Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who recently retired from The New York Times after 25 years, tried to set the record straight Tuesday about his abrupt exit, blasting the paper for what he felt were increasingly unnecessarily tight editorial controls that resulted in "sober, dull opinion pieces."
Krugman — who gave a bleak farewell last month — minced no words in opening his latest piece, posted to his blog "The Contrarian."
"Despite the encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure," he said.
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Krugman said his relationship with the Times "degenerated to a point" where he felt he couldn’t stay. The economist said for his first 24 years he faced few editorial constraints, and his drafts mostly received lighter copyedits, even as some of his positions unnerved leadership at the paper.
"So I was dismayed to find out this past year, when the current Times editors and I began to discuss our differences, that current management and top editors appear to have been completely unaware of this important bit of the paper’s history and my role in it."
Krugman lamented that his popular blog where he could dive deeper into topics with charts and graphs got the axe from the Times in 2017. Twitter threads, he said, proved to be an insufficient substitute, leading him to launch a Substack blog for the more "technical material."
But the Times pushed back, ultimately caving to allow him to publish the more in-depth content in the Times newsletter twice a week until September, when his newsletter "was suddenly suspended by the Times."
"The only reason I was given was 'a problem of cadence': according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers," he wrote.
To boot, said Krugman, the "light touch" edits went to "extremely intrusive" — including "substantial rewrites."
"These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence," he wrote.
The end result felt "flat and colorless," he added.
Krugman also complained that Times editors told him he'd already written about a topic, insisting it can take multiple columns to sufficiently cover a subject.
"If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, 'we are being lied into war,'" he said.
Krugman was left with the impression that his "byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer" his. Therefore, he departed.
