Interesting

I'm not a huge fan of Paul Krugman. (I dropped him from my blog roll years ago) I've always felt that he was far too supportive of economics, and politics of the Clintons and Barack Obama.

That being said, I still believe that he is honest and that he tells the truth, so his his interview with the Columbia Journalism Review is quite informative.

Basically, he left because the editorial editors were constantly trying to water down his stuff, and were trying to cut down on the articles/newsletters that he put out.

The Opinion Editopr, Kathleen Kingsbury, and the Deputy Opinion Editor, Patrick Healy, deny that any such thing was taking place, for reasons noted above, I am disinclined to believe them.

Krugman spent years as a tenured professor at MIT and Princeton for 30 years, so he knows rat-fucking better than any journalistic rat-fucker could possibly imagine.*

For two and a half decades, Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times were beacons of intelligence and common sense. Particularly for progressives inured to the work of many of his colleagues, Krugman offered a liberal gospel that was also a reliable refuge from mediocrity.

He was a reliable refuge from the mediocrity of the New York Times OP/ED page, which, given the continued employment of Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Brett "Bedbug" Stephens, David French,  etc.

………

Kingsbury, her deputy, Patrick Healy, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger all told CJR that they wished that Krugman had stayed at the paper—a desire none of them expressed last week, when an internal memo announced that Pamela Paul and Charles M. Blow would soon stop writing their columns.

It is mendacious to suggest that they wish that he had stayed at the paper when they made it clear that they wanted a lot less of him at the paper.

………

Krugman agreed that he could have stayed at the paper. But in an interview, he said the circumstances of his job changed so sharply in 2024 that he decided he had to quit. He had been writing two columns and a newsletter every week, until September, when, Krugman said, Healy told him the newsletter was being killed.

“That was my Network moment,” Krugman said. “‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’”—a quote from the Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film.

Kingsbury said it was “patently untrue” that Krugman’s newsletter had been killed, although it stopped appearing last October. She emailed him on September 30 to urge him to stay at the paper, and offered to let him keep the newsletter, but without guaranteeing its weekly frequency. She told him he could “use it to weigh in when you and your editor agree that it’s necessary.” And there was a condition: if he wanted to keep the newsletter, the frequency of his column would have to be cut in half, to once a week.

And then there is this:

………

The offer to reinstate the newsletter did nothing to placate Krugman, who had another serious complaint. “I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he said. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” And, increasingly, attempts “to dictate the subject.”

“I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” Krugman continued, “and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.”

"Flat and colorless," huh?  That should be the new motto for what Atrios calls, "That fucking newspaper."

Healy denied he had done anything to muffle Krugman’s voice. “He never called or emailed me saying I was changing his meaning or censoring his views, and he never lodged an objection to me that I overrode,” Healy wrote in his email to CJR.

This is an admission that Healy was trying to, "Muffle Krugman's voice." 

This is what happens when you have too many nepobaby failsons running an institution.  (It ain't just "Dash" Sulzberger)

^*To quote Henry Kissinger, "The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small."