The newspaper editor who wrote a letter to the editor

Bill Keller directed the New York Times between 2003 and 2011, a turbulent period in which the press endured the extreme shock that the popularization of the internet among the general public represented for the media. Among its peculiarities is having written a letter to the editor... to his own newspaper. He wrote it in response to an opinion column he himself had commissioned. The newspaper had appointed him head of the newsroom following the Jayson Blair scandal, who had committed fabrications and plagiarism in dozens of his articles. To try to start the new era with a clean slate, he asked conservative judge Richard Posner to diagnose the ills plaguing the press. The article, alas, did not please him: in one passage, the judge asserted that blogs had better error correction methods than conventional media, larger and therefore slower and subject to a complex vertical network of interests. As is understandable, vetoing the column would have meant agreeing with him, so he wrote a letter to the editor, meaning to himself, criticizing the judge's article as "tendentious and cynical" and reminding him that, in fact, the publication of his acid commentary was the clearest refutation of his theses, according to which the press silenced what was not convenient for it.

All this happened more than two decades ago, but the dynamic is still alive. The blogs that still resist are now almost a relic, and they were not killed by the media, but by social networks with their proposal of micro-messages to which great dissemination was offered in exchange for being polarized or igniting base passions, such as anger. And the New York Times, by the way, is now much more profitable than twenty years ago. Such is the iron health of the press.