Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

The headline, and an unrelated ill-advised series of tweets posted by a Times editor, created a crisis that Baquet addressed with an all-staff town meeting. It began by revisiting the use of the words “lie” and “racist.” Unlike NPR, the Times did not have an outright ban on the use of these words—rather, the paper used them with extreme restraint. “I used the word lie once during the presidential campaign, used it a couple times after that,” said Baquet. “And it was pretty clear it was a lie, and we were the first ones to use it. But I fear that if we used it twenty times, ten times, first, it would lose its power. And secondly, I thought we would find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of deciding which comment by which politician fit the word lie. I feel the same way about the word racist.” In other words, the Times has a policy of not calling every racist remark “racist” and every lie a “lie” but reserving these words for only the biggest lies and the most racist of statements. This, of course, has the effect of establishing a new and fairly consistent standard for both lies and racist comments: one now has to work hard to sink that low.