Paul Krugman on Why He Left the Times

      For a quarter of century Paul Krugman had been bringing two important perspectives to the New York Times opinion section: that of an extraordinary economist (Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008) and that of a consistently insightful progressive.

      But Krugman, who is 71, and the Times parted ways in December.

      Some news organizations lately have been accused of trying to temper their criticisms of Trump and his new administration. We would like to think that was not a factor in the Times-Krugman divorce. We would also like to think that age was not a factor. Whether we would be right to think those things is not entirely clear.

      The best third-party account we had seen of the discussions leading up to Krugman’s departure, including quotes from Krugman’s editors at the Times, was written by Charles Kaiser in the Columbia Journalism Review.

      But Paul Krugman himself has just published his explanation of why he left the Times on his new and wonderful Substack. Here are some paragraphs from Krugman’s own first-party account:

      As many people reading this know, last month I retired from my position as an opinion writer at the New York Times—a job I had done for 25 years. Despite the encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure. If you check out my Substack, you will see that I have by no means run out of energy or topics to write about. But from my perspective, the nature of my relationship with the Times had degenerated to a point where I couldn’t stay…

      The background: until 2017 or so, I felt extremely happy with my role at the Times, for a couple of reasons….

      I believe that my writing affected the national discourse, especially over issues such as George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, the march to the Affordable Care Act (despite Obama’s initial reluctance), and the unjustified fiscal panic of the early 2010s.

      During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote. For most of that period my draft would go straight to a copy editor, who would sometimes suggest that I make some changes — for example, softening an assertion that arguably went beyond provable facts, or redrafting a passage the editor didn’t quite understand, and which readers probably wouldn’t either. But the editing was very light….

      This light-touch editing prevailed even when I took positions that made Times leadership very nervous. My early and repeated criticisms of Bush’s push to invade Iraq led to several tense meetings with management. In those meetings, I was urged to tone it down. Yet the columns themselves were published as I wrote them. And in the end, I believe the Times — which eventually apologized for its role in promoting the war — was glad that I had taken an anti-invasion stand. I believe that it was my finest hour….

      In 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

      One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, “we are being lied into war.”

      I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left….