I never get asked that question, nor this one, "Is the opinion-to-reporting ratio at the Times opinion-heavy?", but I asked myself the latter question, answered in the affirmative and canceled my digital subscription. The Times engages in "consent manufacturing", a term coined by its all-time most influential columnist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is consent manufacturing that Jay Rosen obliquely gestures to with his "how the Times sees itself and its authority." The subject of Rosen's tweet, Paul Krugman, publicly embarrassed himself during the Obama years by writing in the Times' pages that yes, he had heard the talk that he could be the next Secretary of the Treasury but that, as a Times columnist, he already had "quasi-official" authority.

A media outlet can report news truthfully without having an opinion page with a zillion columnists. That is what the Associated Press has done since 1846. But at the Times the most popular section is the opinion page and readers have favorite columnists and rail against the others and sometimes at their own. The Times also, of course, publishes editorials, written by an unwieldy McDonald's commercial editorial board. The Times' modern approach to manufacturing consent is to have each of its opinion columnists paint with a different color on a blue-shifted political spectrum. The resulting painting is of a confusing, dull Gray Lady which overwashes reporting. Times opinionage does not speak with one voice but in a cacophony, to change the metaphor from the ocular the auditory, which drowns out the voices of the reporters. In my opinion.