Even as recently as, say, 15 or 20 years ago, the typical person didn’t read the New York Times regularly, and certainly didn’t read the opinion section regularly. And yet, you probably knew, through osmosis or whatever, that it was the paper of record, written by elites, with its opinion section being the most exclusive opinion real estate in the world, and so assumed that anyone who wrote a column for the New York Times was a smart person with important things to say whose opinion was worth respecting, if not holding up in reverence (and if you caught a snippet of a NYT opinion piece, it probably had enough of the trappings of intellectual discourse to affirm that sentiment). For those that did regularly read the NYT, the opinion section smelled enough like their own farts that even if they disagreed with the content they would affirm it reflexively as a serious, well-considered opinion. And even for those that disdained a column in the NYT, there was no way to make that disdain apparent, either to the writer in a way that the writer would have to see or deliberately ignore, or with a large enough platform such that the disdain would be inescapable.
Now, anyone can read any NYT column, and recognize that many are drivel, poorly written and poorly reasoned, and often with heavy doses of various forms of bigotry thrown in. And everyone can make their disdain readily known. So to be a NYT columnist was once a mark of unquestionable distinction deserving of extraordinary deference, by assumption on the part of most people. But now it just means that your ****ty essays receive extensive, actual scrutiny by everyone, including people with no vested interest in telling you how great you are, and these privileged *******s can’t handle it.
