It's Supposed To Be A Newspaper, Not A Make Stuff Up Paper
..."Stuff" that serves the ideology that best serves you: your career, your preferred narrative, etc.

In The New York Times, Bret Stephens takes on the massive work of fiction masquerading as journalism that is Nikole Hannah-Jones' Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project:

Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we're supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.

As fresh concerns make clear, on these points -- and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize -- the 1619 Project has failed.

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Those concerns came to light last month when a longstanding critic of the project, Phillip W. Magness, noted in the online magazine Quillette that references to 1619 as the country's "true founding" or "moment [America] began" had disappeared from the digital display copy without explanation.

These were not minor points. The deleted assertions went to the core of the project's most controversial goal, "to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation's birth year."

(Hannah-Jones) ... challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that "using 1776 as our country's birth date is wrong," that it "should not be taught to schoolchildren," and that the only one "that should be taught" was 1619. "Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that," she added.

Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine's editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):

"1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country's history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation's birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country's true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?"

Now compare it to the version of the same text as it now appears online:

"1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country's history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation's birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country's defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?"

In an email, Silverstein told me that the changes to the text were immaterial, in part because it still cited 1776 as our nation's official birth date, and because the project's stated aim remained to put 1619 and its consequences as the true starting point of the American story.

Readers can judge for themselves whether these unacknowledged changes violate the standard obligations of transparency for New York Times journalism. The question of journalistic practices, however, raises deeper doubts about the 1619 Project's core premises.

..."Out of slavery -- and the anti-Black racism it required -- grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional," writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing? On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

...Monocausality -- whether it's the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or white supremacy and its consequences -- has always been a seductive way of looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project's subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

The Pulitzer should either be retracted or given back by The New York Times. Of course, neither will happen.

We are harmed when papers write stories of ideological fiction and become in the business of pretending that their fictions are not fictionalized and their changes haven't been made -- especially when both are easily searched out and proved false by anybody with more than a dial-up connection.