The crisis recalled several others involving the paper’s sometimes problematic and imperfectly applied impulse toward both-sides-ism, and the left’s problems with this approach. As much as the Times’s “but-her-emails” campaign coverage is still widely seen as a dark stain on the paper’s reputation, the “unity” headline seemed especially obtuse and unconnected to the world the Times was supposedly observing.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/how-trump-triggers-new-york-times-identity-crisis-headline-dean-baquet

Baquet convened a town hall on Monday afternoon to address the convulsions. “There was enough stuff that happened that it seemed like a good time to talk it out and hear from people,” an editor familiar with his thinking told me. “I think this is a really difficult story to cover, the story of Donald Trump and race and his character. We’re in a bit of uncharted territory. There is definitely some friction over, how does the paper position itself? I don’t think you could argue that we haven’t been tough on Donald Trump. There’s real debate, and some real disappointment, about how we position ourselves as an institution.” Another editor said, “What I think is really going on is, reporters on the front lines, particularly reporters of color, are really attuned to something happening in the country that is, to a lot of them, deeply scary, both personally and politically, and there’s a hunger to have a conversation about it. If this rhetoric continues, how is the Times covering it? What are the rules of engagement for a president who traffics in this stuff? How do we, as a newsroom, grapple with that?”

Last week’s drama appears to have underscored a gulf between some veteran Times journalists and an increasingly influential and vocal cohort of typically younger, next-generation employees. To boil down the nuance as simply as possible, the former camp sometimes views the latter as hypersensitive and politicized; the latter sometimes views the former as blindly tethered to tradition. As a more traditional Times reporter put it, “The headline was inelegant, it missed the point, it was poorly written, but it was not a federal hate crime, as you would think based on reactions from some people in the newsroom. The bigger issue is the culture of outrage.”