a terrific and compelling piece of journalism. Most of us hoped that the award might reawaken the paper to the possibilities of editorial cartoons. It was not to be. And yet, in the midst of his explanation of the Chappatte and Heng firings, the paper’s opinion editor James Bennet, couldn’t resist crowing about the prize.

Our statement in response to ending daily political cartoons in the international edition of The New York Times. pic.twitter.com/FcagTxEZJ9

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) June 10, 2019

The New York Times’s institutional objection to the art form has long been a mystery to cartoonists. Could it be that they ultimately fear editorial cartoons? Editors have certainly always been nervous about the capacity of cartoons to instigate controversy.

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Most of us remember the 2005 Danish cartoon fiasco, when the Jyllands-Posten paid a nominal sum for, and then published a dozen caricatures of the prophet Muhammed, sparking riots in the Muslim world and a fatwah against the poor freelancers who had taken the bait. Then there was 2015’s bloody massacre at the irreverent French satirical publication, Charlie Hebdo, where 11 journalists were murdered. That’s enough to give any editor pause. It’s also true, as Chappatte posted after his dismissal, that:

“We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow.”

But the paper prints plenty of fearless journalism, even in spite of moralistic mobs. Could it be then that our crude scribbles lack the gravitas and nuance of the written word? Is our – admittedly sometimes juvenile – humour beneath them? Or are our leaps of logic and shorthand twists of the knife an affront to the cautious, equivocating approach of corporate managers and editorial page guardians?

Whatever their reasoning, it’s a damn shame about the “damn pictures”. A historic cornerstone of print journalism is dying, casting for a lifeline, and all the paper of record can do is throw it a pair of leaden boots.