All About Jill: Reading The Times

You don’t need the Enigma Machine to read between the lines of the NY Times decision to fire Jill Abramson—their first-ever female Executive Editor—and her place her with Dean Basquet—their first-ever black Executive Editor. Let’s investigate!

Ms. Abramson, 60, had been in the job only since September 2011. But people in the company briefed on the situation described serious tension in her relationship with Mr. Sulzberger, who was concerned about complaints from employees that she was polarizing and mercurial. She had also had clashes with Mr. Baquet.

Let’s see, complaints about Abramson being polarizing and mercurial… naw, no misogyny there [sarcasm]. Cliché, perhaps…

In recent weeks, these people said, Mr. Baquet had become angered over a decision by Ms. Abramson to make a job offer to a senior editor from The Guardian, Janine Gibson, and install her alongside him in a co-managing editor position without consulting him. It escalated the conflict between them and rose to the attention of Mr. Sulzberger.

There is some really strange editing in this paragraph, lots of passive voice—had become angered—the passage is clearly edited so that the actor (Abramson) does something villainous. There is no discussion of why she would want to have a co-manager; is there something ominous or is this more of her mercurial and polarizing behavior?

Let’s rewrite this to remove the passive voice: Abramson made Mr. Baquet angry when she made a job offer to Janine Gibson to be a co-managing editor with him.

And now let’s consider this passage with adding some identity politics: the white female boss wanted to hire another white female to co-manage with the black male. It made him angry.

Oh, my. So now we have the cliché, unpredictable and polarizing woman and another cliché, the angry black man.

“It escalated the conflict between them and rose to the attention of Mr. Sulzberger.” Another strangely passive sentence, but denatures the players (bitchy woman and angry black man?)  and makes Sulzberger look Solomon-like, an impartial third party, when in fact he is the person who hired Abramson (and presumably her successor).

With Mr. Sulzberger more closely monitoring her stewardship, tensions between Ms. Abramson and Mr. Baquet escalated. In one publicized incident, he angrily slammed his had against a wall in the newsroom.

So more cliché angry black man imagery. This is getting uglier the more closely we read the story.

But how did it rise to Sulzberger’s attention? Did Mr. Baquet complain? We will probably never know for sure, because Abramson settled with her employer to not discuss it:

Ms. Abramson did not return messages seeking comment. As part of a settlement agreement between her and the paper, neither side would go into detail about her firing.

So… how does it end?

In accepting the job, Mr. Baquet, 57, made several promises to the staff in the newsroom.

“I will listen hard, I will be hands on, I will be engaged. I’ll walk the room,” he said. “That’s the only way I know how to edit.”

Mr. Baquet thanked Ms. Abramson, who was not present at the announcement, for teaching him “the value of great ambition” and then added that John Carroll, whom he worked for at The Los Angeles Times, “told me that great editors can also be humane editors.”

That’s almost the entire last reel of All About Eve. So Abramson taught Baquet to be ambitious, (and so he was) and he will be humane, and that seems like pretty clear way of saying that the pushy, mercurial bitch is gone, and he is no longer the angry black man.

So was it identity politics, racial politics, sexual politics? Who knows for sure. This is all reading the tea leaves, of course, but the reporters do give us enough clues that I think we can say that there are no heroes in this story; everyone ends up looking like a heel, including Salzburger. One could argue that if Abramson didn’t last long as the first female executive editor that Salaburger made a bad personnel decision and then deflected his bad choice by blaming her.

What happens next at the Times will be interesting. Let’s keep an eye on it.

By: Tengrain

Fully caffeinated with twice the sugar, unabashedly liberal. Award-winning Americans United blogger, blogs at Mock Paper Scissors, and sometimes at Crooks and Liars.

You can follow @Tengrain on Twitter, or you might see him enjoying coffee somewhere in Seattle at any given moment of the day.