"The Times and Nord Stream."

Knees knock on Eighth Avenue.

He won this one. Hersh, undated. (Seymour Hersh/ Flickr.)

10 MARCH—Sometimes news reports make news in themselves. The case most readily to hand, given that Dan Ellsberg is much on our minds these days, is the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe 52 years ago. The Times fought the Nixon administration all the way to the Supreme Court for the press’s right to make public the documents Ellsberg leaked. That was news.

And then there are cases, more all the time in our age of information warfare, when “news reports,” quotation mark required, make news. So it has been this week, when The Times pretended to report an utterly ridiculous, transparently planted account of who was behind the Nord Stream pipeline explosions as if it were  legitimate news.

The once-but-no-more newspaper of record did its duty as it has perversely defined this for most of the years since it published the Pentagon Papers. It served as the national security state’s bulletin board and published the spooks’ preposterous concoctions about some lost-in-the-fog “pro–Ukrainian group” that blew up the Russia-to–Germany gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea last summer. But it is clear to me that the government-supervised Times knew very well that the “new intelligence” its sources fed it is simply too far over-the-top to take seriously. Chafing, for once, under the authority of its supervisors, it went to press with barely disguised reluctance.

Do we really have to put out this rubbish? This question is the subtle-but-legible subtext running all through the piece.  

This is my read, as chair of the Timesology Department at an expensive private university I cannot name because of the sensitivity of negotiations, and I can’t tell you anything about those, either, except to say there are negotiations. You have to read this piece carefully, and you can do so here. See if you agree with me: I detect a sliver of distance between the paper and the powers it serves—maybe some flicker of lost independence with a sepia tint of nostalgia to it. I will not go so far as to suggest this represents that greatest of grails reporters are ever in search of, a turning point. But passive-aggressive dissatisfaction such as we see in this story may—best outcome—suggest a modest start toward some kind of recovery.